Professor Autumn Womack

And then when I came to Princeton, I started working with the Morrison paper, with her archives, which, you know, leveled it up again.

You know, I met her once at a book signing in a very casual way, which is insignificant to nobody but me, where she signed my copy of Home.

So that must have been in like 2012.

And that was the extent of our interpersonal.

She's already, I think, fully retired by the time I came to Princeton.

So no, we never met in person.

Oh, that's such a good question.

So interesting, Sophie.

So I think there's like two is a two prong dance, at least a two prong dancer.

The first one is a very kind of like basic.

Because I read so widely in and, you know, I teach a survey on 19th century African-American literature.

We read so widely in the tradition of the African-American slave narrative, which is really comes into play in Beloved.

When she talks about the creation of Beloved and she talks about all the slave narratives that she read.

And so there was a way that I was able to kind of see or realize how she was filling in the gaps is not the right word, but I would say like working in the tradition and expanding upon the work of the tradition and the genre of the slave narrative and, you know, in many of her speeches.

And the one that I'm thinking of is...

the site of memory where she says the tradition of slave narratives, I mean, they were written for the benefit of a political project of emancipation, right?

I mean, they always had a political ideological agenda.

And as a result, it wasn't about Black writers giving their kind of interior life or their consciousness was not the subject.

It wasn't the desired subject, right?

So you can see her