Toni at Random

Toni at Random— Dana A. Williams

1. “We’re All We Got”

Everything about Toni Morrison’s distinguished editorship pointed to her understanding of that one truth— that any attempt to revolutionize the publishing industry to be more inclusive of Black authors and Black stories would require an army of people united by a belief in literary and artistic excellence in Black culture. While once-vibrant sociopolitical ties dissolved into gradual disconnections and the loss of support networks through neglect and design translated into a loss of the kind of collective identity that had formed in the late 1960s, Morrison never lost sight of the belief that Black people could be everything they needed.

2. Finding Her Form

Even then, Morrison was interested in thinking about the ways fiction told stories history would not.

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.

There was no denying that the current interest in Black or Afro-American studies was strong and growing. That interest was rooted in and pre-supposed a curiosity about an African heritage. But, by and large, attentiveness to that heritage had been obscured. An anthology of African literature could help correct this. Morrison mapped the need this way:

The fact that African literature has been largely neglected can be accounted for by the fact that the educational and literary community has been very slow to discover that African literature is something more than a collection of primitive folktales.

The purpose of this anthology will be to gather in one volume twentieth century African literature which 1) reveals the talent, points of views interests and culture of contemporary African writers; 2) complements the African history text in preparation by the Social Studies Department; 3) extends the awareness and perception of American students (both Black and white) to African people, their literature, traditions, problems, and culture.

And so the Africans speak. The book’s impulse to get on with the real discovery of some truth by allowing peoples to speak for themselves is emblematic of Morrison’s editorship in many ways. She and the editors made no effort to limit the texts to those written to a white audience or to those that could be easily understood in a Western context. Rather, the tales, fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction alike were informed by social, political, and cultural experiences and traditions that challenged the primacy of Western ideals as universal. Ideally, this approach would prompt readers to understand that there were multiple worldviews, that Western ways of thinking and being were one among many.

The anthology was as invested in philosophical impulses as it was in artistry.

The Party understood the racialized lens through which Black Americans rightly viewed the world, but Newton knew that coalition and international politics were necessary elements of the revolution. To help make this point, Morrison helped him arrange the book to reiterate the idea that revolution is a process that must be practiced in a community with others, not just analyzed or theorized in relative isolation.

5. Taking Flight

It would seem in retrospect that each of the books Morrison published in 1974 turned on the notion that accepted ideas needed to be challenged. Much in the same way Herskovit’s collection upended long-accepted ideas about race and culture, the final book Morrison published that year, Land’s Grow or Die: The Unifying Principle of Transformation, decried conventional wisdom and prevailing business practices and promoted, instead, proactive approaches to organizational change and growth. At the core of Land’s argument was the claim that risk aversion and safe-decision making were guarantees for stagnation and death.

Dissatisfied with her pace and injured by her critique of his writing style, Land arrived unannounced on Morrison’s office in early summer. He expressed feelings of distrust of her and Random House. She cautioned him, first, against attempting to publish a book with an editor or company for which he had contempt. It was a fool’s errand. She followed up with a letter to make sure he got the point. She warned:

I cannot be strong-armed. It is simply an ineffective tactic because it makes me angry and uncooperative. Also it rips the thread of trust I assumed existed between us. . . .

We have been working on this since last November. I am excited about it, but very apprehensive about the turns your impatience have [sic] taken. None of this has to do with anything other than human frailty and the structures of vanity— mine and yours, but I think it terribly important to articulate these things at the precise moment they can be helpful.

Land’s theory of transformation argued that organizations cannot resist the impulse to return to their old ways during the improvement phase move toward obsolescence before ultimately dying. At the center of this failure, he argued was the tendency to reinvent and improve rather than to create and innovate. The creativity that informs the start-up/invention phase dissipates, and the adaptive theory used to improve products and process is mistaken for growth.

Her editorial choices reflected her belief that books could provoke thought and foster critical discourse. Her assumption, one that would persist through the years, was that a good editor could collaborate with the author to produce a book that revealed a writer’s individual achievement alongside the book’s more general efforts to shift perspectives. The nonfiction books she edited during these years foreshadowed her interest in publishing books that engage directly with social and cultural reorientations. Far from a disparate hodgepodge, those early books helped craft an editorial identity that positioned her as a serious professional, as one with a gift for helping authors on her list render complex and uncomfortable topics more legible, and as one committed to using her role as a tool for social change.

