Introduction: “there are no two Angela Davises”

A reader’s report on Angela Davis’s autobiography landed on Toni Morrison’s desk in early 1974. Morrison was working full-time as an editor at Random House. Her works-in-progress included The Black Book (an anthology of Black writing, material culture, and art) and a collection of short stories by Henry Dumas (a Harlem-based writer who had been killed by a policeman in the 125th Street subway station in 1968).Footnote ¹ Davis’s autobiography was a higher-profile project for Morrison, and a potentially lucrative venture for Bernard Geis Associates, Random House, and Bantam Books – the trio of firms that planned to publish it that year. But the reader’s report (compiled for Bantam) was not encouraging. According to the anonymous reviewer, the manuscript failed to illuminate either Davis’s personality or her politics. As a person, Davis came across as invulnerable to the point of seeming inhuman, the reader complained; at the same time, the sources of her political convictions remained unclear. The reader included a “list of questions” that they thought were unanswered in the text: why did Marxism appeal to Davis? How did she reconcile her communism with her commitments to Black people? How did she bridge the differences between herself and the masses? The list went on. And on.Footnote ²

In four full pages of tight typescript, addressed to Jim Silberman, an editor in chief at Random House, Morrison slammed this reader’s report. She found their suggestion that Davis be made to seem more “human” particularly infuriating. “[H]umanness, is a word white people use when they want to alter an ‘uppity’ or ‘fearless’ nigger – (whether the white person is black doesn’t matter),” she wrote. She was also incredulous about the reviewer’s demand for more political content. Of course, she could encourage Davis to write “a history of her ideas,” along with “a list of the scholars and books that impressed her,” but the resulting manuscript would not meet the publishers’ expectations for a readable – and sellable – book. “Does Bantam really want answers to those questions?” Morrison asked.Footnote ³ The answer, she knew, was “No.”

From Morrison’s perspective, the anonymous reader had failed to grasp the essence of Davis’s life story. By asking for both more personal insights and more ideological content, the reader suggested that the activist’s personality and politics were distinct entities. Morrison demurred. In clipped sentences that underscored the strength of her own feelings, she wrote,

Morrison’s goal was to show how the personal and the political aligned in Davis’s still-short life story (the author had only just turned thirty). To that end, she engaged in a process that I call emotional editing, which I define as the act of making changes to a text in order to convey emotions and elicit them in readers.

My approach, while original, builds on prior academic contributions. Literary scholars have long been interested in the ways in which authors use language to communicate emotions to readers. But most of these scholars focus on finished texts, or briefly refer to archival sources without making meticulous comparisons across various manuscript drafts.Footnote ⁵ By contrast, since the 1970s, scholars of critique génétique (genetic criticism) have analyzed avant-textes (pre-texts) such as handwritten notes, revised drafts, and typescripts. But, influenced by post-structuralism, these scholars argue that it is impossible to glean a writer’s intentions – emotional or otherwise – from any draft, whether finished or unfinished.Footnote ⁶ My approach to emotional editing combines literary scholars’ interest in emotions and authorial intent with the kind of detailed analysis of manuscript drafts favored by practitioners of critique génétique. It is also indebted to interdisciplinary scholarship on literature, empathy, and human rights. In 2001, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that, by inducing empathy, literature could expand readers’ moral awareness, with positive effects on social justice.Footnote ⁷ Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights offered a historical case study of this phenomenon. Epistolary novels in late eighteenth-century France prompted readers to identify with characters’ struggles, according to Hunt, who argued that human rights “grew out of the seedbed sowed by these feelings.”Footnote ⁸ Scholars of cognitive literary studies, on the other hand, have tended to be more cautious in their claims.Footnote ⁹ For instance, Suzanne Keen has emphasized that readers will react variously to a text, making it impossible to assume an empathetic, let alone politically proactive, response.Footnote ¹⁰ Keen maintains, however, that it is incontrovertible that cultural producers often aim to influence their audiences’ emotions (and ensuing social commitments) through techniques of “strategic narrative empathy.”Footnote ¹¹ Following Keen’s reflections, my goal in this article is to focus on the production rather than the reception of Davis’s autobiography by analyzing Morrison’s motives for and techniques of emotional editing, while suggesting that Morrison anticipated a range of possible reader responses.

The research presented here also intersects with scholarship on Black life writing that has examined collaborative relationships between author–protagonists, cowriters, and editors. In a 1986 study of early slave narratives, William Andrews observed that “the transcribing, editorial, and prefacing practices of white litterateurs” hemmed in Black protagonists’ voices.Footnote ¹² Rachel Blumenthal subsequently suggested that white abolitionists pressured Frederick Douglass to adapt his autobiography to fit their political purposes.Footnote ¹³ During the civil rights and Black Power eras, celebrity activists had more space to shape their own life stories. Yet, as shown by Mark Sanders, Malcolm X’s amanuensis Alex Haley still controlled much of the narrative in X’s autobiography, resulting in a text that conformed to conservative American “myths of the self-made man.”Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast to most of the existing research, which has shown how editors or coauthors misrepresented or diluted the politics of author–protagonists, this article examines a collaboration in which an editor aimed to communicate more effectively, and amplify the impact of the politics of the author.

Prior to 2025, scholarship on Morrison’s work as an editor was sparse.Footnote ¹⁵ This has changed with the publication of Dana A. Williams’s Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, a narrative history aimed at a general audience. Informed by archival research and personal interviews with Morrison, as well as many of the authors whom she edited, Williams highlights Morrison’s combined business acumen and literary skills. The Black Arts and Black Power movements of the mid- to late 1960s generated increased demand for fiction and nonfiction works by Black Americans. Williams charts Morrison’s efforts to take advantage of these market opportunities without compromising the voices of the writers whom she edited. The research presented here is compatible with but distinct from Williams’s book, which neither employs the methodology of literary archaeology that I use in this article, nor argues that Morrison aimed to garner readers’ support for Davis’s radical politics through the use of emotional edits.Footnote ¹⁶

