And even African American writers (mostly men, but not all) made clear that, except as background, prepubescent black girls were unable to hold their interest or stimulate their curiosity. Writers write what they like and what interests them.

No one it seemed missed their presence center stage and no one it seemed took them seriously except me. When they did appear, they were jokes or instances of pity - pity without understanding. Of all the characters chosen for artistic examination, with empathy or contempt, vulnerable young black girls were profoundly absent. For example, in 1963, my first novel, The Bluest Eye, was a consequence of being overcome by the wholesale dismissal of a certain part of the population (to which I belonged) in history texts and literature.

It is in the interstices of recorded history that I frequently find the 'nothing' or the 'not enough' or the 'indistinct' or 'incomplete' or 'discredited' or 'buried' information important to me. Yet in spite of my wariness, my skepticism, there is a dependence, solid and continuous, that I have on history, partly for the data available to me there, but mostly for precisely those gaps, those erasures, that censure. While I maintain a cool eye while reading historical texts, it is an eye no cooler than the one historians maintain, and ought to maintain when reading fiction. Not just in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain’s unconscionable humiliation of a grown man at the hands of children there was no respite in those years even in the encyclopedia or in history texts. And if I or someone representative of myself ever were mentioned in fiction, it was usually something I wished I had skipped. It was a caution based on my early years as a student, during which time I was keenly aware of erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to me - silences that I took for censure. A relationship that was wary, alert, but ready to be persuaded away from doubt. As it had been since the beginning of my writing years, I was drawn to it by my complicated relationship with history.

Toni morrison on beloved