And I was full of dread at starting a fourth round with editors who confused me and who seemed themselves confused about my Black cowboys, about the heroes I envisioned. I had no question about the viability and importance of my Black cowboy heroes. I see cowboys, runaways, refugees, hauling their way west—fleeing the torrid, brutal, chattel-driven South. I heard my late agent reciting, magnificent, original, inventive, and huge. And yet, there was no book.
Maybe I wasn’t writing well enough. Always a nagging thought. Maybe the (white) editors could not perceive or believe the myth the story rode in on. Possible, too. Maybe my writing style was hard for them to perceive clearly enough to edit. Who knows?
That conversation with Miss Chloe was a bolt-blue afternoon. Like a mirror in good light. I heard resignation in my voice. Going through the motions of revising given the editorial dissonance was like spending a new day standing at a closed door.
After Morrison passed, and our conversations started to interrupt my days and my routine, her suggestion about getting a lawyer, about Bill Clinton, came back to me. I realized that she had just wanted me to unhinge myself. She did not say, “Get Clinton’s lawyer.” She did not even say, “Be like Bill.” What she said was, “You don’t need an agent to solve your book problem. Get yourself a lawyer and keep moving.”
When Morrison said this to me, I didn’t really hear her. I couldn’t see myself in a Clinton sentence, and so I dismissed myself from the context. When her voice came to me, when this suggestion was a memory, that was when I wept. All my grief for Miss Chloe had been encased in gratitude, and so, I had not cried. I was hardly even sad. I was glad that I’d gotten to know her and to experience her amazing mind. But the recollection of yet another piece of advice not taken . . .
This was when I had a kind of Bluest Eye moment intellectually. Her recommendation, her example, involved Bill Clinton, a famous and erudite former president, a white male. Almost instinctively, I separated from the topic at hand. I viewed Morrison as making a mistake—to suggest that I could do what Clinton had done. It’s crazy. The view from here suggests that I had a problem. That I had dealt with my manuscript as if I needed to take orders. I didn’t.
I’m not cooking. I’m not charging by the plate. I’m trying to tell a story, best I can.
I knew now what to do: exactly what she’d said. Instead of hanging round where the language I spoke isn’t spoken, move to a different crowd, where the lingua franca is shared.
In the wee hours, I acknowledged that I might, maybe, get a chance with my cowboys. For the record, I have never in my life stopped writing. I started writing once I understood the sentence, and I have not stopped since. Writing and publishing differ in agenda and in scope. Both are capable of celebration and of battery and of all in between. At its core, writing is an individual contract, requiring intellect, commitment, and heart (or confidence). According to Morrison, writing mostly requires focus and control. Publishing is big, public facing, an institution, a place of intrigue, often a series of machine steps, a lumbering mystery to the uninitiated. Publishing got the better of me.
Morrison seemed to think I should be able to sort through the publishing thicket. That I should be bold enough to come barreling in with my book. To my mind, that would have been miraculously, or magically, or with some measure of her ease. Over time, I’ve come to think she wanted me to be determined, to refuse to give up or be held up. She wanted me to move confidently, to match my confidence to my competence. She wanted me to be more aggressive, more demanding. She wanted me to shake whatever the hell was the tree.
If I did not believe in my writing, in my intelligence, in my work, then what did I think she was doing with me?
When Miss Chloe screamed at me through the speakerphone, I wanted to dissolve. But the truth was, I could not negotiate the publishing business. She wouldn’t help, and I couldn’t figure what else to do but do the book over, per these (sequential) editors’ advice. The many do-overs had gotten old and pointless. I explained to her that I wasn’t sure what would happen with the book.
Her frustration and her raised voice led to our long recess. I scarcely admitted to myself or anyone else that my failures had provoked me to put our friendship on pause. I had no new monographs to bring to the table. My scattered pages and unfinished books were as present and as weightless as air. Only finished work ages well. I could not keep presenting myself without new work. That was my takeaway. Toni Morrison and I had two and a half spats in seventeen years. This was one of them.