Emotions, emotional edits, and literary archaeology

Before I examine the substance of and motivations for Morrison’s editorial interventions, some definitions are required. I define emotions as culturally contingent manifestations of combined changes to a person’s physical and cognitive state, labelled approximately for ease of communication. This necessarily wordy definition incorporates the central proposition of historians of emotions, which is that there are no such thing as universal emotions, common to all people across space and time.Footnote ¹⁷ What a working-class white American man called anger in the 1930s is not the same emotion as what a middle-class Black American woman calls anger today. This definition also reflects the findings of neuroscientists who have examined the interactions between emotions and cognition. In contrast to earlier ideas of emotions as passions that were antithetical to reason, recent research shows how emotions are constructed in culturally informed brains.Footnote ¹⁸

As the act of changing a text to convey emotions and elicit them in readers, emotional editing can entail the addition of labels (such as anger), but it need not be that explicit. It can also consist of references to embodied experiences (a speeding heartbeat to convey fear, for example). Perhaps counterintuitively, emotional editing may also result in the deletion of labels (such as anger or fear). There is a reason why “show, don’t tell” is a foundational principle in creative writing. The inclusion of a sensory detail (such as a cold room) or a simile (for instance, “like a prison”) can rouse readers’ emotions more effectively than the simple statement, “I was lonely.” This is because evocative details prompt readers to draw on their own emotional memories and associations, thereby stimulating links between thinking and feeling.

To identify emotional edits to Davis’s autobiography, and to offer insights into Morrison’s motivations, I used a form of literary archaeology. There are multiple versions of the book manuscript in archives across the northeast United States. I conceived of the published version as the top layer of a site. Just below the published version lay the manuscript setting copy – the final version prior to publication. Beneath this were earlier drafts – sometimes whole sections, sometimes small excerpts (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Layers of the autobiography.

Given the concrete nature of manuscript drafts, this form of literary archaeology is less imaginative than the version used by a number of feminist writers, starting with Morrison herself. In the late 1980s, Morrison described the process by which she re-created the interior lives of enslaved people in her novels as “a kind of literary archeology.” By combining “some information” with “a little bit of guesswork,” she would figuratively “journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.”Footnote ¹⁹ Scholars working in this tradition have used a combination of evidence and informed speculation to recover under-documented pasts of marginalized people.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, much of the work of identifying edits to Davis’s autobiography consisted of a mechanical process of comparing various drafts to one another, which methodologically lies closer to critique génétique.

However, not all – or even the bulk – of Morrison’s impact on Davis’s autobiography was recorded. As noted by archivists at Columbia University, when she worked as an editor, Morrison typically gave authors verbal, as opposed to written, feedback.Footnote ²¹ This was certainly the case in her collaboration with Davis. The two women developed a friendship as they worked together. They discussed the writing process at Morrison’s home in the Hudson valley (where Davis lived for a spell in 1973), on car journeys in and out of New York City, and on a month-long writing retreat in the Virgin Islands.Footnote ²² There are no real-time records of these conversations. But there are fragments of evidence in the archives that point to the ways in which Morrison influenced Davis’s writing. In addition, there are the two women’s later-in-life reminiscences of their work process. Most date from the 2010s. They are tinged with nostalgia. But they still offer insights into how Morrison influenced the content and style of the autobiography.

A methodology based on informed speculation was also necessary to discern Morrison’s editorial intentions. Evidence in this regard ranged from the specific to the contextual (Figure 2). The most specific evidence was also the most succinct, in the form of handwritten comments in the margins of manuscript drafts, both in Morrison’s exuberant cursive and in Davis’s carefully controlled script. At the broadest end of the scale, my understanding of the intended impact of Morrison’s edits drew on narrative conventions, particularly within the Black autobiographical tradition.

Figure 2.

Contextual sources.

Combining empirical evidence of changes to the manuscript drafts with more circumstantial information enabled me to re-create a fuller picture of the content of, and motivations behind, edits to the autobiography. Of course, not all of the revisions to the text altered its emotional timbre: sometimes Morrison suggested a deletion to avoid repetition or preempt libel; other times she added a few words to clarify a statement. But it is my contention that a remarkable amount of Morrison’s influence did constitute emotional editing. In the second half of this article, I discuss both the substance of some of these edits and their intended effects. Before that, I offer insights into the respective positions of the publishers, author, and editor, which help to explain why Morrison’s edits were so frequently emotional ones.

No love triangle: the publishers, author, and editor

Commercial imperatives naturally drove Random House, Bantam Books, and Bernard Geis Associates. For motives of brevity, and because Bernard Geis is such a remarkable embodiment of the commercial world of publishing, I focus here on his interest in, and demands upon, Davis. Geis’s firm specialized in the acquisition of “literary trash,” such as Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 best seller Valley of the Dolls – a thinly disguised roman-à-clef about sex, drugs, and self-destruction on Broadway.Footnote ²³ By the late 1960s, investors had grown leery of Geis’s business model and his firm teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.Footnote ²⁴ A book deal with Davis offered financial redemption and the publisher was determined to tap the activist’s life story for all that it was worth. On the day he announced the book deal with Davis, Geis revealed that his firm had also reached a settlement with its creditors.Footnote ²⁵

Geis’s proposal for the book, which he circulated among various publishing houses in the fall of 1972, was sensationalist, with a smattering of salaciousness. “Angela Davis, at 28, is already a name in contemporary history, an international symbol, and a legend,” Geis (not incorrectly) observed, before noting that she had recently been the “Number One ‘criminal’ on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list.” Geis suggested that the autobiography would “penetrate” Davis’s “abiding sense of privacy,” offering a “true account” of her “unique and tender love story” with George Jackson. He even quoted a prosecutor at Davis’s trial, who had characterized that relationship as driven by a “passion that knew no bounds.”Footnote ²⁶ Geis transparently communicated his intention to amplify prurient content in the activist’s life story to boost sales. He soon secured printing and distribution agreements with Random House and Bantam Books (the same firms that had distributed Valley of the Dolls in hardcover and paperback respectively).

