I’ve spent a lot of time reading Toni Morrison’s editorial correspondence from her time at the publishers L. W. Singer and Random House, where she edited more than 50 books between 1971 and 1983. During that time, some things I thought I knew changed.
I had heard, for instance, that Morrison was part of a group of Black women in New York (Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and June Jordan among them) who, in 1977, resolved to start their own publishing company. The most modest lore about Morrison’s involvement offered her as a key participant in the planning. The more elaborate versions had her plotting her escape from Random House and taking the Black women authors on her editorial list with her. As it turns out—the archive tells its own story—Morrison attended only one of the meetings of what Jordan dubbed “the Sisterhood,” and corresponded with members of the group only once or twice more about the kinds of things a start-up publishing house would need.
Then there were the things I suspected were true, after my first encounters with the Random House collection at Columbia University, that remained true even after my final visits to Morrison’s personal archives, at Princeton: She was no shrinking violet. She pulled no punches. She was slow to anger, at least in writing. She could also be provocative.
In a 1974 essay announcing the publication of her editorial feat, The Black Book—a visually stunning, culturally rich chronicle of Black experience—the nation’s oldest and largest Black civil-rights advocacy group, the N.A.A.C.P., became an unsuspecting foil in Morrison’s critique of Black histories that favored the good and eschewed the bad and the ugly. “What on earth did little statues of black jockeys have to do with the civil-rights movement?” she asked in a New York Times article headlined “It’s Like Growing Up Black One More Time,” in response to the group’s demand that the Black jockeys in the lobby of the Morrison Hotel in Chicago be removed for the duration of the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual convention there. The same kind of respectability politics, she lamented, had “annihilated” the controversial Amos ’n’ Andy Show (where two white actors played stereotypical Black characters) and “slaughtered” the children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo (which featured a Black hero but failed to see that “Sambo” was a racial slur for some), much to her dismay.
So imagine my surprise at seeing an inter-office memo, dated January 28, 1972, from Morrison to her Random House colleague Fabio Coen declaring her support of the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision to protest plans for a movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Coen, the acclaimed children’s-book editor who would go on to become editor of the juvenile list at Pantheon and Knopf, had defended the book and its author, Roald Dahl, against claims that it upheld white supremacy. (When it was first published, in 1964, there was little public resistance to the book’s portrayal of the Oompa Loompas as African Pygmies who had been imported to staff the factory. It was for their own good, after all. They were practically starving, with only caterpillars for sustenance. They were better off in England with Wonka. Sound familiar?)
When plans for the movie were announced, years later, the N.A.A.C.P. argued that the book fed racist stereotypes and should be banned. Dahl decried the objection vehemently, arguing that the organization’s characterization of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a “terrible dastardly anti-negro book” was wrongheaded.
Morrison was unrelenting in her missive to Coen: “I tell you it has been a long time since I have encountered anything so painful—no less sad because unintentional—in fact truly insidious because it is unintentional.” She supported the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision to condemn the book and insisted, for three single-spaced, typed pages, that the book was intricately and dangerously racist. “I would not allow my children to read it,” she declared, “except as an example of latent white supremacy.”
Every researcher is on guard for archival rabbit holes. Falling down one can be the difference between a productive research day and an interesting one that has no real bearing on your project. I avoided rabbit holes like the plague. I tempered my curiosity. But I couldn’t resist flagging the memo as something I should come back to. What role, if any, had Morrison played in convincing Knopf, her publisher by then, that the book was, in fact, offensive to Black people and racist in its portrayal of its Black characters?
The title was ultimately changed to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—thus creating some distance between the book and the movie, which premiered in June of 1971—and the Oompa Loompas were no longer Africans but green-haired orange people. Had the points Morrison outlined in the memo played any role in the publisher’s decision to recast the Oompa Loompas in subsequent editions? What role did she play, if any, in Dahl’s decision not to finish the planned third installment in the series?
The memo on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was one of the earliest dated correspondences I found in Morrison’s editorial files. And yet, in its brazenness, it could have been one of her last. Copying Random House president Bob Bernstein on the memo, she wrote: “Recently I saw in the Random House Dictionary that the definition of ‘bleed’ was ‘the reddening of the skin’—the assumption being that black people do not bleed. I beg to differ on several counts. They do. I did when I read parts of this book.”
I titled the last chapter of my new book, Toni at Random, “Daring to the End.” Turns out, Toni Morrison was daring from the beginning.
Dana A. Williams is a professor of African-American literature and dean of the graduate school at Howard University
