Dana Williams opens her narrative of Toni Morrison’s time as associate editor at Random House quite wisely, with Morrison’s words at the 1974 Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard University. This is wise because this is where Toni Morrison justifies her work in a capitalist enterprise seeking to profit from a book reading public after the start of the Black Power movement within the Black Arts Movement. In this first chapter titled “We’re All We Got,” Williams mentions the presence of Carole Parks who was managing editor of Black World periodical owned by John H. Johnson. Morrison says at this conference that “there must be Black independent publishers.” Williams writes that Morrison’s relationship with Black World would absolutely prove her to be a “career woman” who would choose to side with the mainstream when she did not cite Black World in final edits of Random House’s book by Henry Dumas.
Despite this, her role as an editor in the 1970s was absolutely INSTRUMENTAL in pouring new knowledge to the general American public after the Black Studies movement, true to Morrison’s birth sign of Aquarius. She was absolutely the water bearer or the knowledge distributor of the historical significance of the Black Power movement in the books she chose to edit. However Williams’s framing needs clarity. At the end of this first chapter, Williams writes that of her “distinguished editorship,” Morrison understood 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” (10).
As a Black Studies scholar, I have to ask what does Williams mean by “artistic excellence”? Does she mean what can easily amount to a shallow tokenism of Black culture where stories are published that show the material and professional rise of a Black individual at the sake of acknowledging their community?
In the second and third chapters, Williams writes how Morrison responded to a job ad in the New York Review of Books posted by L.W. Singer which was a small publishing house in Syracuse. She was hired and L.W. Singer was eventually bought by Random House. In the fourth chapter, Williams chronicles Morrison’s editing of Contemporary African Literature with Edris Makward and Leslie Lacy. She ends this chapter with Morrison’s atttempts to publish Huey Newton’s autobiography which failed; however, she did publish for Random House Newton’s collection of essays titled To Die For the People.
In the fifth chapter, Williams discusses Morrison’s collaborations with Boris Bittker’s The Case for Reparations, and Melville Herskovits’s Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism. Williams proves her point at the end of this chapter that Morrison’s “editorial choices reflected her belief that books could provoke thought and foster critical discourse” (67). The question is, based on Williams’s vague framing, what kind of discourse? A discourse that pushes reparations or a discourse that, to Williams’s first chapter, does nothing to promote independent Black publishers?
The sixth chapter describes The Black Book which, for Williams “more than any other project…defined Morrison’s editorship” because it encapsulated “what a book about Black life could do–celebrate the pride of Black accomplishment and acknowledge the joy and pain of three hundred years of Black life” (82). Williams could have provided more detail into one of the more influential newspaper clippings, like the clipping that inspired Morrison’s fifth 1988 novel Beloved. She relegates much of the content of The Black Book to lists instead of the spiritual meaning that certain symbols and images had for certain Black people. For Williams, The Black Book helped make the point “that a book about Black life when done well and marketed effectively, could be both a popular and critical success” (82). But Williams does not make the case that The Black Book was a critical success by interviewing its readers about what it specifically meant to them.
It is in Wiliams’s seventh chapter titled “The Two Tonis” where her history, her historiography, and her literary criticism is at its best. This chapter is about Morrison’s collaboration with Toni Cade Bambara who edited the The Black Woman in 1970 just before Morrison arrived at Random House. Her analysis of Gorilla, My Love makes the reader want to read the story again when Williams writes that when Bambara’s protagonist Hazel and her brothers go to see the film “Gorilla, My Love,” the man in the booth plays “King of Kings” instead and Hazel “protests, starting a fire at the candy stand…For Bambara, no mythology was sacrosanct. Every act of violence could be interrogated and revised to show that another, more caring reality was possible” (88). Williams’s analysis of Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters that Morrison edited is remarkable when she writes: “the Southwest Community Infirmary offers us an example of an attempt to eliminate the gap between traditional and modern medicine practices” (100). What is jarring about this chapter is Williams’s insistence that the Black Arts Movement ended; she almost suggests that Morrison’s editorship signaled the end of the Black Arts Movement. In this chapter she writes “the Black Arts Movement, which, by 1970, was in decline,” and that Morrison impacted the African American literature tradition “after the Black Arts Movement” (88, 110) as if it ended.
How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if Tony Martin was editing and printing his Marcus Garvey Library during this and future decades? How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if Angela Dodson is printing issues of Black Issues Book Review from the nineties into the twenty first century? How could the Black Arts Movement be “in decline” or end if George Curry is still printing Emerge magazine in the nineties?
What redeems this chapter is Wililams’s narrative of the critical reception of The Salt Eaters and Bambara’s response to specifically Adrienne Rich’s review of it.
In reality, the Black Arts Movement has never ended. It continues, and is driven by those who are inspired by its originators.
Williams’s eighth chapter titled “Leon Forrest and the Collective Complexity of Blackness” is about the work of the subject of Williams’s doctoral dissertation, novelist Leon Forrest. Williams writes that Morrison told Forrest that she would have to get Jason Epstein “who had become the firm’s editorial director to approve any offer she might propose on Forrest’s behalf” (125). In the book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders writes that Epstein was a member of the General Assembly that was part of the Congress on Cultural Freedom which as she and Mary Helen Washington (in The Other Blacklist) wrote was a front group for the C.I.A. Their members’ activities deserve a healthy skepticism. This chapter shows that Williams has an abiding trust in what Morrison and Random House higher ups like Jason Epstein said about the profit sales of Forrest’s work. If Ishmael Reed’s experience with Doubleday is any indication, privately owned booksellers’ claims about what sells requires a layman’s verification.