Geis’s commercialism clashed with Davis’s politics. As a Marxist, she well understood the logic of capitalism. The signing deal – said to be in the “high six figure(s)” – freed her to do the unpaid political work she cared about; and mass marketing, of the kind Geis specialized in, would ensure broad dissemination of her life story.Footnote ²⁷ But that would all be worthless, from Davis’s perspective, if Geis’s vision for the autobiography prevailed. Speaking at a book launch in Brazil almost fifty years later, Davis recalled how unnamed publishers had wanted her to write “um – well you can imagine – yeah, all about your sexual exp – you know, you know what I’m talking about.”Footnote ²⁸ Sex was not, and nor would it ever be, part of the story that Davis wanted to tell. Perhaps even more fundamentally, Geis’s focus on Davis as a prime mover of history contradicted her own belief that organized masses, not individuals, effected change.Footnote ²⁹ Tensions emerged early in the activist’s relationship with the publisher, and their collaboration went downhill from there. After an initial agreement, Davis stalled for six months. In language that reflected the prevailing sexism and commercialism of the publishing industry, Geis ruminated that it was time to “sit the young lady down … and wind up this entire transaction.”Footnote ³⁰ He subsequently savaged Davis’s first manuscript draft, presumably because it lacked the confessional qualities that he believed the public craved.Footnote ³¹

Luckily for both Geis and Davis, there was an editor at Random House who knew how to reconcile the publishers’ demands for market impact with the author’s concern for political effect. In the spring of 1972, some six months before Davis reached a preliminary agreement with Geis, Morrison had written to Bettina Aptheker, Davis’s friend and comrade in the American Communist Party (CPUSA). As an early articulation of how Morrison envisaged a book by Davis, this letter is revealing:

It is easy to overlook this letter for two reasons. First, there is nothing in the archives to suggest that Davis responded directly – or at all – to the proposal. Second, the eventual book was not a group of essays, as Morrison suggested, but an autobiography, which facially resembled the one outlined by Geis. Yet the letter is important because it reveals Morrison’s commitment to delivering a simultaneously personal and political book. Morrison was always intentional with language. In this letter, she balanced “subjective” and “personal” with “effective” and “powerful,” conveying that Davis’s selfhood and politics were mutually reinforcing. Drawing a direct comparison between the “author” and the “book,” Morrison merged Davis, the person, with Davis, the thinker and activist. Not unlike Geis, Morrison recognized that Davis was both an individual and a symbol. But whereas the publisher communicated his intention to exploit Davis’s notoriety to further profits, the editor characterized the book as a platform for Davis to broadcast her critiques of American politics and (in)justice. Promising that Davis’s “non-book” would have meaningful effects on those who read it, Morrison suggested a legacy that would outlive the author and even the book itself. The genre of the proposed book soon shifted from essays to an autobiography. But the editor’s determination to produce a personal work with far-reaching political impact remained.

Morrison’s political convictions, editorial experience, and own writing practice qualified her to edit Davis effectively. Morrison was not a communist. But her views on social and racial justice were often compatible with nondogmatic forms of Marxism; in her fiction writing, for instance, she gave Black Americans, who were marginalized by racialized capitalist structures, an agency – and a history – of their own.Footnote ³³ But more relevant than whether Morrison agreed with Davis on points of doctrine was the editor’s commitment to rendering faithfully the language, thoughts, and feelings of Black writers. Morrison viewed her job as her contribution to civil rights and Black Power: by working at publishing houses, she could make a “record” of “the voices” and “ideas” of Black Americans; editing, as she frequently said, was her equivalent to “marching.”Footnote ³⁴ She had applied for her first editorial job with a textbook publisher in upstate New York in 1965 because it offered the opportunity to expand the representation of Black Americans in school curricula, but soon became frustrated with the political and practical limitations of this job.Footnote ³⁵ At Random House from 1968, and as a senior editor for trade publishing from 1970, she focussed primarily on works by Black authors. To Morrison, all Black writing was political (whether the author in question was an activist or a poet) because all Black writers engaged with questions of power, representation, and voice.Footnote ³⁶ Her challenge as an editor was to help her writers reach as broad an audience as possible without adapting their texts for a “White gaze.”Footnote ³⁷

In addition to her political interests in editing Davis, Morrison had practical ones. She understood that poetry and short-story collections by “unknown” Black authors, such as Henry Dumas, did not sell in large numbers, and that readers would “only receive one or two” Black women writers at a time.Footnote ³⁸ Even then, the market was unpredictable. In the early 1970s, Morrison edited and promoted the sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud’s first poetry collection, From Memphis & Peking. She was confident that Chase-Riboud’s renown as a visual artist would parlay into popularity as a poet, and convinced Random House to issue a first print run of five thousand copies. The book did not sell. As suggested by Williams, Morrison could afford losses on some books if she made profits on others. Davis’s autobiography, with an initial print run of twenty-five thousand copies, could insulate Morrison’s entire list.Footnote ³⁹

Morrison’s burgeoning career as a novelist informed her work as an editor. Her first two books, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) made Black women and girls – the most under- and misrepresented people in the United States – fully realized protagonists. Both books were literary equivalents to micro-history: through highly specified characters and localities, Morrison investigated wider truths about race, gender, and class. The “Black is Beautiful” movement of the mid-1960s prompted her to write The Bluest Eye, as an exploration of how racism refracted through the brains and bodies of Black girls.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sula was, among other things, a retort to stereotypes of absent Black men and dominant Black women that ran through Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s influential 1965 “Report on the Negro Family.”Footnote ⁴¹ Without using the words internalized racism or Black feminism, Morrison made her books about those things. In this way, she engaged in a form of personal politics that was meaningful to Black women.

Noteworthy too is the extent to which Morrison used emotions in her novels to elicit responses from her readers. The feelings of Claudia (the main narrator of The Bluest Eye) were more mundane than those of Pecola Breedlove, whose self-loathing manifested in a desire for blue eyes and a descent into madness. Remembering her childhood, Claudia recalled how she hated Shirley Temple and envied her light-skinned classmate Maureen. By making Claudia’s emotions quotidian, Morrison invited readers to empathize with them. She designed simple episodes to linger in readers’ minds. Claudia remembered searching for Pecola at the home of a White family where Pecola’s mother worked as a maid. Pecola accidentally knocked over a blueberry pie, still warm from the oven. Her mother hit her, before comforting a little white girl dressed in pink, who called Mrs. Breedlove “Polly.” Through the simple story, Morrison conveyed the Black girls’ shame, as hot as the juice from the “blackish blueberries” running down Pecola’s legs. It was the shame of being caught red-handed, the shame of breaking something beautiful. It was also the shame of witnessing a small white girl have power over a grown Black woman.Footnote ⁴² In Sula, Morrison used metaphors and similes to convey the strength of the bond between the two principal female protagonists. When Sula returned after years of absence it felt to Nel like “getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed.”Footnote ⁴³ Morrison designed the simile to prompt readers to ask and answer questions. What would it feel like to see out of one eye only? What would it feel like suddenly to see clearly once more? Would it feel like joy, or relief? Would it feel like something that had been missing was finally restored? Would it make the ordinary feel extraordinary?

