Those 18 years as an editor at Random House had not been for nothing. She knew exactly what was needed to lead, sometimes throw, the reader into an alien world. It was not merely words but the silences between them, the unsaid things and the smoke they sent up, that gave her phrases their rhythm and their power. Hers was a work to reclaim lost black voices.
托尼在蘭登書屋當編輯的18年可不是白做的。她清楚地知道需要用什么把讀者引導至一個陌生的世界，有時是讓讀者突然陷入那個世界。不僅僅是文字，而且是文字間的沉默，那些沒有說到的事情和它們帶來的迷霧讓她的語句有了節奏和能量。她的作品是為了找回失去的黑人聲音。
Slaves in wagons singing under their breath, ghosts and haints staring silently from tree stumps, ancestors whose names were hidden in children's chants. Or simply girls like herself raised to womanhood in the Midwest, beside a steel mill, in a small house obsessively painted and sluiced with Fels-Naptha as though at any moment they might be forced to leave. Read as she might, there were no books about this world, in which someone like her took centre-stage. She determined to write one, whether or not it sold; this became "The Bluest Eye".
馬車上的奴隸們低聲歌唱，鬼和海雀在樹樁上默默地凝視，祖先的名字隱藏在孩子們的圣歌中。或者僅僅是像她一樣在美國中西部長大成人的女孩們，她們生活在鋼廠旁邊，在一所小房子里，他們癡迷地涂著顏料，用氈子沖洗著，好像隨時都可能被迫離開。盡管她可能會閱讀，但這個世界上還沒有像她這樣的人占據中心舞臺的書籍。她決定寫一本書，不管它能不能賣出去；這本書就是《最藍的眼睛》。
Along with the voices she recovered black experience, but through culture, not the easy, lazy colour-fetish: through the sweet smell of Nu Nile Hair Oil, the sharp tang of mustard greens cooking, the inevitability of entering by back doors. The protagonist of "The Bluest Eye" longed to be like Shirley Temple, but in this book and those that followed her creator rejoiced in dark eyes, thick lips, flared noses. Who had instructed blacks in self-loathing? Who told them they were not beautiful? When she cleaned house for a richer woman as a girl, and paid her for cast-off clothes, she still felt proud. When she wrote, she felt magnificent.
伴隨著她的發聲，她尋回了黑人的經歷，但她是通過文化，而不是簡單的、懶惰的對膚色的迷戀：她是通過尼羅河發油的芬芳，芥菜烹調時的辛辣味道，不可避免地走后門做到的。《最藍的眼睛》的主人公渴望像秀蘭·鄧波兒一樣，但在這本書中，以及那些追隨她的創造者的人們，卻以黑眼睛、厚嘴唇和鼻孔大的鼻子為樂。誰教導黑人自我厭惡？誰說她們不漂亮？她是個小女孩的時候，為一個有錢的女人打掃房子，那人給她買舊衣服，她仍然感到自豪。當她寫作時，她覺得自己很了不起。
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