THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 69
“The Black Book” was intended, like
“The Bluest Eye,” to combat the “Black
is beautiful” jingoism of the time, and
to show real black lives from the ghastly
slave ships of the sixteen-hundreds to
America in the twentieth century. After
she met Middleton (Spike) Harris, a
collector of black ephemera, who intro-
duced her to other collectors—among
them Roger Furman and Morris Lev-
itt—Morrison got to work with a de-
signer, Jack Ribik, putting together a
kind of scrapbook of black American
history and life. She jettisoned the idea
of having text dominate the collection,
for fear that it would give it too much
of an ideological spin.
“I am not sure what the project meant
to the authors,” she wrote in a 1974 essay,
“but for me it was like growing up black
one more time.” It’s easy to glean what
she meant by that. Morrison, like many
black Americans of her generation, had
come of age with the idea that black
achievement—as well as the hard
times—formed a kind of lore, an oral
history that was passed down with pride.
In the same essay, Morrison wrote:
The point is not to soak in some warm bath
of nostalgia about the good old days—there
were none!—but to recognize and rescue those
qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity
that were so much a part of our past and so
useful to us and to the generations of blacks
now growing up....To create something that
might last, that would bear witness to the qual-
ity and variety of black life before it became
the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation and the
focal point of all the mindlessness that seems
to have joined the smog of California’s movie
world. Whatever that “something” was, it would
have to be honest, would have to be rendered
through our own collective consciousness. It
would have to assume that we were still tough,
and that our egos were not threads of jelly in
constant need of glue.
“Nothing could have interfered with
my putting this book together,” Mor-
rison said, in an interview in the Times
in 1974. “I was afraid that young people
would come to believe that black history
began in 1964 or that there was slavery,
there was a gap, and then there was
1964.” In “The Black Book,” which she
worked on for a feverish eighteen-month
period, Morrison wanted to provide vis-
ible evidence of where blackness had
been and where it was going. She in-
cluded documents—a patent showing
that William B. Purvis had invented
the fountain pen, for instance—and
photographs, among them one of Lena
Horne bathing in her drive and signifi-
cance, and one of the black cowboy Nat
Love. There were descriptions of voo-
doo charms; a full-color ad showing a
black baby in a white cap and gown,
advertising Sunlight Soap; pictures of
clothes made by slaves; and another pat-
ent, this one for Norbert Rillieux’s “im-
provement in sugar-making.” There
were lines of poetry by Langston Hughesand by Henry Dumas, whom she con-
sidered one of the most talented of her
authors. There were images of black
men being burned or lynched, and a
clipping about Margaret Garner, a run-
away slave who killed one of her chil-
dren so that she would not grow up in
slavery—a story that haunted Morri-
son and inspired her 1987 novel, “Be-
loved,” another tale of innocence lost
and of black women alone in the world
together. You can also find in “The Black
Book” other sources of inspiration for
Morrison the novelist. There is an ex-
cerpt from Gwendolyn Brooks’s pro-
found poem about abortion, “The
Mother”—“Believe me, I loved you
all./Believe me, I knew you, though
faintly,and I loved, I loved you/All”—
which brings to mind Morrison’s “Song
of Solomon” (1977) and the extraordi-
nary speech that the healer Pilate de-
livers near the end of her life about wish-
ing she had known more people so that
she could have loved them. With “The
Black Book,” which would be nomi-
nated for a National Book Award, the
editor was also feeding the creator. (As
with all great books, one wants “The
Black Book” to be all things for all peo-
ple, and yet the collection is devoid of
any story or image of an out gay per-
son—there is no mention of Gladys
Bentley, for instance, or Bruce Nugent,
let alone of James Baldwin or Audre
Lorde. Just as Morrison was afraid that
young people might think black historyjumped from slavery to the civil-rights
era, a young queer kid today may won-
der, leafing through the reprint, if black
gayness has been deliberately erased or
“just” forgotten.)
When the book was published,
Margo Jefferson, then a critic at News-
week, wrote, “As a young girl I was
taught that black surgeon Daniel Hale
Williams had performed the first suc-
cessful heart operation; that blacks were
shipbuilders, inventors and landown-
ers, and that I was never to sing a song
that used the words darky, coon or crow.
‘You need this for yourself,’ cautioned
my father; ‘and for ammunition,’ added
my mother. ‘The Black Book’ is confir-
mation and ammunition.” Morrison
welcomed and encouraged dialogues
between black critics and artists. “White
people can’t do it for us,” she said in a
1974 interview. “That’s our responsibil-
ity and in some way we have to do it.
I say you must always tell the truth.
And I tell you that we are not weak
people and we can stand it.” But first
you need serious and seriously good
work to inspire the discourse. For me,
“The Bluest Eye” and “The Black Book,”
works of the highest quality, were tan-
gible and galvanizing evidence that to
be an artist meant arming yourself with
the truth—about where you came from
and where you hope to go—and that
hypocrisy was the enemy of art. Mor-
rison showed me what was possible.
In an unpublished biographical state-
ment that she wrote around the time
that she was promoting “The Black
Book” and her second novel, “Sula”
(1973), she offered a window into her
sensibility, which was driven by loss,
effort, survival, and not turning away
from any of it. Her relatives on both
sides were migrants from the South,
she explained, who had suffered and
persevered. She went on:Even before I knew what they had done
to stay alive, to raise their children, and to be
better than their detractors—even before that,
their eyes impressed me. They were like wells
of stacked mirrors—each with a depth and re-
fraction of its own.... The closest I can come
to describing it is the look of people who have
lived places where there are great distances to
view. Desert people, or people who live on sa-
vannahs or mountain tops—they have the look
I remember in my parents and their relatives.
Their eyes were terrible, made bearable only
by the frequency of their laughter. ♦