Morrison called this technique “participatory reading”:

Morrison did not think of “participatory reading” as unique to her own novels. She believed it was what all literature was “supposed to do.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, her idea was similar to the “‘iceberg’ theory of omission,” which Ernest Hemingway designed to “make people feel something more than they understood.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The difference, then, between Morrison’s approach and that of other editors who instructed authors to “show, don’t tell,” was one of degree and cultural conviction: she was a particularly active editor, attentive to details and unafraid to intervene in texts, and she drew her own ideas of participatory reading from Black traditions, including jazz music and religious sermons, which invited congregants “to stand up and to weep and to cry.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It was this intentional and culturally specific commitment to participatory reading which Morrison brought into her collaboration with Davis, to encourage the activist’s readers to “feel something profoundly” for themselves.Footnote ⁴⁷

Inhabiting memories: the editor as mentor

Before she took her editor’s crayon to any manuscript drafts, Morrison changed the way Davis wrote. Davis came to the project as a trained philosopher and critical theorist, with no practice, and seemingly little interest, in writing about herself. As evidenced by her essays in If They Come in the Morning, a 1971 collection of prison literature, Davis’s prose was dense and learned. “Despite a long history of exalted appeals to man’s inherent right of resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how to relate in practice to unjust, immoral laws and the oppressive social order from which they emanate,” she wrote in the first sentence of chapter 1.Footnote ⁴⁸ Davis initially planned to write her autobiography “without really dwelling on [her] memories or reimagining them,” as if to dispense of the personal dimensions of her life story as quickly as possible. As she later recalled, it was Morrison who encouraged her to write in a different way – to “inhabit” her memories and to parse them out, piece by piece.Footnote ⁴⁹

Early on in their collaboration, Morrison requested that Davis do a writing exercise, the archives suggest. The activist wrote by hand about a distinct childhood memory, focussing on simple things: what happened, what she did, how she felt. It was a Saturday morning; she was six or maybe seven years old. She was going to her dance class with her younger brother Benny, who was in her care. They walked along a main street in their neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama to reach the community center where the classes were held. Benny ran out into the street, coming inches away from a bus, which screeched to a halt. She knew that he had almost been killed. Fear overcame her. She wrote about what happened next on college-ruled paper, in fountain pen (Figure 3).Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 3.

The writing exercise. Undated handwritten paragraph, Folder 8 (file 1 of 2), Box 101, C1491, Toni Morrison Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Not unlike Claudia’s fictionalized memory of a fallen blueberry pie in The Bluest Eye, Davis’s real memory was drenched with emotions and their embodied expression: fear, embarrassment, shame, relief; urinating, shaking, hiding, an embrace.

This exercise unlocked Davis’s ability to write unguardedly about herself. Gradually, she pieced her early years back together through several dozen vignettes that, combined, made up “Rocks” (the chapter of the autobiography devoted to her childhood and adolescence). Her memories came in shards: bombs exploding in the neighborhood; guns that her parents hid in their home; a Black woman who came to the door crying for help; shacks that served as a school for Davis and her friends. At each juncture, Morrison encouraged Davis to write about how she had felt. She had been afraid of the violence in her neighborhood. She had been sad that her classmates did not have enough to eat. She had been hurt when her friends fought each other at school. Almost always she had been confused, as she experienced structural racism with the mind and body of a child, lacking the political knowledge and analytical tools to make sense of it.Footnote ⁵¹

This seemingly unmediated style of writing invited readers to make sense of the experiences that Davis, as a child, was yet fully to understand. For instance, the author described the anger she felt as a five-year-old when her teenage cousin cajoled her to the back of a Birmingham bus. “I was angry not only because I had been tricked and lost my seat, but because I didn’t know who or what to blame,” she wrote.Footnote ⁵² Readers, by contrast, knew “who” and “what to blame,” and could connect the child’s anger to the system of segregation in the South. Similarly, as it was framed in the final version of the autobiography, readers could appreciate the political dimensions of Davis’s memory from the dance class. In a preceding passage, the author recalled her discomfort with her own appearance as a child. Her friends would taunt her: “Just because you’re bright and got good hair, you think you can act like you’re white.”Footnote ⁵³ Much as Morrison had written about the self-hatred of young Black girls in The Bluest Eye, Davis pointed to her own self-loathing as a girl with “light skin instead of dark, and wavy instead of kinky hair.” Self-conscious about the “clumsiness” of her body, she “always tried to find a place to hide in one of the back rows” in her Saturday dance class.Footnote ⁵⁴ This framing enabled readers to understand that when the young girl wet herself, she felt as though she had the wrong body and feared that she was not among friends. Readers could reflect on a discrete memory of humiliation – as searing as the warm urine that ran down Davis’s legs – as evidence of how segregation destroyed the self-esteem of children and impeded solidarity among Black Americans. Engaging readers as participants in the text, Morrison encouraged them to think about Davis’s emotions and give them political meaning.

Morrison knew that not all readers would derive the same meaning from the emotions that Davis described. Whether they grew up in the northern or the southern United States (or in many other countries, for that matter), many readers of color would have had similar experiences to those of Davis as a child, subjected to cruelties while protected by adults in their lives from understanding the full scope and structure of racism. Shared memories would enable readers of color to empathize with Davis. Given white readers’ lived experiences, they might be less likely to empathize with Davis, and perhaps more likely to sympathize with (or pity) her. Morrison’s own views on enabling such feelings in white readers were complicated. As indicated by her sharp rebuttal of the Bantam reviewer in 1974, the editor had no interest in moderating representations of Davis’s “fierce” personality to indulge white sensibilities.Footnote ⁵⁵ But she was interested in opening all readers’ minds to Black Americans’ unvarnished realities. Davis’s childhood memories would have helped white readers to appreciate her as a full person, with a painful past, and not an impenetrable personification of radical Black liberation – a figure that even in the minds of very progressive whites was informed by highly racialized conceptions of Black women as superhumanly strong.Footnote ⁵⁶ Black empathy and white sympathy had different wellsprings, but each had potential political value. And both would have helped readers to understand why Davis would eventually turn to communism for explanations of, and responses to, structural racism.

