Morrison ended the letter with a trace of humility. She set that modesty aside quickly, however, and reinforced her letter with honest bravado, concluding with a final pitch about her confidence in the book.

I suspect this letter should include some information about myself— something to prevent you from ignoring this letter— but that’s probably presumptuous [sic] if not just a waste of letter reading time. Let me just say. . . :I want to publish books about us— black people— that will make some sense— to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and the Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire. . . . I have already published some books that I believe do that. I know the one I have described to you will do more.

With a few exceptions, Morrison’s editing of the poems in the volume was light. Clifton had titled a poem “I Am a Black Woman,” for instance. “There must be 800 of these,” meaning poems with that title, Morrison wrote. So she suggested calling it “And I Am Not Done Yet,” which was the first line of the poem in draft. In its published version, Clifton shifted the first line to the title, dropped the conjunction and, and began the poem with the line “as possible as yeast/ as imminent as bread.” The poem “To Ms. Ann,” Morrison noted, worked “marvelously.

But they decided to publish An Ordinary Woman first in large part because Clifton did not feel ready to publish the memoir. She had tried to explain the concept of the book to her then-editor, Alice Mayhew. “It will take . . . months,” she had confessed,

Because the bringing of one’s insides out, especially for somebody who has made a life of holding very carefully her insides, is some hard. Also I think that after I bring them I shall trot them back in to hold again. That’s hard. . . . I shall take me apart then put me back together; but you know, I can do that . . . If I just would.

You could have written some lousy, sensational, sexy book and you’d probably not have this problem,’ she remarked. “(Except some other editor would have to publish it.) but you wrote a good one and it is slowly but surely finding its readership (almost 2,000 people!).” Her first novel, she often repeated to authors she worked with, sold a mere three thousand copies before gaining traction. Great reviews of a first novel could set the stage for more sales for a second novel. But Look What They Done to My Song— the quiet, little book she loved— was the only book they would publish together.

The fact that she knew the letter was coming and they had resolved the problem did little to avert Morrison’s annoyance with the first letter. Flummoxed, she wrote:

I will probably always be befuddled about what you imagine this publishing company to be and about your reasons for ascribing sinister motives to a copyediting mistake of placing your name after Miller Williams. I can only assume you had some bad experiences with other publishers.

We make errors, Jim, and I am sure that I will never be wholly free of that frailty. What I (we) don’t do is spend time thinking up silly ways to tell the world on a book jacket that one of our own authors is racially inferior to his co-author and/or has done “less” work. . . . But more than the misunderstanding, I regret the absence of trust which is the single most important ingredient to exist between author and editor. I wish you thought I deserved it.