Morrison took risks publishing voices some deemed marginal and, by extension, challenged Random House to remain true to its legacy of prioritizing artistry and quality over market trends around the same time publishing conglomerates had begun to drift toward privileging commercial viability above all else.

6. The Simplest Life Is a Triumph

Just as The Bluest Eye set out to interrogate the life of a young girl who did not ascribe to the 1960s rallying cry “Black is beautiful,” Morrison intended for The Black Book to function, at least in part, as an interlocutor to the refrain, which she felt was “an accurate but wholly irrelevant observation if ever there was one.”

The slogan provided a psychic crutch for the needy and a second (or first) glance from whites. . . . The phrase was nevertheless a full confession that white definitions were important to us (having to counteract them meant they were significant) and that the quest for physical beauty was both a good and worth while pursuit. . . .

When the strength of people rests on its beauty, when the focus is on how one looks rather than what one is, we are in trouble. When we are urged to confuse dignity with prettiness, and presence with image, we are being distracted from what is worthy about us: for example, our intelligence, our resilience, our skill, our tenacity, irony or spiritual health. And in that absolute fit of reacting to white values, we may very well have removed the patient’s heart in order to improve his complexion.

The Black Book, then, was to focus on the heart— “the old verities that made being black and alive in this country the most dynamite existence imaginable.

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.

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.

7. The Two Tonis

Even as Bambara agreed that women must approach “the complexity of ourselves in a fearless way,” she saw no dilemma in the way being a Black woman intersected with being a race warrior. As she told Beverly Guy-Sheftall,

It’s not as if you’re a Black or a woman. I don’t find any basic contradiction or any tension between being a feminist, being a pan-Africanist, being a socialist, and being a woman in North America. I’m not sensitive enough to people caught in the “contradiction” to be able to see the dilemma. . . . My head is somewhere else.

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.

Even as she avoided the inflammatory style and language of some Black Arts Movement writers, Bambara was similarly committed to using writing for its transformative, activist, and interventionist impulses.

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.

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.

When Morrison sent Chase-Riboud the jacket proofs for the book, the passive-aggressive exchanges finally came to a head. Morrison chose a picture of Chase-Riboud holding a piece of her sculpture for the front of the book and another picture of Chase-Riboud for the back. The silver and black color scheme, along with the images, were meant to convey an aesthetic sense of elegance. But Chase-Riboud saw the choice differently. “I find the dust jacket slick and overmerchandised and for no good reason and to the detriment of the poems,” she wrote.

The purpose of the jacket is to make people pick it up, fondle it and hopefully open the book. The acid test is on the pages. . . . Remove it [the jacket] and your book will die in every book store in this country. You have the opportunity to transfer to some people some beauty and sensibility— take a chance.

Morrison’s experience working with Chase-Riboud was instructive. Morrison knew that having a publicity and promotion plan was an important aspect of how well a book sold. But never again would she assume an author would cooperate with her plans without explicitly saying so. She also sharpened her thinking around identifying a primary and secondary market for books she would acquire. Chase-Riboud’s social capital among white cultural and artistic aficionados did not translate into a book buying public. And alternative paths to the book’s success were unavailable for different reasons. Authors needed champions beyond their editors and publishers. If they were not lucky enough to enlist influential supporters, they certainly had to avoid making powerful enemies. The same politics that yielded enthusiastic endorsements could result in quiet condemnation, which could be worse than loud and damning disapproval. The latter might at least get the book some attention.

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.

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.

Morrison was conflicted about how to market Generations. Was it a nonfiction novel or a memoir? Because it was short, it would not work as a family history book or an autobiography. The first set of galleys had the book titled Generations: A Celebration in Prose, evidencing the fact that it did not fit any category neatly really.

On the editorial fact sheet, she described Generations as a miniature Pentimento— Lillian Hellman’s 1973 memoir (subtitled A Book of Portraits to connote that it was not a pure autobiography and an ironic foreshadowing of the impending controversy about the book’s veracity). Like the Hellman memoir, Generations was a recollection of figures who influenced the author.

