DN10

Writing History of Blacks & Securing the Future

June 4, 1944, Monday evening

I went and called up Saxon. . . . I told him about Bontemps'  letter about trying to find a publisher, and he said that he felt the same way—that he had no doubts about finding a publisher once it was complete. Then I told him about my slight worry that somebody might try to have some one else supersede me--not definite, but something I'd like to have settled. 

He said that after all, he left the manuscript fully into my hands that he has nothing to do with it, and nobody else has anything. I told him that I was not sure that that was understood elsewhere, and that I did not want to go too deeply into it then, but that was one of the things I wanted clarified when I finished it. That I was not going to make any demands for reassurances now, but that I would before I submit it out there. 

 (If Dillard gets it that way—or maybe they have—then I may find that they are not at all interested in it out there. Then I will have to make sure that it is so good that they won't need to put their hands on it. Now I am beginning to see light. Maybe that is why Dent has proved so uncooperative—he understood something of the kind before now.)   

I asked Saxon how he was feeling and he said pretty good, and then I told him that I had been so pressed mentally that I had taken two or three days off—that I found out that the chapter on slave buying, selling, and stealing—that I was once proud of—is now woefully inadequate, just like Reddick's material was when I started writing on the book, and that I have begun rewriting it altogether. We parted nicely, I telling him that I would call Wednesday at 11.

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