“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it,” Toni Morrison, who was born on this day in 1931, said.
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 “second 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 people right there, the death of a younger generation that had been so abused that there was really no hope.
At Random House, Morrison published Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis, among others. She was responsible for “The Myth of Lesbianism,” 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.
In order to get attention for her authors—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 decided to concentrate on one African-American text each season. She worked diligently. “I wanted to give back something,” she said. “I wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything.
, Alvin Beam said, “Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes.”
The racial climate in the mid-seventies made it especially hard for Morrison to promote certain books—books that might be taken as too radical. Morrison remembered that the marketing department balked when she wanted to have a publication party in a club on 125th Street. No one from Random House came—it was rumored that someone in management had cautioned the staff about the danger—except the publicist and her assistant, who said it was the best party they’d ever been to.
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