What began as an exchange between writers with mutual respect devolved rather quickly into a series of miscommunications. Initially, Morrison suggested to Jordan that she could get a contract rather quickly, In a matter of days. Weeks went by, however, with no word from Morrison. What Jordan did not know was that Morrison needed to find a way to respond to Silberman’s concerns about how well Jordan could perform as a novelist. There was, still, the matter of the Simon and Schuster contract; and Silberman was scheduled for a monthlong vacation.

Morrison returned the manuscript as requested but also took a moment to write to Jordan directly.

Last Thursday I returned your material to your lawyer at her request. I didn’t want to call you with if-y information— only with a yes or no. . . . I can’t figure out why you didn’t trust me; I know you wanted things settled but, had no idea there was a time crisis involved; . . . I would have felt so much better if you had given me the deadline and the ultimatum yourself. Keep doing the work though, I love it.

She ended the letter on an apologetic and hopeful note: “I am sorry that because we don’t know each other well enough to accurately assess the import of an exchange or, on the other hand, of unexpected silence, things have come to their current resolution that I am seeking, with this letter, to obviate, and move beyond positively.

In many ways, Jordan was a publicity department’s dream author. She was well connected and regarded in a variety of circles. She could command audiences at universities and community centers and museums alike. She was deliberate about planning her itinerary and making as many appearances in an area or region as possible, and she was extremely organized in terms of documenting her professional activity and supporters.

10. Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Like most of the literary authors whose work Morrison admired, Dumas was one of those writers who defied neat categorization. He wrote across genres effortlessly. He produced an abundance of poems that revealed a command of poetic craft, and his choice short stories were peerless. Morrison was also struck by his willingness to write against or beyond accepted literary conventions. This was the work she was trying to do in her own fiction, of course. Dumas was a kindred spirit in this way. He felt comfortable playing with narrative and form and completely ignored the supposition that every good story had a beginning, middle, and end.

Mack’s adventures, as he attempts to fulfill his desire to be a successful tenor saxophone player, inform the novel’s actions, but what the novel is really about is his spiritual journey toward self-determination and emotional maturity, ultimately in service of the Black community.

I read the final version of the manuscript some weeks ago and have been thrashing about for a handle,” she wrote. “Usually getting a title isn’t so important at this stage, but because the book needs a title that will really pull it together in the reader’s mind before he opens it I am desperate. . . . I think we need a sentence-title like ‘Been down so long looks like up to me.’” After fits and starts with a range of options (including Pilgrims, I Have My Own Song to Sing, and Like a Ship Out to Sea), they settled on the title they thought best from the beginning— Look What They Done to My Song.

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.

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.

Like so many of the novels Morrison published, Tragic Magic situates the reader in a well-crafted fictional world that allows us to see the main character’s interior life. The narration holds the reader so closely that we cannot help but to see what Mouth sees— that the cost of preserving an exacting masculinity is high. It is impossible for any of the men in the novel to establish and maintain intimate relationships with women or anyone because they are so guarded on the one hand and disappointed in their ability to live up to the impossible standard on the other.

Author by author, book by book, Morrison was determined to build an editorial identity that mirrored her belief that the cultural terrain was best traversed when every kind of author was given meaningful opportunities for storytelling. While Black women writers were being published in record numbers, Morrison looked beyond the trend and acquired novels by Black male writers as well. No doubt she was interested and invested in celebrating the success women writers were experiencing. She was among these writers, after all. But her ability to edit all kinds of fiction challenged the simplistic notion that affinity with one group had to come at the expense of another. There was more than enough room across the rich literary landscape for all. Publishing Gayle Jones’s fiction would certainly prove this.

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.

Her first big score was a comment from James Baldwin, who read the novel on the galleys Morrison had sent him. “Corregidora is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the sounds of black men and women,” Baldwin wrote; “it dares to confront the absolute terror which lives at the heart of love.

It would make all the difference in terms of getting the attention of reviewers, critics, and readers alike. Morrison was prepared to delay the book’s publication for months if needed, in fact, to avoid sending it out naked— that is, without the right quotes from the right people announcing the book’s achievement.