Dramatizing the moment: the editor as writer

One of Davis’s main goals in writing her autobiography was to persuade all her readers, and especially readers of color, that communism offered the best solutions to racism and inequality. This was no simple task, at least vis-à-vis American readers. Communism was not popular in the United States in the early 1970s. Even New Leftists who embraced Mao, Che, and Ho Chi Minh as symbols of radical insurgency distanced themselves from the CPUSA due to its perceived obedience to Moscow. Davis faced particular challenges in convincing Black readers that communism offered appropriate responses to racism. Leaders within mainline civil rights organizations rejected communism for both strategic and ideological reasons and, with a few key exceptions, most Black radicals agreed with Stokely Carmichael’s eventual assessment that it was “not an ideology suited for black people, period.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In early manuscript drafts, Davis struggled to write about communism in a way that would convince readers of its relevance to their everyday lives. In the final pages of “Rocks,” she described a mounting feeling of claustrophobia in Birmingham during her teenage years. Frustrated by the apolitical attitude of the city’s small Black middle class, she accepted a scholarship to attend Elizabeth Irwin, a progressive high school in New York. There, she first read The Communist Manifesto.Footnote ⁵⁸ Davis alternated between long quotations from the Manifesto and analysis of its principal points. She had been “particularly impressed” by Marx’s argument that a revolt of the “‘lowest stratum’” would dislodge “the whole super-incumbent strata of official society,” she wrote – a reflection that certainly gave readers a window into her adolescent precocity but offered them little insight into what Marxism should mean for them. Davis insisted that “the emancipation of the proletariat” would create a “foundation … for the emancipation of all oppressed groups in society” – Black Americans included.Footnote ⁵⁹ For fans of theory, this version of the manuscript had much to recommend it. But as a piece of political propaganda aimed at a mass audience, it faltered.

Morrison worked to balance out the theory-laden text by taking away some of Davis’s disquisitions and adding two sentences that she wrote herself.Footnote ⁶⁰ In a note to the author, the editor recognized that Davis’s first encounter with Marx was a “key event,” which needed “to be made stronger” for the reader, and proposed “something to dramatize the impact of the Manifesto” on the teenage protagonist (Figure 4).Footnote ⁶¹ At a crucial point in Davis’s life story – laden with political and ideological significance, yet challenging to convey to most readers – Morrison took the reins as a coauthor of the autobiography. The sentences that she inserted created much stronger connections between politics and emotions than Davis had produced in earlier drafts of the text.Footnote ⁶²

Figure 4.

From editor to writer. Undated handwritten minutes from a meeting, Folder 3, Box 1268, Random House Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

The first sentence that Morrison added was short and deceptively simple (Figure 5).Footnote ⁶³ With a simile that resembled one she had used in Sula, she compared the Manifesto to a skilled doctor who had removed a cataract from a patient’s eye. This was an easy image to relate to. Many shortsighted people know the experience of putting on glasses for the first time – the wonder of seeing individual leaves on trees, bricks on buildings, and stars in the night sky. Many people also know what it feels like to dream of being blind or visually impaired – the panic, disorientation, and sense of having no control, as well as the relief that comes with waking from that dream. Morrison conveyed that reading Marx evoked those feelings of wonder and relief in Davis.

Figure 5.

Morrison’s words. Angela Davis: An Autobiography, manuscript setting copy, 1977, MC 940, 28.5–28.12, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, marked as 240, 176.

The second sentence that Morrison added was long, and far more complex (Figure 5). Morrison had already trained Davis to write about her childhood memories in “Rocks.” In the second sentence, she returned to those memories: “the roar of explosives, the hidden guns, the weeping Black woman … the children without lunches, the social games of the Black middle class, Shack I/Shack II, the back of the bus.”Footnote ⁶⁴ By summoning once more those fragments of memory, Morrison reminded readers of the various feelings that Davis had experienced as a child: the fear, sadness, and anger, as well as her near constant state of confusion. Then, even in the same sentence, Morrison explained how, thanks to Marxism, everything that had once been confusing “fell into place.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Morrison showed how The Communist Manifesto made a coherent picture out of the shards of Davis’s childhood memories, giving seemingly arbitrary injuries a structure, and an explanation. This second sentence not only reminded readers of the emotions that Davis had experienced as a child. It also had the potential to remind them of anything they had felt when reading about Davis’s childhood. The editorial intervention was deft. Morrison worked to carry over readers’ empathy and sympathy (readily generated toward Davis as a child confronting the racial injustice of the Jim Crow South) to her membership of the CPUSA – a part of her life story that garnered no automatic understanding from most readers.

It is, of course, far from clear how many readers were persuaded, upon reading the final autobiography, that communism was the best solution to racism, economic inequality, and social injustice in – and beyond – the United States. Morrison understood that readers were simultaneously bound and segmented by race, gender, and class, and that various groups would not respond to the same text in a similar way. For instance, she based her only published short story “Recitatif” (1983) around the conceit that socially embedded codes entailed opposite meanings for Black and white readers.Footnote ⁶⁶ As the editor of Davis’s autobiography, Morrison similarly aimed to reach various communities of readers differently, if not to convert them to communism, then at least to give the author–protagonist’s politics a fighting chance.

