Over the course of eighteen months, the team worked to assemble The Black Book. With the heavy lifting done, Morrison began to ramp up prepublication promotions by contacting 175 radio stations with Black programming and every Black Writer, celebrity, and news outlet she thought would be helpful. She released the Cosby spots to Black radio stations first. Then, she sent review copies to everyone from Barbara Halliday at the Detroit Free Press to Don Cornelius at the popular TV dance show Soul Train.

Their best shot at it would be to work closely on the revisions in a focused way without interruption.

Morrison had just moved into her new home on the Hudson, and Bambara joined her there for three days as they went back and forth with edits and revisions to ready the book for publication. “She’d write and I’d edit some,” Morrison recalled

She would go upstairs and work, then she’d run down the stairs and say, “What about this?” Then I would sit down and go over that, then she’d run back up the stairs. It was the most amazing— but certainly extremely efficient, for us— way to do it, because she was so clear. She could focus immediately. I would just have to grunt and point and she knew exactly what I was suggesting.

On one of the few occasions Morrison spoke explicitly and at length in print about what her work as an editor entailed, she described her work this way:

Editing sometimes requires restricting, setting loose or nailing down; paragraphs, pages may need rewriting; sentences (especially final or opening ones) may need to be deleted or recast; incomplete images or thoughts may need expansion, development. Sometimes the point is buried or too worked-up. Other times the tone is “off,” the voice is wrong or unforthcoming or so self-regarding it distorts or misshapes the characters it wishes to display. In some manuscripts traps are laid so the reader is sandbagged into focussing on the author’s superior gifts or knowledge rather than the intimate, reader-personalised world fiction can summon.

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 by May 7, Morrison shifted from Durham’s patient defender to his outright critic. The problem was that Durham’s secretary (or whomever he sent to deliver the pages) left a mere thirty-eight pages. The fact that they seemed hastily done annoyed her. The clandestine delivery to the receptionist without asking to see or speak to Morrison or Silberman infuriated her. The package was dropped off “and hurried away,” as if the manuscript was a ransom note. She wrote Durham in full candor.

For some reason that I cannot quite explain I was ashamed. On every level—professional, personal— I felt a deep and painful embarrassment. . . . Only my vigorous and sincere agitation has kept this contract alive. . . . But the contempt for those efforts which you displayed in last Thursday’s scenario left me so melancholy and so hurt I believed I would strangle if I didn’t tell you how I felt. . . .

You have never seemed to choose candor in dealing with me, a fact that has depressed me for a long time now. . . . I could manage with your patronising me. I cannot manage with your contempt.