Even as she had some sense of how shy Jones was, Morrison was taken aback by the timidity Jones expressed in the letter. This same writer who wrote the unimaginable seemed uncertain about everything and uncomfortable with anything other than writing.

I don’t know what an agent-writer relationship should be. . . . I feel like I’m in this really strange situation when all I really want to do is to be writing. I wouldn’t even think about contracts. . . . Everything else seems scary and I am really unsure about myself and what I should be doing/saying. I hope that you will forgive me if in all the things coming at me for me to do and say, I have chosen the wrong thing(s) to do or say.

Sameness,” Morrison chided, was “not quite the same thing as a distinctive style.” Achieving subtlety and discovery in traditional or semi-traditional modes was harder to do. “But when it works,” she added, “it does magnificent.

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.

12. Boxing the Champ In

A different reporter asked Bernstein what he thought might be the implications of signing up a convicted felon, which Ali was at that point, for a book deal with such a high payout. Having anticipated the question, Bernstein pulled his pipe from his mouth, leaned across the table toward the microphone, and replied that the day publishers refused to publish controversial books would be a bad day for democracy. Random house was no stranger to controversial authors.

Ali would not, however, accept one white female reporter’s claim that as a Muslim, he ascribed to feelings of hate for all white people. “Can you show me where I’ve ever said I hate any white person?” he insisted. “I’m a victim of hate. I have a right to hate evil.

Morrison relented and hoped Durham would make good on his word. But he also had to convince Silberman to let him work at his own pace. “Try this my way,” he wrote. "Allow me the exotic pleasure this time of calling you first with the work, rather than vice versia [sic]. I am highly conscious of the overhangings. But now that I’ve got the ball, I run faster and better when I give myself the illusion I’m in charge of it and the whistle wont blow before I wrap it up. I beat deadlines when I feel no deadlines.

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.

Durham resurfaced in late February 1975 with the Zaire chapter and the revision of the induction chapter. He and Morrison were on speaking terms again. And yet another contract addendum was signed. They had a final editorial meeting, and this time, Durham met all the deadlines Morrison set. He and Morrison agreed to spend the whole month of May working together in New York to review the entire manuscript. As quickly as Morrison suggested edits, Durham made them. They finally had a full draft. When Morrison got the news that the book had been chosen as the main selection for the Literary Guild, she announced to all that any changes to the uncorrected galleys needed to be on her desk by August 22. A version of the galleys was already with the proofreader and copy editor. Changes Durham suggested and those of the proofreader and copy editor would be made, and the type size needed to be enlarged. Otherwise, the book was ready to go. The plan was to print one hundred thousand copies— the largest first printing of the list for the year.

Finally, almost six years after Durham began to shop the book with publishers, The Greatest was published to much acclaim.

Importantly, The Greatest was financially successful. In addition to the Literary Guild serial sale, the firm also sold serial rights to several major outlets, including Book Digest, Newsweek, The New York Times, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. Disappointingly though, it did not make the American bestseller lists. While it was on the large chain bookstore B. Dalton’s list for several weeks, the bookseller’s list was different from a general readers’ list. That list was made up of sales at places like Scribner’s, Brentano’s, or Double-day, the stores that reported to the bestseller list. The Greatest sold more than ninety-four thousand copies from its first printing but largely at places where Black people bought books, none of which were among the standard booksellers whose sales were counted. In this sense, the disconnect between the actual number of books sold and the way reporting declared books bestsellers helped Random House see how inherent biases made it impossible to rely on reported information to determine non-white groups’ interests and book-buying tendencies. Morrison’s point that well-done so-called “Black books” that received the right kind of marketing and promotion could sell as well as any other books had been made yet again. She did not need the validation of a bestseller list to prove it.

13. Free Angela

While still in prison, Davis had coedited If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) with her longtime friend Bettina Aptheker. A compilation of texts about political prisoners, the prison system, repression of political figures, and resistance to political repression, If They Come in the Morning, published by Third World Press, opened with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis and included contributions by Aptheker, Julian Bond, John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo, Ericka Huggins, George Jackson, Ruchell Magee, Huey P. Newton, and others.

