One of the few critics to embrace
Morrison’s work was John Leonard, who
wrote in the Times, “Miss Morrison ex-
poses the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-
and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-
Cat photograph that appears in our
reading primers and she does it with a
prose so precise, so faithful to speech
and so charged with pain and wonder
that the novel becomes poetry.... ‘The
Bluest Eye’ is also history, sociology, folk-
lore, nightmare and music.”
The poet Sonia Sanchez, who taught
“The Bluest Eye” in her classroom at
Temple University, saw the book as an
indictment of American culture. For
Pecola, the descendant of slaves, to want
the master’s blue eyes represents the “sec-
ond generation of damage in America,”
Sanchez told me. “For this woman, Toni
Morrison, to write this, to show this to
us—it was the possible death of a peo-
ple right there, the death of a younger
generation that had been so abused that
there was really no hope. What Toni has
done with her literature is that she has
made us look up and see ourselves. She
has authenticated us, and she has also
said to America, in a sense, ‘Do you know
what you did? But, in spite of what you
did, here we is. We exist. Look at us.’”
“What was driving me to write was
the silence—so many stories untold and
unexamined. There was a wide vacuum
in the literature,” Morrison said. “I was
inspired by the silence and absences in
the literature.” The story she told was a
distinctly American one: complicated,
crowded, eventful, told from the perspec-
tive of innocents. “I think of the voice of
the novel as a kind of Greek chorus, one
that comments on the action,” she once
said. She was a social realist, like Drei-
ser, with the lyricism and storytelling ge-
nius of someone like Isak Dinesen.
I
n 1968, Morrison was transferred to
New York to work in Random House’s
scholastic division. She moved to Queens.
(“I never lived in Manhattan,” she said.
“I always wanted a garden.”) A couple
of years later, Robert Bernstein, who was
then the president of Random House,
came across “The Bluest Eye” in a book-
store. “Is this the same woman who works
in the scholastic division?” he asked Jason
Epstein, then the editorial director of
Random House. Morrison had been
wanting to move into trade publishing,
and went to see Robert Gottlieb, the ed-
itor-in-chief of Knopf, an imprint of
Random House. Gottlieb recalled the
interview: “I said, ‘I like you too much
to hire you, because in order to hire you
I have to feel free to fire you. But I’d love
to publish your books.’” He became her
editor, and Morrison got a job under Ep-
stein as a trade editor at Random House.
At Random House, Morrison pub-
lished Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara,
and Angela Davis, among others. She
was responsible for “The Myth of Les-
bianism,” one of the first studies of the
subject from a major publisher, and
“Giant Talk,” Quincy Troupe and Rainer
Schulte’s anthology of Third World
writing. Morrison gave me a copy of
one of the first books she worked on,
“Contemporary African Literature,” pub-
lished in 1972, a groundbreaking collec-
tion that included work by Wole Soy-
inka, Chinua Achebe, Léopold-Sédar
Senghor, and Athol Fugard. (For some
of them, it was their first publication in
America.) The book is lavishly illus-
trated, with many color photographs of
African tribesmen and African land-
scapes. Showing me the table of con-
tents, Morrison said, “What was I think-
ing? I thought if it was beautiful, people
would buy it.” (Not many did.)
The women she worked with, in par-
ticular, became some of her closest friends.
“Single women with children,” she said,
when I asked her about that era. “If you
had to finish writing something, they’d
take your kids, or you’d sit with theirs.
This was a network of women. They
lived in Queens, in Harlem and Brook-
lyn, and you could rely on one another.
If I made a little extra money on some-
thing—writing freelance—I’d send a
check to Toni Cade with a note that said,
‘You have won the so-and-so grant,’ and
so on. I remember Toni Cade coming to
my house with groceries and cooking
dinner. I hadn’t asked her.” The support
was intellectual as well as practical. Sonia
Sanchez told me, “I think we all looked
up and saw that we were writing in differ-
ent genres, but we were experiencing the
same kinds of things, and saying similar
kinds of things.” Their books formed a
critical core that people began to see as
the rebirth of black women’s fiction.
Before the late sixties, there was no
real Black Studies curriculum in the acad-
emy—let alone a post-colonial-studies
program or a feminist one. As an edi-
tor and author, Morrison, backed by the
institutional power of Random House,
provided the material for those discus-
sions to begin. The advent of Black Stud-
ies undoubtedly helped Morrison, too:
“It was the academic community that
gave ‘The Bluest Eye’ its life,” she said.
“People assigned it in class. Students
bought the paperback.”
In order to get attention for her au-
thors—publishers still thought that the
ideal book buyer was a thirty-year-old
Long Island woman, and reviewers would
lump together books by Ishmael Reed
and Angela Davis, along with children’s
books, in a single article—Morrison de-
cided to concentrate on one African-
American text each season. She worked
diligently. “I wanted to give back some-
thing,” she said. “I wasn’t marching. I
didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join any-
thing. But I could make sure there was
a published record of those who did
march and did put themselves on the
“ You were smart to request a blindfold.”