“Clear enuf”: enabling participatory emotions

Whereas Morrison thought Davis’s initial drafts on communism were insufficiently emotional to impact readers fully, she thought that her early writing about law enforcement and criminal justice was oversaturated with anger. Davis expressed outrage over violent policing, prejudicial courts, and punishing prison systems. A passage in which she described the 1968 murder of Black teenager Gregory Clark at a traffic stop in Los Angeles was typical. As a member of a local chapter of SNCC, Davis had helped to produce a “WANTED” poster featuring a photograph of Warren Carleson, the policeman who had killed Clark. “If we had been consciously seeking a picture of a typical ‘racist’ pig, we couldn’t have made a better choice,” she wrote, before adding that “Carleson’s racism, his sadism, his cowardice was fully revealed in his face.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Davis’s damning and insistent assessment of the policeman was in line with the tone of her early manuscript, which, by Morrison’s estimation, conveyed the activist’s “visceral … loathing” of the police.Footnote ⁶⁸

A comparison of drafts shows that Morrison frequently encouraged Davis to remove expressions of anger toward law enforcement and the state. She confirmed this in her February 1974 letter to Random House editor in chief Silberman.Footnote ⁶⁹ One interpretation of these edits would be that Morrison aimed to make Davis’s ideas and persona more palatable to some, presumably white, readers. But this interpretation runs counter to Morrison’s political and literary convictions. As evidenced by her determination to publish the poetry and short stories of Henry Dumas, the writer killed by New York City transit police in 1968, Morrison was keenly aware of the damage wrought by police brutality on Black culture and lives. And as expressed in her 1972 letter to Aptheker, she shared Davis’s view that, for Black people in the United States, the word “justice” belonged in quotation marks.Footnote ⁷⁰ Morrison also frequently expressed dismay that many, otherwise excellent, Black writers had bowed to pressures to adapt their texts for a “White gaze.”Footnote ⁷¹ For instance, she said that when she read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative she could “feel the anger that he erase[d]”; the Black abolitionist’s autobiography, she thought, was weaker as a result.Footnote ⁷²

Morrison’s intention was not to dilute Davis’s rage, but to help readers to foster anger of their own. The editor’s letter to the editor in chief contained a crucial quantifier: she had worked to expunge “much” of Davis’s “visceral reaction” toward the police, but not all of it.Footnote ⁷³ Sometimes Morrison accompanied a vigorous strikethrough of a sentence or phrase in Davis’s draft with a note in the margins, such as “clear enuf [sp.]” or “cut enuf above.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For instance, in the manuscript setting copy, Davis described how prison guards in California had bound her hands behind her back and “chained” another Black woman and a Chicana woman to each other during an emergency evacuation of the jail. Meanwhile, they had left the only white female prisoner unbound, “both hands free.” Morrison drew her green crayon across the author’s ensuing reflection that “[t]here could not have been a more telling demonstration of the jailors’ unrestrained racism.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Morrison’s goal was not to excise Davis’s emotions, but rather to create “holes and spaces” that would prompt readers to ask and answer questions of their own.Footnote ⁷⁶ What kind of jailers would do such a thing? What kind of state would allow, or even encourage, this practice? How would one woman of color, chained to another woman of color, feel? And what might a white reader feel, knowing that wherever she found herself in the world, she would always be that bit more free?

Her advice to Davis regarding her description of Warren Carleson fit in with this pattern. She let the phrase “‘racist’ pig” stand, but encouraged the author to delete her assertion that the policeman’s “racism, his sadism, his cowardice” were fully revealed in his face (Figure 6).Footnote ⁷⁷ The final text invited readers to focus first on the facts of the case. In February 1968, eighteen-year-old Gregory Clark and his friend drove a new Ford Mustang on Washington Boulevard. They drank from soda cans wrapped in paper bags. Carleson pulled them over. He told the teenagers they did not “fit” their car. He accused them of hiding alcohol in their paper bags. The policeman ordered the two young men out of the car. Perhaps there was a scuffle. Carleson handcuffed both teenagers. He then punched Clark, knocking him to the ground. Clark was laid face-down on a sidewalk, hands tied, unarmed, when Carleson shot him in the back of his head.Footnote ⁷⁸ The description invited readers to think for themselves. What kind of a person would assume that Black teenagers had stolen a car because that car was expensive and new? What kind of a man would shoot a boy in the back of his head when he was already handcuffed and knocked to the ground? Morrison wanted readers to reach their own judgments about Carleson as a racist, sadist, and coward. And she calculated that they would reach these judgments more comprehensively by virtue of being invited to form them for themselves. In the final version of the autobiography, Davis substituted one word for the policeman’s “racism, his sadism, his cowardice.” The word was “soul” (Figure 6). Carleson’s “soul” was like a canvas, inviting readers to project their feelings about the policeman who had murdered Gregory Clark. It was also like a canvas in the sense that Morrison and Davis had carefully primed it, so that readers’ feelings about police brutality would align with the author’s and editor’s own.

Figure 6.

The soul as a canvas. Angela Davis: An Autobiography, manuscript setting copy, 1977, MC 940, 28.5–28.12, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, marked as 222, 337, 299.

Morrison did not remove Davis’s most emphatic expressions of hatred and anger from the autobiography because she disagreed with the author’s characterizations of law enforcement and the criminal-justice system as fundamentally racist, or because she hoped to make Davis more likeable to readers whose whiteness insulated them from these truths. The editor cut out these expressions because she supported Davis’s goal of convincing as many readers as possible that the system was unjust, and that it needed to change. Davis accepted these edits because she appreciated that the best way to politicize readers was to enable them to “feel something visceral” for themselves.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the closing sections of the activist’s life story, Morrison would encourage Davis to make even more substantive emotional edits in order to galvanize readers into activism.

Editing as organizing: the power of a hopeful ending

While Morrison deleted many of Davis’s expressions of anger and hatred toward the police and the state, the editor did not significantly alter the emotional timbre of the relevant passages of the autobiography. In other words, readers of the published book are still able to recognize Davis’s feelings toward US authorities, even if the text invites more participation on their part. By contrast, Morrison counselled Davis to transform the prevailing mood in sections of the autobiography that dealt with her release from prison, the manuscript drafts suggest.

In an early manuscript, Davis portrayed her release from jail as a source of conflicting and often painful feelings. “My thoughts and emotions were a hopeless jumble,” she wrote. Her “joy” was “tinged with the fear of confronting what had become the unfamiliar sensation of freedom.”Footnote ⁸⁰ She experienced flashbacks. The lights from her supporters’ cameras took her back to the “somber scene” of her arrest, “flashbulbs exploding.”Footnote ⁸¹ A hug from her best friend’s son transported her to their previous meeting, in court, when the child had cried uncontrollably about her captivity.Footnote ⁸² Davis described her anxiety that freedom was a delusion. “How many scores of times had I already awoken from this dream only to have my eyes fall upon the bars of my cell?” she wrote.Footnote ⁸³ Confusion, terror, guilt, powerlessness; Davis suggested that her experience of imprisonment did not end as soon as she was released.