Months earlier, at Governor Ronald Reagan’s behest, the University of California, Los Angeles, had dismissed her from the philosophy faculty for being affiliated with the Communist Party. When the Supreme Court of California ruled that a professor could not be banned for party affiliation, the university regents declined to renew her appointment, this time claiming that remarks she made in speeches were politically incendiary.

It was clear to Morrison, and Davis agreed, that the only way to complete the revisions for the book in a reasonable amount of time was to have Davis stay in New York while she worked on it.

Morrison and Davis’s friendship developed naturally. Somehow they escaped the awkwardness that tended to come with the absence of shared history. What they did have was enough common ground as Black women to build a meaningful connection, which was only strengthened over the next few months, after Morrison invited Davis to stay with her and her boys in Spring Valley. During the summer and early fall of 1973, they commuted to Random House office on East 50th Street in Manhattan every day. The office was a haven for Davis— a vibrant space filled with books, constant foot traffic, and palpable energy fueled by diverse creative and intellectual pursuits. Living in Spring Valley also gave Davis relief from the hustle and bustle of city life and from an overwhelming schedule. Everything about the arrangement worked. There, Davis could do things normal people did, like cook and enjoy her family, whom Morrison welcomed in her home as well. They could go for a run, which they often did, without the burden of media scrutiny.

Morrison was attentive to every detail. She approved the back ad layout for the jacket, which was to have “a hairline of white around each halftone and a black border around that white hairline,” and she requested oval frames for the four snapshots above. While she was pleased with the manufacturing in general, she appealed to Silberman to help ensure she had some input in these matters in the future. She was similarly hard on the publicity team. She complained: “The Angela postcard 1) has no space for a message (on the left) 2) places the Geis credit improperly 3) needs a vertical line to separate the address are from the quote/message area— as a normal postcard. In the future, she told Selma Shapiro, she would like to see the layout and copy for publicity items.

Morrison sent galleys to all the major news outlets and to a range of writers asking them for comments. When she secured a quote from Jessica Mitford, the leftist author of the prison reform book Kind and Usual Punishment, she added an excerpt of it to the book’s back cover and to the appeal letter.

14. Letting Giants Talk

Morrison seemed unbothered by the tussle and accepted his apology. She wrote back casually:

Now that our author-editor relationship has been baptized and duly anointed with our first spat, we can get on with our business.

It was really awful to have to go to a huge sales conference to present your book with the slammed phone ringing in my ear. But it worked out o.k. I even got printing up from 7,500 to 10,000 (paper) when the whole mood of the house is ‘cut printings and raise prices.’ . . .

Maybe my anger improved my delivery. . . .

All’s well, Chinweizu. . . .

I can never stay angry at people— only institutions.

If the book did well, it would be because of his brilliance, she joked. If it failed, it would be because she was an “idiot editor.” In short, he should worry less about the jacket and focus more on getting reviews, feature articles, television appearances, radio shows, and news stories so he could promote the book. The publicity team would help, but he could recommend friends and colleagues who might give him book parties or places to read from the book or to give lectures about it. She implored him to trust that she would do everything in her power to help the book be a success.

She also helped Van Sertima publish “Bad News for Columbus, Perhaps” as an op-ed and teaser on December 4, 1975, in The New York Times.

Once the book was released, the reviews of it were similarly titled— “Columbus Discovered America? Random House Book Says Blacks Here First,” “How About Abu Bakari II Day? A Rutgers Professor Says Africans Beat Columbus Here by 2,000 Years,” “Rich Black Past ‘Embarrasses’ Europe,” and “Before Columbus: Roots of a Dispute.

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.

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.

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.

16. Daring to the End

In an industry marked more and more by commercial pressures as the years progressed, Morrison’s editorship was marked by an aesthetic authenticity. Her time at the firm coincided with a time of shifting cultural, political, and technological changes, and she was keenly attuned to these forces. She understood that the role of an editor was not simply to curate content, but to reflect and sometimes challenge the world around them. So many of the publications she brought into print became a mirror to the era— capturing the nuances of its complexities and responding to its demands.