Within four years after Solomon's success, Morrison followed up with Tar Baby. A provocative departure from her earlier all-black casts, the novel introduces the ambivalent Jadine, a world-weary traveler who searches for self-actualization among West Indian servant-caste relatives through a brief fling with a furtive black interloper. Propelled by the novel's success, Morrison became the first black woman championed in a cover story for Newsweek, which heralded her as the top black writer in the United States. Her response was a teasing one-liner: "Are you really going to put a middle-aged, gray-haired, colored lady on the cover of this magazine?"
Beloved was published in 1987. Returning to a focus on motherhood, the novel probes the pain of mothers who are slaves, revealed through the humiliation of Sethe, who kills one of her children rather than watch it grow to adulthood, when she would be brutally and repeatedly punished, robbed of a sense of self, and utterly debased by slavery.
In January 1988, having worked her way up in the literary hierarchy, Morrison received the Ritz-Hemingway, National Book, and National Book Critics Circle nominations for Beloved — but no awards. Led by poet June Jordan, a formal protest that white critics were unwilling to recognize Morrison's enormous talent ran in major newspapers, accompanied by an open letter from Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Angela Davis, and forty-two other African Americans. Critic Houston A. Baker labeled the letter a "civil action" designed to call attention to a "miscarriage of judgment": "We wanted to call the attention of others to this ignoring of the beauty and greatness of Morrison."
