36 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
line. And I didn’t want to fail my grand-
mother. I didn’t want to hear her say, ‘You
went to college and this is all you thought
up?’” She laughed. “Compared to what
my family had gone through and what
I felt was my responsibility, the corpo-
ration’s interest was way down on the
list. I was not going to do anything that
I thought was nutty or disrupt anything.
I thought it was beneficial generally, just
like I thought that the books were going
to make them a lot of money!”
Morrison’s view of contemporary
black literature transcended the limita-
tions of the “down with honky” school of
black nationalism popularized by writ-
ers like Eldridge Cleaver and George
Jackson. She preferred to publish writ-
ers who had something to say about
black American life that reflected its
rich experience. In 1974, she put together
“The Black Book,” a compendium of
photographs, drawings, songs, letters,
and other documents that charts black
American history from slavery through
Reconstruction to modern times. The
book exercised a great influence over
the way black anthropology was viewed.
At first, Random House resisted the
idea of “ The Black Book.” “It just looked
to them like a disaster,” Morrison said.
“Not so much in the way it was being
put together, but because they didn’t know
how to sell it. ‘Who is going to buy some-
thing called “The Black Book”?’ I had
my mother on the cover—what were
they talking about?” She wrote about the
project in the February 2, 1974, issue of
Black World: “So what was Black life like
before it went on TV?... I spent the last
18 months trying to do a book that would
show some of that. A genuine Black his-
tory book—one that simply recollected
Black Life as lived. It has no ‘order,’ no
chapters, no major themes. But it does
have coherence and sinew.... I don’t
know if it’s beautiful or not (it is elegant,
however), but it is intelligent, it is pro-
found, it is alive, it is visual, it is creative,
it is complex, and it is ours.”
Despite all misgivings, the book gar-
nered extraordinary reviews. Writing in
the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Alvin Beam
said, “Editors, like novelists, have brain
children—books they think up and bring
to life without putting their own nameson the title page. Mrs. Morrison has
one of these in the stores now, and mag-
azines and newsletters in the publish-
ing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go
like hotcakes.”
Morrison got a letter from a man in
prison who had read the book. “Some-
body had given him a copy, and he wrote
to say thank you,” Morrison told me.
“And then he said, ‘I need two more
copies, because I need one to pass out
to other people, and I need another one
to throw up against the wall. And I need
the one I have to hold close.’ So there
were readers on, quote, ‘both sides of
the street,’ which is the way they put
it.” I recall buying “The Black Book” as
a teen-ager and feeling as if I had been
given a road map of the Brooklyn com-
munity where I lived at the time.
“Toni became not a black editor but
the black editor,” a friend of hers told
me. In 1975, D. Keith Mano, the “Book
Watch” columnist for Esquire, devoted
an entire article to Gayl Jones and her
new book, “Corregidora,” but the piece
was as much about Morrison as about
Jones. “Toni Morrison is Gayl’s Sven-
gali editor at Random House,” Mano
wrote. “Toni is dynamic, witty, even bois-
terous in a good-humored way. And
sharp. Very sharp. She often uses the
pronoun I. She’ll say, ‘I published “Cor-
regidora.”’... I suspect the title page of
‘Corregidora’ should read, ‘by Gayl Jones,
as told to Toni Morrison.’” If Morrison
had been a man or white, it seems un-
likely that Mano would have noticed
her championing of an author. Jones
was uncommunicative and Morrison
had books to sell. If a writer needed
fussing, she fussed, and if not, not.
Morrison was a canny and tireless
editor. “You can’t be a slouch in Toni’s
presence,” the scholar Eugene Redmond
told me. “Her favorite word is ‘wake-
ful.’” (She still gets up at 4 A.M. to work.)
When she published the books of Henry
Dumas—a little-known novelist and
poet whose work was left fragmentary
when he was murdered by a transit officer
in the New York City subway in 1968,
in a case of mistaken identity—she sent
copies to Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis, Ruby
Dee, and all the major movie executives
and television hosts. In a letter inviting
people to read at a tribute to Dumas,
she wrote, “He was brilliant. He was
magnetic and he was an incredible art-“On the other hand, Louise N., of Metuchen,
New Jersey, only gives you three stars.”