To answer my unsolved questions, as I had done my whole life, I turned to literature. I turned to the women I had long imagined as a council of mothers: Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara. They had advised me, consoled me, sustained me, saved me before. I needed them now more than ever. And, I turned to memoirs of madness.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron argues that depression, despite the cold, precise terms in which we currently discuss it, is more than anything a disease of disorder and loss of control. He writes that “our perhaps understandable modern need to dull the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness.

If William Hazlitt hadn’t awakened each morning crawling inside his own skin, he could not have written “On the Pleasure of Hating.” If Virginia Woolf didn’t have difficulty attaching herself to life, she would not have written “The Death of the Moth.” If James Baldwin wasn’t in perpetual violent struggle to bring the black and the white inside himself under control, there would be no “Notes of a Native Son.” These pieces are the work of writers engaged at the deepest level with the essay.

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.

For Morrison, the exploration of the ordinariness of Black women, individually and as a group, was a venture into the extraordinary. The need for acid and outrage was indisputable, yes; but universalizing Black women’s discrete experiences was uniquely appealing and necessary.

Similarly, when Zia Jaffrey asked Morrison about the intelligence of the criticism of her books, Morrison noted:

Once I was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, with two other black writers. The three of us, who don’t write anything alike, were lumped together by color, and the reviewer ended by deciding which of the three books was the best. And she chose one, which could have been [the best], but the reason it was the best was because it was more like “real” black people.

Here, Morrison was referring to Johnson’s “The Oppressor in the Next Room,” which reviewed Song of Solomon, White Rat, and James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room, books that had nothing in common except the author’s race. Morrison rightly described that kind of reduction as absurd. That Johnson thought Song of Solomon was the “best” was besides the point.

Johnson’s review revealed two problems. One, that Black books that ventured beyond realism were likely to have their authenticity questioned. And, two, that books by Black authors, no matter how different they are one from another, were negligently pitted against each other, with one of them being designated as “the best.” Since she was aware of this tendency, Morrison tried to avoid releasing more than one book in the same season for fear that critics could put them in competition with each other rather than give them individualized attention.