66 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
then at Howard, in D.C., where she joined
a writers’ group and worked on a short
story about a little black girl who wanted
blue eyes. The character was based on a
girl she’d known growing up in Ohio,
who’d wanted those eyes and decided that
God didn’t exist when He didn’t give
them to her. Morrison put the draft in a
drawer and got on with the business of
living. In 1958, she married the Jamaican
architect Harold Morrison; seven years
later, the couple was divorced, and Toni
was by herself, supporting two young
boys and working as an editor at L. W.
Singer, a textbook company in Syracuse,
New York. During an argument, a neigh-
bor called Morrison a tramp in front of
her children. Morrison filed a two-hun-
dred-thousand-dollar lawsuit, which she
later dropped. She fought to protect her-
self, but how do you protect yourself from
isolation or loneliness?
Loneliness and hurt are often an art-
ist’s first tools, and Morrison put hers
to work by remembering and writing
about the world she’d come from: the
funk of poverty as well as its flowers,
the ghost stories that her father, a welder
and a Jack-of-all-trades, told his chil-
dren. In a way, “The Bluest Eye” builds
on those tales and honors the years when,
without knowing it, Morrison was pre-
paring to become an artist. Set near the
start of the Second World War, before
postwar prosperity changed Lorain, the
book is narrated by Claudia, a feisty
child, but the tone is elegiac, since a lot
of the novel is driven by memory and
the stories that shape it. Before the nar-
rative begins, Morrison gives us the crux
of the tale in a sort of preface:
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in
the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it
was because Pecola was having her father’s baby
that the marigolds did not grow.... It was a long
time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves
that no green was going to spring from our seeds.
Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by
fights and mutual accusations about who was to
blame....It never occurred to either of us that
the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had
dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black
dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in
his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith
were no more productive than his lust or despair.
What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear,
lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola
and the unyielding earth....The seeds shriveled
and died; her baby too. There is really nothing more
to say—except why. But since why is difficult to
handle, one must take refuge in how.
By dispensing with narrative suspense
up front, Morrison the modernist fo-
cusses our attention on character, on how
the stories we tell about and to one an-
other often are the story. We first meet
Claudia and Frieda when a white
neighbor taunts them, and we are shown
that whiteness has no erotic pull for
Claudia; she has no interest in being
defiled or overtaken by it. Given white
dolls for Christmas, she destroys them.
But, she says, “The dismemberment of
the dolls was not the true horror. The
truly horrifying thing was the transfer-
ence of the same impulses to little white
girls. The indifference with which I could
have axed them was shaken only by my
desire to do so.” Claudia has already
learned to hate; she knows that the world
doesn’t admire and validate her the way
it does white girls, and she compensates
for her vulnerability by fighting for at-
tention and respect.
Pecola has no fight in her. (To see
her name and read her story is to be re-
minded of Peola, another girl of color
who is tormented by the question and
the reality of race, in Fannie Hurst’s 1933
novel “Imitation of Life.”) But, to be
fair, Pecola comes to Claudia’s family
under humbling circumstances: the
county places her there because she and
the other Breedloves—her father, Cholly,
who works at the local plant; her mother,
Polly, who works as a domestic; and her
older brother, Sammy—have no home.
Cholly, in addition to burning his house
down, went “upside his wife’s head, and
everybody, as a result, was outdoors.”
(“There is a difference between being
put out and being put outdoors,” Mor-
rison writes, in one of the book’s fabu-
lous clarifying paragraphs. “If you are
put out, you go somewhere else; if you
are outdoors, there is no place to go....
Outdoors was the end of something, an
irrevocable, physical fact, defining and
complementing our metaphysical con-
dition.”) At Claudia’s, Pecola falls in
love with an image of a blue-eyed Shir-
ley Temple on a cup, and in order to
peer at it as much as possible she drinks
three quarts of milk, which angers Clau-
dia’s mother. Testing charity’s patience
can get you put outdoors, too.
Eventually, the Breedloves are reunited
in a storefront. But how can you be re-
united if you’ve never really been to-
gether? The three women who live abovethe Breedloves, prostitutes named China,
Poland, and Miss Marie, have formed a
kind of family. Unlike the rest of town,
the prostitutes do not despise Pecola, so
she visits with them, and Morrison’s fan-
tastic ear for dialogue is given free rein;
she revels in how women speak, not only
to one another but to themselves:“Hi, dumplin’. Where your socks?” Marie
seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but
invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen
from menus and dishes that were forever up-
permost in her mind.
“Hello, Miss Marie. Hello, Miss China.
Hello, Miss Poland.”
“You heard me. Where your socks? You as
barelegged as a yard dog.”
“I couldn’t find any.”
“Couldn’t find any? Must be somethin’ in
your house that loves socks.”
China chuckled. Whenever something was
missing, Marie attributed its disappearance to
“something in the house that loved it.” “There
is somethin’ in this house that loves brassieres,”
she would say with alarm....
“How come you got so many boyfriends,
Miss Marie?”
“Boyfriends?Boyfriends? Chittlin’, I ain’t
seen a boy since nineteen and twenty-seven.”...
Pecola fingered the fringe of a scarf that
lay on the back of a sofa. “I never seen nobody
with as many boyfriends as you got, Miss Marie.
How come they all love you?”
Marie opened a bottle of root beer. “What
else they gone do? They know I’m rich and
good-lookin’. They wants to put their toes in
my curly hair, and get at my money.”The accuracy of Morrison’s dialogue
can render you a child again, eavesdrop-
ping on those thrilling ladies, whose talk
feels like a delicious tease, a promise of
warmth and attention. Will these women
love Pecola—and stay adults in the pro-
cess, which is to say, give her the five
minutes of innocence and comfort that
a black girl of her class is allowed in Lo-
rain? Although Pecola is continually
robbed of her innocence, she holds on
to the scraps of her dreams with a stead-
fastness that breaks the heart. Her up-
stairs neighbors are another aspect of her
hope. She loves to listen to these wom-
en’s stories because, despite the demands
of their work, they are free: free to love
whomever and spend their money how-
ever they like. Later in the conversation,
Morrison reveals what the prostitutes
keep from Pecola: how life can break you
down. Pecola asks Marie if she had chil-
dren with the man she loved, and Marie
answers, “Yeah. Yeah. We had some.”
Morrison continues, “Marie fidgeted.