Migration, Word Work, & Collectivism: on the Interdisciplinary Artist-Editorship of Toni at Random
by CONSTANCE COLLIER-MERCADO
in Spring 2025
Jillian M Rock, “theblues002,” 2025
My first thought is A Movement In Every Direction. Reference to the 2022 traveling exhibition comes early and without warning in response to Dana A. Williams' mention of “a city where a confluence of roads met” in Ohio (12). I wonder eagerly if this, Toni at Random, her expansive survey of Morrison’s nearly 20-year career as a senior editor at Random House, might navigate the breadth of her work by way of an open, imagined, or otherwise fleshy-porous border. It quickly becomes clear that what Williams has done with her recounting is in many ways place-based but above all it is collectivist and wildly artful as, of course, was Toni Morrison. The opening chapter, “We’re All We Got,” situates readers firmly in media res with regard to both the timeline of Morrison’s tenure at Random House and the context of several recurring themes throughout the book: Who exactly are the titular “we” in We're All We Got? What responsibility do they have toward the advancement of Black publishing and literature? And more importantly, what is their responsibility to each other—especially in times of conflict, scarcity, disagreement, or political upheaval?
I use they and their here, but such questions could easily be turned inward to more directly implicate a similar we, us, our wading through the same uncertainties today. This 1976 Morrison, speaking to an audience of conference attendees on the campus of Howard University, is not so far removed from those of us who descended on nearby Harrisonburg, VA in Fall 2024 to discuss the state of Black poetry and poetics at the most recent Furious Flower IV conference. It’s no coincidence that many of the same key figures, community presses, Pan-African aspirations, and institutional concerns have also shown up at Furious Flower over the years. Helpful for documenting this connection is Williams’ meticulous citation of the exact “we” sharing a panel stage with Morrison at the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers. The author does an excellent job of situating Morrison’s editorship within the cultural and political climate of the times, beyond just her personal talent. And so we get a history lesson in addition to general reflections on Morrison’s editorship—a political contextualization alongside the recounting. It is one of the major strengths of the book.
Williams’ scholarship also takes note of fleeting professional squabbles and at times more weighty disputes over what Morrison considered a need for greater “commitment,” “love [for] anybody,” and “sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation” (4, 8). But Morrison’s ability to deftly straddle the borderline of such conflicts, to the ultimate benefit of her personal and author-editor relationships, constitutes the core of a migratory practice perfected across time, place, artistic practice, as well as familial and cultural boundaries. Williams spends the next three chapters— “Finding Her Form,” “There Needs to Be a Record,” and “Escaping the Chrysalis”—revisiting the many migrations of Morrison’s college years, teaching career, and early editorship at L.W. Singer to help inform the broad aesthetic she would soon become known for. It is during these years that I begin to understand Morrison as a kind of interdisciplinary artist-editor using the model of her early travels and creative interests to make a cohesive whole of what others often saw as disparate parts.
Williams walks readers along the winding paths of Morrison’s family tree from Alabama and Georgia, with a brief stop in Kentucky during her mother's childhood, to the place of George and Ramah’s ultimate meeting and Morrison’s birth in Lorain, Ohio. The introduction of Chloe Ardelia is a tender thing. We’re told that she and her family move six times during her childhood before her parents are finally able to buy a house. Precarity is a very real part of their lives even among this migrant town of seemingly progressive steel workers. Williams holds back from mentioning the apartment lost to fire when one landlord sought to evict the family with flames. The residue of that encounter is never far from the surface though. Kentucky, too, is no doubt in the room with Morrison’s mother, Ramah, when her youngest daughter comes home from school one day to inform the family that her teachers think she’s bright enough to go to college. This child's intelligence will be encouraged, not seen as a danger. Kentucky.
Williams’ writing is superb at offering just enough detail to be intimate without slipping into voyeurism. Morrison was known for maintaining a firm distance between her work and personal life, so much so that she reserved different names for herself among them. It’s a boundary that remains intact through great care. I imagine Williams sifting through family details for inclusion in these early chapters. Would people really need to know that Morrison’s grandfather was a violinist, her father was born in Georgia, and her mother played piano and sang “as a way of probing her mind. … a form of discovery?” (15). Absolutely. We’re told that “Morrison’s move toward an art form that could accommodate all the pieces she was” extended from deep roots (12). The kind of depth that knows you might say you’re from this place, but you’re also from over there. Or, one generation removed from over there. And that ain’t but another invisible line. Another border to be crossed.
So it comes as no surprise that in the years after her departure for college at Howard University and, later, graduate school at Cornell, Morrison becomes the consummate line-stepper, changing the meaning of “form” to suit her shifting needs—noun or verb, shape or genre, career or hobby, place or pathway. By this time, her many geographic connections are stacking up too: Lorain, Ohio leads to Washington DC. A summer theatrical tour across Southern states becomes grad school in Ithaca, NY, then a two-year teaching position at Texas State University, and finally a return to Howard University as English instructor. I begin to think of Howard as Morrison’s personal borderline between North and South. It is often her center of gravity between moves, although the District of Columbia itself is about 200 miles south of the actual Mason-Dixon line.
