Writing Process for “Paper”

Two of my favorite short stories are Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray.” Each of these stories, in different ways, interrogates the deployment of language and how language serves as a foundation to the social construction of race the subversion of that false construction. Morrison states that “‘Recitatif’ was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different…