As a transcript of the emotional consequences of incarceration, this was effective writing. But it did not gel with the publishers’ expectations for an upbeat end to the autobiography.Footnote ⁸⁴ Morrison, too, was seemingly dissatisfied with this early draft, although her concerns stretched beyond market demands for a happy ending. Reflecting years later on her own narrative crafts, Morrison described how she always aimed to move a story “toward goodness.” “I don’t want to leave a text with the reader hopeless or even helpless,” she said.Footnote ⁸⁵ Morrison had no interest in producing trite, feel-good storylines, which suggested that everything was right in the world. But she wanted readers to believe that human beings had the power to effect positive change. Slave narratives offered instructive models. Frederick Douglass, for instance, structured his Narrative around the binary of slavery and freedom, in order to mobilize readers into opposing the former and supporting the latter.Footnote ⁸⁶ Morrison aimed to produce a similar contrast between Davis’s experiences of imprisonment and liberation, lest readers feel that the difference between unfreedom and freedom was not, in the end, so great. In line with Morrison’s habit of giving writers verbal, not written, feedback, the archives do not contain a record of the advice that she gave Davis regarding her early version of the manuscript draft. What the archives do offer, however, is two very different accounts of Davis’s release from jail. The changes are dramatic enough to suggest that they came at Morrison’s behest.

The final manuscript conveyed none of the ambivalence about freedom that had characterized Davis’s early account. In the initial draft, she had experienced a muddle of emotions about leaving jail. In the finished version, her inner emotions were in harmony – only the prison guards, who controlled the gates, stood in her way. “I wanted to scream with joy. But the sluggish jail bureaucracy hindered the natural flow of my emotions,” she wrote.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the first version, Davis had portrayed her imprisonment as a traumatic ordeal with lasting effects. In the final draft, she represented release as a point of total transformation: “Jail, imprisonment, sheriffs, chains – all that was far behind.” Davis conjured an iconically American image of freedom, of a group of friends hopping into a car and “[s]peeding down the freeway.” Short clauses conveyed finality: “I was out there; no guards, no police, no handcuffs,” she wrote.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the early draft, Davis had described how intrusive thoughts about her confinement tainted the sensation of liberty. In the final version of the autobiography there were no flashing bulbs to take her back to the moment of her arrest. The hug that she received from her friend’s son was a closed circle, without attendant memories of a small boy, wailing in court. In this final version, freedom felt like an end to anxiety, bewilderment, helplessness, and guilt.Footnote ⁸⁹ It felt, in other words, like Davis was really free. These changes helped readers to appreciate imprisonment and emancipation as polar opposites, moving the story “toward goodness” through an approach that Morrison evidently endorsed.Footnote ⁹⁰

Further changes to the text conveyed the idea that ordinary people could organize effectively to create positive change. Davis’s initial approach to conveying the power of the masses was heavy-handed. Draft passages for the closing sections of the autobiography read like a who’s who of the groups that organized for her freedom.Footnote ⁹¹ “It was not only me,” she wrote, before she listed some of the people who had worked on her defense committee.Footnote ⁹² Lists like this did not make for thrilling reading, and nor did Davis intend them to. She wanted to convey the unheroic reality of revolutionary action, so that her readers understood that change did not depend on a single super-figure – herself included. Her discussion of her first day of freedom was laced with self-effacement, reaching a full expression when she met with a crowd of her supporters. She was overwhelmed by the power of the group – “their vigor, their strength, their militancy.” She went on:

Davis communicated a contrast between the masses and the individual with asymmetrical language. She attached synonyms for efficacy and capacity to the collective – “awesome” “vigor,” “strength” “militancy,” “power” – and used words that conveyed the impotence of the individual – “undeserving” “inadequacy,” “small,” “insignificant.” Her use of “inevitably” was telling because it suggested that her own weakness was nothing to do with her personhood: any single individual was no match for the coordinated efforts of a group. Davis intentionally preempted readers’ desire to lionize her in a triumphant moment. History had no room for heroes in this account.

Davis’s self-deprecating denouement clashed with the publishers’ demand that her book portray an extraordinary individual – “‘someone great,’” as Geis phrased it in his 1972 proposal.Footnote ⁹⁴ In addition, Morrison probably sensed that Davis’s self-deflation might stifle readers’ enthusiasm for her cause. Removal of lists of names was a simple task, achieved with the characteristically energetic lines of the editor’s green crayon. More substantively, Morrison encouraged Davis to recast her self-abnegation as heroic sacrifice. In the final manuscript, Davis limited her confession of her own feelings of inadequacy to three succinct sentences. As she waited for her defense team to organize her bail, she described “feeling a profound sadness. Why me and not others? I could not get rid of a sense of guilt.” In this final version, Davis experienced feelings of personal inadequacy while still in jail and then moved beyond them, to the jubilation of freedom beyond the prison walls. An anecdote (which had been eclipsed by the expressions of diffidence in the first draft) subsequently came to the fore. Davis explained that the conditions of her bail forbade her from interacting with a large group. She knew that she could be sent back to prison if she met with the crowd of her supporters. But she reasoned that she could not allow a “selfish concern for this little bit of freedom” to prevent her from thanking the people “who had given so much” to her cause.Footnote ⁹⁵ Without a second thought, Davis went to the meeting. This formulation helped readers to appreciate Davis’s courage, even as it allowed the author to express the importance of the group. Davis presented herself as the kind of hero who put others over herself, rather than an antihero who questioned her own worth.

Edits to this stage of the activist’s life story were aimed at generating enthusiasm for Davis – both as an individual and as a symbol for a wider cause. With no reference to Davis’s mixed emotions, the description of her meeting with her supporters took on an unqualified celebratory tone. Davis ended this section of the autobiography describing the “thunderous ovation” that she received from the crowd at her committee’s headquarters – “an ovation that almost made up” for all the suffering she had undergone while on the run and in prison.Footnote ⁹⁶ Davis and Morrison invited readers to put themselves in this crowd, and realize the emotional rewards of activism for themselves.