The eighth chapter shows that Williams’s abiding trust should, for the reader, transform into a healthy skepticism that seeks verification instead of blind acceptance.
Williams’s ninth chapter titled “The Extraordinariness of Ordinary Black Womanhood” is about Morrison’s collaborations with Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan. This is where Williams’s reveals Morrison’s humility as an editor who works with human beings, rather than automatons who churn out profitable books. Morrison succeeded in publishing books of poetry but had “run out of patience” when dealing with Chase-Riboud and her husband who resisted his wife’s efforts to promote the book. Morrison’s work with these authors told her that Random House’s “reluctance to publish poetry was well founded” (263).
In her tenth chapter “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Williams discusses Morison’s editing works by Henry Dumas, John McCluskey and Wesley Brown. Morrison had James Baldwin write endorsement of Brown., and Williams’s point in this chapter is to make clear that although “Black women writers were being published in record numbers, Morrison looked beyond the trend and acquired novels by Black male writers as well” (189).
Morrison’s eleventh chapter is about her relationship with the novelist Gayl Jones who wrote Corregidora (1975) which received critical acclaim. For Morrison according to Williams, what made Jones hard to work with was her “little interest in doing any promotional work for the book” (200). Like Chase-Riboud, Jones had a partner in Bob Higgins who seemed to make demands on Morrison’s editing that she was not willing to tolerate.
While Williams writes in this chapter that “neither Morrison nor Jones identified squarely with feminism or with the notion of Black women writers being in vogue” her thirteenth chapter on Angela Davis betrays this: Morrison absolutely identified with Black women writers being in vogue (208). That was how she got Angela Davis to write an individual autobiography.
Her twelfth chapter is about her editing the autobiography of Muhammad Ali titled The Greatest (1975). She had to deal with two middlemen before getting to the text of the life of Muhammad Ali–first his collaborator Richard Durham, who produced Destination Freedom on Chicago Public Radio in the forties; and Herbert Muhammad, the spiritual advisor to Muhammad Ali. Williams point at the end of this chapter about The Greatest is poignant and becomes a pandora’s box to more important questions: “inherent biases made it impossible…to determine non-white groups’ interest and book buying tendencies” (240).
This point begs the reader to ask the extent to which Random House was promoting the book among Black audiences. Morrison’s reaching out to Bill Cosby and James Baldwin was one way, but were there institutional connections she could have made to make it more profitable among Black audiences?
Her thirteenth chapter is about Angela Davis, her trial, and Random House publishing Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Williams provides the history of the criminal trial that made Davis famous. Morrison also acquired a second book Women and Race (I read this book as Women, Race and Class in grad school) by Angela Davis. Williams mentions a “bombshell expose” by a “journalist” named Greg Armstrong who claims he has a tape revealing that George Jackson “confesses” to the murder of a prison guard; she cites an article from the Village Voice. It is clear that Williams adds mention of this letter to dramatize the obstacles Morrison overcame to publish this book. What is absolutely clear, fifty decades in retrospect, is that Morrison’s promotion of the individual Angela Davis resulted in the erasure of the political message of Jonathan Jackson and George Jackson. This erasure could only maintain the same gender divide that Williams claims Morrison was questioning in her seventh chapter.
The fourteenth chapter “Giant Talk” is about Morrison’s editing books dealing with histories of the Third World people, including Giant Talk which was an anthology about literature from the Third World; The West and the Rest of Us by Chinweizu; and They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima.
Most telling to a Black Studies scholar in the West, is her quote of Chinweizu saying that the function of universities in Africa is “to turn out products useful to imperialists” (278). Williams writes that Morrison’s decision to publish this and other books shows was “her willingness if not determination to rewrite history more honestly in the tradition of the Black Studies movement, which challenged the dominant narratives that mischaracterized, marginalized, and erased African and African diaspora contributions to world history” (292).
In her fifteenth chapter Beyond the Black Book: Scrapbooking Black History, Williams details Morrison’s editing Railroads: Train and Train People in American Culture (1976) by James Alan McPherson and Miller Williams; The Cotton Club: A Pictorial and Social History of the Most Famous Symbol of the Jazz Era (1977) by James Haskins; and Creole Feast: 15 Master Chefs of New Orleans Reveal Their Secrets (1978) by Rudy Lombard and Nathaniel Burton.
The sixteenth chapter and the Acknowledgments sections belonged in a comprehensive Introduction that included simple summaries of each chapter. The topic of this book requires an extensive index.
Williams’s organization of her book by theme does not do justice to the heavy lifting and multitasking that Morrison undertook as editor. She was courting Angela Davis at the same time she was editing Henry Dumas at the same time she was courting drafts from Muhammad Ali at the same time she was doing A LOT for Random House. Williams shows this in a detailed and refreshing way. Her choice of specific terms is questionable, however. For example, in her chapter on Muhammad Ali, her use of the term “Zaire” which is the term Western imperialists imposed on the Congo for their purposes of colonization, is telling.
As Morrison told Carole Parks and other Black independent journalists, if it came between them and her career, she would always choose her career, but it will not be a dull career.
What is telling about Morrison’s career is that her longest lasting women clients were women clients who were not married: Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis.
The publishing industry and American culture has forever changed due to the editorship of Toni Morrison whose work has prolonged, not truncated the Black Arts Movement. Thank you, Dr. Dana Williams, for detailing why. -RF.