4. Escaping the Chrysalis

“Whatever these African writers were talking about,” she told Black Issues Book Review founding editor Susan McHenry, “it wasn’t about color.”

They weren’t explaining anything to white people, though they may have commented on social conditions under colonialism. In one of Chinua Achebe’s stories for example: A man leaves his home and saying goodbye to his wife, he touches her hair— a very small subtle gesture you’d never see in Black writing in America back then. I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers— men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by— I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellisons’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?

Morrison had begun to execute this project of dismissing the white gaze in her own fiction. But taking up this work in her editorship required far more nuance. Publishers wanted books that appealed to general audiences, and textbooks were the most conservative in this regard. Teaching some and reminding others that African literature was a long, rich tradition that far exceeded the stereotypical ways Africans had their literature presented was delicate work.

If Morrison used the publication of Tales at Doubleday as a point of note, its early low sales numbers could hurt her case. Unqualified impudence was the approach in the end. Bambara had a track record for selling books, she was a talented writer who had well-crafted stories published in reputable venues, and she was willing to accept a small advance. The latter point was crucial. The publisher had nothing to lose, Morrison argued, and everything to gain. If the collection did well, financially or critically, it would be a win. If it did not, the loss would be so minor that the opportunity to add Bambara to Random House’s roster of authors would offset the loss. No one could argue with this rationale. By then end of the week, the contract was being drafted, even though every publisher, including Random House, was reticent, if not obstinate, about offering a writer a contract for a short story collection.

9. The Extraordinariness of Ordinary Black Womanhood

While Morrison had counted on Chase-Riboud’s personality to help sell the book, Chase-Riboud belatedly declared that she wanted to sell the book exclusively on its merits. She desperately wanted to avoid the fate of the artist who had to “tap dance for prizes and coverage.” When she lamented that “even coveted things like the Yale poetry prize has [sic] no meaning because its value is blurred because of its commercial value,” Morrison shot back:

I don’t understand what you are saying about holding a firm line between the work and the publicity. I hope you are right that people who like the work will “do things” for it without being asked— that would relive us entirely of doing anything at all other than manufacturing it— but it is probably not a good idea for us to take that risk. We have to think of all sorts of anonymous people walking into a book store and wanting to buy the book for some reason— one reason I can give them is that they have heard or read about it. . . . I must also try to get booksellers to put in [sic] on their shelves and they will do that for one of two reasons: Random [House] says so or they too have heard about it. So. What is that but publicity?. . . . This is a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stockrooms.

Even as he was deliberate about using autobiographical elements in Tragic Magic, Brown was reluctant to probe certain aspects of his life, especially some of the prison stories that ended up in the novel. Morrison convinced him that these stories could help ground and enhance it. The things writers were most resistant to telling were often the very things they should write about, she told Brown. Similarly, she argued, so much of the best writing happened when writers moved toward and not away from the source of historical hurt that was also personal, even when it was painful for the writer to do so.

11. Green with Envy

Calling the writer out on those places in a draft that are weak was the work of a good editor, in Morrison’s view. And a good writer, she argued, knew exactly where those sections were and either hoped they might go unnoticed or conceded that it was the best the writer could do at the time.