Conclusion: the effects of affect?

Toni Morrison’s influence on Angela Davis’s autobiography was decisive. Mentoring the author, adding words and sometimes sentences while expunging others, and reshaping the story’s emotional arc, Morrison helped to produce a text that underscored the connections between emotions and politics in Davis’s life, made legible the activist’s communism, encouraged readers to form their own responses to policing and criminal justice in the United States, and offered them hope in ordinary people’s capacity to effect change.

The research presented here helps to nuance characterizations of “oppressive” white publishers and “powerless” Black writers in the era of conglomerate publishing.Footnote ⁹⁷ Certainly, scholars are correct to argue that commercially oriented, white-dominated publishing houses pressured Black authors to moderate their voices and politics. But this article has shown how a Black female editor – committed to her job for political (and not just pecuniary) reasons, and a skilled writer in her own right – could insulate a Black female author from the worst of those pressures.

Morrison reconciled the publishers’ demands for a personalized page-turner with Davis’s determination to write an entirely political book. Despite, or perhaps because of, his tense relationship with Davis, Bernard Geis remained appreciative of Morrison throughout the years-long process of publishing the autobiography. “I repeat what I said before: You deserve every credit,” he wrote to the editor on the eve of the book’s release.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet Geis’s admiration never came at the expense of Davis’s esteem. The author understood that Morrison had helped her to articulate a politics of Black feminism and Marxism in ways that would resonate most with readers. In 1978, as Davis began work on a book that would offer a more scholarly analysis of these same issues, which would eventually be titled Women, Race and Class, she turned to Morrison to be her editor once more.Footnote ⁹⁹

In Davis’s autobiography, as in her own novels, Morrison aimed to foster politically valuable emotional responses in readers. As she acknowledged in her 1993 afterword to The Bluest Eye, she used various literary techniques to reach readers, so they might be “touched” and “moved.” With “touched,” Morrison suggested a range of emotional responses, including feelings of empathy for a characters’ suffering and feelings of self-recognition, in the form of shame, when reading about people who colluded with systemic racism. The word “moved” had at least two meanings in this context. It meant to be affected by emotions. It also meant to be mobilized into action. The research of some scholars suggests that there is little distance between being “touched” and being “moved,” in the sense that empathy forged by reading can readily prompt ethical responses in the “real world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But Morrison herself was not one of those scholars. She thought that the distance between being “touched” and “moved” was great. By her own estimation, more than two decades after her first novel was published, “many readers remain[ed] touched but not moved.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

It would have come as no surprise to Morrison, then, that some readers’ lived realities and ideological proclivities were too far removed from those of a Black female communist to generate empathetic or sympathetic responses, let alone politically progressive reactions, to Davis’s life story. It was not only the anonymous reader for Bantam Books who failed to recognize how the personal and political intertwined in the autobiography. Some early reviewers were also unmoved. Malcolm Muggeridge was a white, male, British, septuagenarian journalist and fervent anticommunist. Writing for the American men’s magazine Esquire in the fall of 1974, he dismissed Davis’s criticisms of police racism as overblown and lamented that he had learned nothing about “the mental and emotional processes” that had radicalized a “well-educated, above averagely intelligent and attractive girl.”Footnote ¹⁰² Morrison’s efforts to connect Davis’s thoughts and feelings were lost on this critic, as well as on a number of other liberal and conservative reviewers who wrote in major newspapers and magazines in the 1970s. The incomprehensibility of Davis’s adherence to communism, as well as the absence of any personal life that stood fully apart from her politics, were recurring themes in critical reviews, which assistants at Random House diligently clipped for Morrison to read.Footnote ¹⁰³

Readers who shared dimensions of Davis’s radical politics and lived experiences were far more likely to recognize the connections between emotions, political convictions, and social activism in the autobiography, and to be moved themselves. Starting with her childhood memories, Davis had brought “precision and individuality” to her “personal narrative,” to show how a movement had grown out of “the universal, bitter, and private experiences” of Black Americans, wrote the white feminist and New Left activist Elinor Langer in the New York Times. Langer recognized the links between the personal and the political in the autobiography. She also quoted the two sentences that (unbeknownst to her) Morrison had authored as exemplary of Davis’s capacity to explain the appeal of communism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the Sister newspaper, Adele Wallace, the owner of a feminist bookstore in Los Angeles, praised Davis for writing about racism, sexism, and capitalism in “human terms so that the reader can feel what she is saying on a gut level.” Davis had helped to make otherwise abstract structures of oppression meaningful to readers by changing the way they felt, according to Wallace, who added that she herself had found reading the book to be a “deeply moving experience.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Reviewing the autobiography in the Chicago Daily News, Maya Angelou riffed on the emotional and organizational meanings of the word “movement.” Davis’s life story fulfilled the dictionary definition of the verb “to thrill,” by producing “tremulous movement,” the poet wrote. Angelou also expressed appreciation of the author’s emotional restraint, which allowed readers to develop thoughts and feelings of their own. “There is no hysteria or ranting in this book – rather, the telling of events,” she wrote, tacitly recognizing Morrison’s efforts to forge participatory reading through emotional editing of the manuscript.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

We cannot readily determine how many people were galvanized into social activism by reading Angela Davis’s autobiography. What we can tell is that Toni Morison used emotional editing with the aim of touching Davis’s readers, and moving them. In the United States, An Autobiography has been published and republished twice in hardcover and three times in paperback, each time with multiple production runs. Today it is also available in e-book and audiobook formats. It’s most recent release, in 2022–23, is indicative of readers’ renewed interest in the era of Black Lives Matter. The autobiography has reached global audiences through translations into Arabic, Bulgarian, Finnish, French, Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish in the 1970s and, more recently, Catalan, Persian, Portuguese, and Turkish. As communities of readers absorb Davis’s life story, and discuss it in classrooms and cafes, on picket lines and online, they will continue to react emotionally and politically to the text. In this way, Morrison’s goal of producing a “non-book” whose impact would “never be confined to its covers” has come to pass.Footnote ¹⁰⁷