When Morrison leaves her teaching position seven years later, I am equally eager to claim her as belonging to every place and art form she’s ever visited. Williams is more measured in her estimation that “she would not be a dancer, nor would she be an actor. . . . the thing that sustained her interest the most was word work” (21). On this subject of word work and, more broadly, form as the choice between a career versus a hobby, Morrison’s decision not to pursue full-time acting or dance is also an act of artistic self-preservation. Earlier in the text, Williams is mindful to inform readers that “at one point, Morrison was convinced she would be a dancer. … [However,] realizing the severe limitations of a young Black girl’s ability to earn a living …” she reconsiders this decision upon entering college (17). Likewise, “for a while, it seemed like performing in the theater would be the art form Morrison identified most intimately with” (18). She sticks with theater off-and-on throughout undergrad and grad school but eventually shifts her focus yet again. The inclusion of these details by Williams leaves me to wonder how much of Morrison’s ostensible departure from other artistic pursuits might really have been, not so much an abandonment, but a refusal to squeeze them into the mold of a day job.
As writers, we are often made to reassure ourselves with the knowledge that Morrison didn’t publish her first novel until she was almost 40 years old. It is even more comforting to know that, before her career as an editor took off, she was a 30-something single mom moving back home with her parents—a familiar circumstance for those of us navigating 21st-century life under the demands of capitalism. As with “side-hustle” creative cultures of today, Morrison may have felt a sense of pressure to take up one of her other talents or rush her first novel to publication in order to have some income. But she’s not of the mindset that those things are going to be what helps her make ends meet. Williams tells us: “The fact that she did not have a job was sobering, but it was far from disastrous. … she was that much closer to finding her form” (22). Instead, she practiced a different kind of interdisciplinarity, one that does eventually lead to the publication of novels, five short poems, two librettos, and two stage plays amongst other multidisciplinary productions, but begins from the singular entry point of word work.
Toni Morrison in 1970, Wikimedia Commons
Life as an editor becomes the vehicle by which she pays her bills, protects the rest of her art, and still has some creative outlet across multiple interests. This is a different approach compared to artists today who are urged to commodify our every creative inkling in favor of whatever will sell in the moment. Morrison’s interdisciplinary moves at a much slower pace and is migratory as in nomadic, rather than migration for the sake of abandonment. The nomad never truly leaves their previous location behind. Instead, they move through and among several places in a seasonal rotation that overlaps between each one. It is a communal movement rather than an individualist or consumptive one – in keeping with the kind of “motley crew [with]… a passion fueled by something other than careerism” for which Morrison’s future editorial projects like The Black Book would become widely known (74). And it’s a necessary model for present-day artists.
This model takes center stage for the first time when she edits Contemporary African Literature in 1971. A bold choice for her first project at Random House, featuring multiple authors writing across genres, cultures, countries, and an entire continent, it was also a matter of timing. Morrison migrates into a socio-political moment that is steeped in post-Integration and Civil Rights Movement disappointment, a rising Black Power sentiment, and the first waves of continental African (and Caribbean) decolonial movements. In the midst of these upheavals a group of Black students at what are today sister campuses, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and University of Wisconsin-Madison, set off a wave of occupations, solidarity actions, and general-strikes including a list of demands that draw national attention. Williams tells us that Morrison already has an idea for an African literature anthology but before pitching it to Random she first returns to the Midwest to take her cues directly from the students.
Three things are striking about this scenario: First, the fact that Morrison is invited as a guest lecturer at UW-Madison in a clear attempt to pacify an outraged student body, but instead uses the opportunity to put forth an equally groundbreaking anthology. Second, that Morrison’s recent move to New York to join Random House has ultimately become another migratory port, this time leading to contemporary African fiction by way of the Africa House Cultural Center. How are we operating in mutual exchange with our valuable cultural centers today? And third, the contrast between this late-1960’s depiction of a radical Black Midwest, compared to the usual imaginings of this region as a site of peaceful family respite that Morrison only returns to when she needs an escape. Both depictions are valid but it is this revolutionary side that isn’t often highlighted enough. That Williams situates the development of Contemporary African Literature in this geographic context (even as she makes a point to center the African narrative) is important work. It becomes easy then to connect the 1968-69 University of Wisconsin uprisings to more recent student encampments at the University of Michigan and elsewhere across the country in solidarity with Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and global anti-imperialist efforts.
Like Morrison, we should be following the lead of our young people, students especially, in ways that carry a disruptive meat on the bone. The “meat” on the bone of Morrison’s first editorial project comes when she recruits Gambian Associate Professor, Edris Makward, who was teaching Wolof on campus, to be the outward facing editor for the book. He brings on Leslie Lacy, American expat to Ghana, as co-editor and they get to work. Both have impeccable academic pedigrees to satisfy the demands of respectability but they also promote a strong decolonial agenda. While Morrison sets about a marketing campaign that will allow the anthology to migrate between high school students, college courses, readers of general adult literature, and educator-academics, Makward and Lacy foreground the idea that all parties will have to reimagine what is presupposed to be true about African literature.
