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On Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39 years old. By this time she was a divorced single mother of two sons and a respected teacher with a master’s degree in English from Cornell. She was an established a senior editor at Random House, the only Black woman in that position at the publisher. She’d championed Black authors and emphasized Black literature in the mainstream, including developing and strategically bringing out autobiographies by such Black Power luminaries as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. She was a close friend of influential participants in the Black Arts Movement, like the poet Sonia Sanchez. Yet in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the most recent documentary released on Morrison, she recalls being unwilling to submit The Bluest Eye, a novel about a little Black girl that longs above all else to have blue eyes, to Random House because she was, in her own words, “Just an editor. Not a writer.”
It’s a marvel to think that the famed Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner did not consider herself a writer. Her works are a staple in the classic American literary canon, taught in universities everywhere. Her musings on Black American history and culture, especially that of Black American women, were the voice of the forgotten Black American underclass, creating rich narratives entirely apart from the influence…
