Dana Williams recently revealed to a New York audience that it was Toni Morrison herself who chose the title for her Williams’s new book about the renowned author. The occasion was a panel at 92NY, where Williams discussed “Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship,” her biography about legendary author and American icon Toni Morrison’s tenure as an editor at publishing house Random House.
Also on the panel, presented in Buttenweiser Hall by the Unterberg Poetry Center, was moderator Lisa Lucas, a pioneering publishing executive in her own right, and panelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an acclaimed poet and novelist.
Greatness often takes time. Williams said she first met with Morrison, who died in 2019, in 2005 after she had already begun her research for the book. She explained that her research took on more than an academic angle, due to the mutual friend both she and Morrison had in Eleanor Traylor, a legendary literary scholar and Howard University professor. All three had worked at Howard. Said Williams, “I saw a side of [Morrison] that was unvarnished, because Eleanor’s position, overwhelmingly, was ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.’ There were levels of comfort, so I also began to know [Morrison] as a very human person.”
So renowned was Morrison for her literary dexterity at delving into the complex lives and psyches of working-class Black Americans that she was awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. As much as that image of her was aggressively promoted by the media, her lengthy tenure as an incisive, groundbreaking editor at Random House remains shrouded even in publishing circles. Publishers Weekly lauded “Toni at Random” as “A triumphant account of an underexplored aspect of Morrison’s influence on American literature.”
In the same way Morrison tried to bring the complexity of Black people to public consciousness, Williams attempts to give a nuanced portrait of Morrison as a woman adept not only at writing about Black American people and experiences, but also as a visionary, advocate, and strategist at guiding the work of other writers. Williams explained the thinking behind Morrison’s advocacy for author Gayl Jones, for example, who famously refused to do press for her books: “While Morrison is doing press for her own books, she’s promoting Gayl Jones, in part because she doesn’t want to be the only Black woman writer who’s getting any kind of attention. She was also very sophisticated in it because she didn’t want the two of them to be reviewed together just because they were both Black writers.”
Williams also said Morrison stumbled into her career as an editor after editing a book called “College Reading Skills” while still employed at Howard University. “She understood how to make a book work, and would complain about books that didn’t work, so I think that kind of inspiration for editing is important.”
Morrison leveraged that experience into editing at small presses, including an imprint for Random House. Her skills and personality soon brought her to the attention of leadership, and she headed to New York in 1967 to begin working at Random House proper. Williams noted that Morrison felt “alone” at Random House as the only Black woman editor, and Fanonne Jeffers pointed out that this position probably informed how Morrison went about her work. “I can only guess this might have contributed to the way that she moved in publishing. There’s always community. That’s what the book says to me. Instead of looking at her as this one singular person, she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. She has sorority sisters, and you know all of that.”
Morrison made herself available and relatable to not just the writers she worked with but the staff at Random House. Lucas, Williams, and Fanonne Jeffers all referenced her reputation for cooking for people she liked. Morrison’s Random House office was a veritable way station. Explained Williams, “Her office often was this magnet where people were constantly in and out. People I talked to were amazed that she was able to get any work done, because it was almost the station where everybody stopped in here or there.”
Williams also pointed to Morrison’s work on Angela Davis’s autobiography as both a pivotal moment in Morrison’s career as an editor and one that demonstrated Morrison’s tenacity, talent for relationship-building, and foresight. “The game changes with Angela Davis when she’s able to score that. She’s working trying to convince Angela Davis’s team that she can do this. It comes together nicely, because they’re able to build trust, and that’s why, again, what trust looks like and feels like, and being able to anticipate what the public is going to want is really important.”
Fanonne Jeffers emphasized the irony of Morrison’s public image in the mainstream. For Black audiences, Morrison embodied the innate equality of Black people. For the mainstream, she seemed to represent something slightly different. Fanonne Jeffers remarked about Williams’s book, “For me, the biggest thing is realizing how Black she was; extremely Black, and the way that people have tried to deracinate Toni Morrison to make her into this special Negro that’s different from the rest of the Black people.” Fanonne Jeffers concluded later that “Black people need to understand — she was ours first.”