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.

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.

What Morrison’s decision to publish the book revealed was her willingness if not determination to rewrite history more honestly in the tradition of the Black Studies movement, which challenged dominant narratives that mischaracterized, marginalized, and erased African and African diaspora contributions to world history. The look beyond the domestic and accepted histories of civilization held a unique appeal to Morrison. The interplay between culture-shifting books, literary books, and commercially successful ones exemplified her innovative approach to editing.

*15. Beyond The Black Book

His next letter was less solicitous.

This morning I received from Random house the proofs for the dust jackets of the book. I note that Miller Williams’s name preceeds [sic] mine as co-author of the book. Who made the change and why was it made?

I do not consider this a minor point. . . . The book was my idea from the very first. I am led to assume that someone there decided that the order of names was a matter of race. This saddens me.

Through her editorial choices, Morrison emphasized that history is a living, breathing entity shaped by the stories we tell and how we tell them. Publishing these books helped brandish her reputation as a culture worker whose productivity as an editor could be rivaled only by her rising prominence as an important writer.