Williams takes this opportunity to remind readers that Morrison’s infamous “invisible to whom?” quote is first delivered to Susan McHenry, founding editor of the Black Issues Book Review, as a comparison between the fiction of Richard Wright and Chinua Achebe who was featured in the anthology. An extended quote from Williams goes on to note that:
What the anthology made clear was that African literature, both written and oral, existed long before a colonial presence and that much of the varied literature that emerged after this presence did so on its own terms rather than in response to a white gaze.
“Africa was discovered by Africans,” Makward and Lacy wrote, making the point that Africans could write for and to themselves quite explicitly…And so the Africans speak. The book’s impulse to get on with the real discovery of some truth by allowing peoples to speak for themselves is emblematic of Morrison editorship in many ways. She and the editors made no effort to limit the texts to those written to a white audience or to those that could be easily understood in a Western context…Ideally, this approach would prompt readers to understand that there were multiple worldviews, that Western ways of thinking and being were one among many.” (37-38)
Williams also dedicates an entire chapter to Morrison’s development of The Black Book and the details included feel like a secret gift from the late artist herself. Morrison credits lead editor, M. Spike Harris, in the cover material followed by her parents on the acknowledgements page alongside South Carolina luminaries like Vertamae Grosvenor, but it is her final acknowledgement that pushes me over the edge: “Above all … our thanks to those millions of Black people who lived this life and held on.” The words seem to foreshadow her more condensed dedication to those who did not live, upon her publication of Beloved: “Sixty Million and more.”
It is interesting to note that while Contemporary African Literature covered an equally broad range of genres, it did at least stay within the realm of the literary. By comparison, The Black Book primarily expresses the Black American experience through ephemera – objects. “No one at Random House was completely clear about what the book would be … ‘like the Whole Earth Catalog but different,’ [Morrison] suggested” (73). A sign that, just as African literature could not be compared to anything written in the West, so too is African American history a uniquely singular experience. It’s hard to imagine the publishing industry of 2025 allowing such broad terms for a book today. Even with projects like Black Futures by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew out in the world. Most editors’ favorite reminder is that sprawl is real and no one book can, or should, be everything. And yet Morrison makes it look easy to do the exact opposite.
Williams makes clear that the effort was anything but. When Harris got sick and his collaborators were pulled away by distance or other projects, Morrison dropped everything to make sure the book still happened. She did this by “contacting 175 radio stations and every Black writer, celebrity, and news outlet she thought would be helpful” including the Detroit Free Press, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Don Cornelius, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paule Marshall, and others (79). Her dedication to making sure that Harris and his team still got paid and properly credited for the work they had done is also a testament to her genuine concern for their well-being beyond simply an editorial relationship. This care and willingness to work through unavoidable delays is also on display during her time editing titans like Chinweizu, Ivan Van Sertima, and Rudy Lombard among others.
Then, too, is a return to my first thought. The critical reader for A Movement In Every Direction, curated by Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan N. Dennis, encouraged viewers to “put y[our] story on the map” by way of personal reflection and engagement with a digital tool that accompanied the exhibition. When Morrison recruits Spike Harris, who “was probably the best-known and most highly regarded self-taught Black historian in New York City,” to be lead editor of the project, the mention of their many “hours [spent] in his Croes Avenue apartment in the Bronx poring over old newspapers” gives me a jolt (71-73). My grandparents lived for more than 40 years at 1710 Croes Avenue. Might they have been neighbors with Harris? The idea that Morrison may have passed through the orbit of my own people, in an elevator car or walking down the street or standing in the lobby, is a surreal thought.
Williams further details the March 4th, 1974 launch party for The Black Book at Charles’s Gallery in Harlem and my mind immediately goes to the background image on my cellphone. It’s everyone’s favorite picture of Toni Morrison – she is at a New York City disco party and she’s dancing. A quick web search reveals that the two events were only a day apart but I can’t help wondering if the New York Times photographer could have made an error in the archive—if the sheer elation on Morrison’s face is actually from her March 4th celebration with Random House instead of some anonymous event on the 5th. In the end, we may never know for sure but it is Williams who invites readers to find themselves—invited me to find myself—on the map of Morrison’s wide-ranging influence and put a pin in it. To bring myself along with the interdisciplinary artist-editor, author, mother, daughter, sister-friend, wherever her next stop may be.
Constance Collier-Mercado (e/she/her) is an experimental writer, artist, and womanist culture worker committed to Black language and collective memory. Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, her creative home resides in the space between family connections tied to Atlanta, GA; Bolivar County, MS; and Beaufort County/Gastonia, AfroCarolina[1].
Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice via an irreverent blk gender-infinite. Constance has received Fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, MacDowell, The Stay at Nearview, The Periplus Collective, The Watering Hole, Kimbilio, The Hambidge Center, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her writing has been published in the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) blog, Obsidian, Hennepin Review, Root Work Journal, The Believer, Kweli Journal, FIYAH Magazine, and elsewhere.
[1] Michelle Lanier.
