CBR11bingo: Own Voices
I struggled for quite some time trying to decide what to read for CBR11 Bingo’s center square. I’m so glad that I finally landed on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, not just because it’s a book I definitely should have read by now, but because it’s moving and beautiful and painful. I expected The Bluest Eye to be powerful; I didn’t expect it to be poetic.
This novel tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl growing up in Ohio after the Great Depression. Pecola lives in the kind of horrifying poverty that most of us only ever read about, along with her brother Sammy and their parents, who are always fighting. When I say fighting, I don’t mean like a normal married couple, or even a married couple having problems–I mean really fighting, physically, like they may kill each other any minute. When Pecola’s father Cholly, who is always drunk, nearly burns down their house, Pecola goes to live with the MacTeers–narrator Claudia and her sister Frieda and their parents. As Claudia describes, “Mama had told us two days earlier that a ‘case’ was coming–a girl who had no place to go.”
This is a story about poverty, abuse, and rape. The real tragedy, though, the one at the heart of the story, is Pecola’s self-loathing. She believes she’s ugly (and everyone around her confirms this opinion) and wants nothing more than to be beautiful. In her mind, the most beautiful thing she can imagine is to have blue eyes. Claudia recounts how, while living with them, Pecola is obsessed with Shirley Temple and her golden curls. Pecola loves Shirley Temple so much that she obsessively drinks milk out of a saucer with the actress’s face on it to the point where she downs three quarts of milk this way, leading to one of the few funny scenes in the novel, in which Claudia’s mother carries on about people drinking three quarts of milk with a passive aggressiveness that only a mother can perfect. (“Don’t nobody need three quarts of milk. Henry Ford don’t need three quarts of milk. That’s just downright sinful.” And Claudia’s musings: “When Mama got around to Henry Ford and all those people who didn’t care whether she had a loaf of bread, it was time to go. We wanted to miss the part about Roosevelt and the CCC camps.”)
Morrison explores the idea of whiteness equating to beauty with an unflinching eye. The feeling is most obvious in Pecola’s obsession with blue eyes, but it’s pervasive in the way many of the characters think of each other. Whiteness is the “default” that the characters strive for, unconsciously or not. When a light-skinned girl named Maureen shows up at Claudia’s school, everyone except Claudia and Frieda like her right away. In a separate narrative (not narrated by Claudia) Morrison describes a woman named Geraldine who grows up wanting the best for her family, which essentially means rejecting things that are “black.” She thinks the local boys of her own race aren’t good enough for her son (her plan rather backfires when her son grows up to be a bully), and she looks down on the impoverished black people she knows. “Grass wouldn’t grow where they lived. Flowers died. Shades fell down. Tin cans and tires blossomed where they lived. They lived on cold black-eyed peas and orange pop. Like flies they hovered; like flies they settled.” By contrast, the neighborhood where Pecola’s mother works as a maid for a white family is practically Eden: “The backyards of these houses fell away in green slopes down to a strip of sand. . . . The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. The sky was always blue.”
The ways in which the black community learn to turn on each other are also demonstrated in a flashback of Cholly’s life. In those passages, we learn about how two white men humiliated him while he was having sex with a young woman. Unable to effectively direct his rage toward the men, he vented his anger at the girl instead, instigating an unending history of hatred and abuse toward women, including Pecola’s mother.
Even the opening passage of the novel relies on people’s acceptance of whiteness-by-default. It begins: “Here is a house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.” In interviews, Toni Morrison was vocal that she was writing for black people and she wasn’t going to apologize for it. Nor, indeed, should she, especially when first grade reading books are clearly written for white children.