THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 67
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She pulled a bobby pin from her hair
and began to pick her teeth. That meant
she didn’t want to talk anymore.”
A
gain and again, Morrison asks what
happens to the children. Where
are Marie’s kids? And what does it do
to Pecola to see the furious and griev-
ing Polly Breedlove, who works for a
white family, extend more tenderness
to her white charge than she ever has
to her own children? To tell Polly’s story,
Morrison’s novel expands like an accor-
dion. The music is mournful, and in it
we hear Polly’s griping monologues
about how she came to be with Cholly,
who, as a baby, was abandoned on a pile
of trash by his mother. Polly met him
after her family moved from Alabama
to Kentucky as part of the Great Mi-
gration. Once married, she and Cholly
crossed the river to Ohio, where Polly
went to work for a mean white woman.
“Look like working for that woman and
fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome.
But I holt on to my jobs.” Like her
daughter, Polly fell in love with what
she was not—the white images she saw
flickering on a movie screen:
The onliest time I be happy seem like was when
I was in the picture show....[T]he screen would
light up, and I’d move right on in them pictures.
White men taking such good care of they women,
and they all dressed up in big clean houses with the
bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet.
Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made
coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. I
don’t know. I ’member one time I went to see Clark
Gable and Jean Harlow. I fixed my hair up like I’d
seen hers on a magazine. A part on the side, with
one little curl on my forehead. It looked just like
he r....I got up to get me some candy. I was sit-
ting back in my seat, and I taken a big bite of that
candy, and it pulled a tooth right out of my mouth.
I could of cried....There I was, five months preg-
nant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front
tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just
didn’t care no more after that. I let my hair go back,
plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly.
When Pecola is born, Polly wants to
love her, but in the end she can’t. “I
knowed she was ugly,” she says. “Head
full of pretty hair, but Lord she was
ugly.” Black, poor, female, ugly: one gives
birth to what one feels oneself to be.
And other black women don’t help, es-
pecially if they’re like Geraldine, a minor
character, who’s trying to maintain order
and thus keep dirtiness, blackness, and
chaos out of her life. One day, Geral-
dine’s son, Junior, convinces Pecola to
come to his house, where he plays a ter-
rible trick on her involving a cat. Ger-
aldine arrives and puts an end to the
mayhem, but her disgust bubbles up like
vomit when she looks at Pecola, who,
she feels, is surely more to blame than
her son: She had seen this little girl all of her life.
Hanging out of windows over saloons in Mo-
bile, crawling over the porches of shotgun
houses on the edge of town, sitting in bus sta-
tions holding paper bags and crying to moth-
ers who kept saying “Shet up!” Hair uncombed,
dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked
with dirt. They had stared at her with great
uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned
nothing and asked everything....The end of
the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning,
and all the waste in between.W
e belong as much to the things
we throw away as to the things
we keep. Pecola is shunned by Cholly
and Polly and Geraldine and nearly every
other person she comes into contact with,
but that doesn’t mean they can shake her,
in part because they can’t shake them-
selves: she embodies their pain and an-
guish and disrupts their dreams, no mat-
ter how flimsy they may be. And, as
horrible as it is, Cholly’s abuse of his
daughter is an attempt for him to love
someone. What he knows about love is
informed by abandonment and contempt.
Like Pecola, he grew up in a world wherelove was not only largely absent; it was
an emotion to be despised. By extend-
ing his stunted understanding—violently,
selfishly—to his powerless daughter, he
acts out in one of the few ways available
to him. But, in a life full of violations,
it’s the last straw, and Pecola folds in on
herself. We listen, at the end of the book,
as she talks with the only person she has
left: her blue-eyed self.
How many times a minute are you going to
look inside that old thing?
I didn’t look in a long time.
You did too—
So what? I can look if I want to....
They aren’t going anywhere.
I know it. I just like to look....
I’d just like to do something else besides watch
you stare in that mirror.
You’re just jealous.
I am not.
You are. You wish you had them.
Ha. What would I look like with blue eyes?I remember finishing that section of
the novel, at age ten or eleven, and feeling
the sharp chill and awfulness of being
split in two. What did it mean to not
be a “whole” person? Part of Morrison’s
genius had to do with knowing that our
cracked selves are a manifestation of a
sick society, the ailing body of Amer-
ica, whose racial malaise keeps produc-
ing Pecolas. You can find her every-
where. She’s the dark-skinned woman
trying to lighten her complexion with