bleaching creams; she’s the woman who
undergoes surgery to thin her lips or
her nose; she’s the girl who wears col-
ored contact lenses so that the world
can see her differently.
When you’re a kid, a black- or brown-
or yellow- or red-skinned kid, most of
the time you don’t start the morning
thinking about how racism will ruin
your day. What you want to know is
who will love you, and what surprises
that love will bring you that day. It’s the
world that brings hate to your front
door, and it’s hate that makes you hide
who you are. As a kid, I responded vis-
cerally to “The Bluest Eye,” for a num-
ber of reasons, starting with the book
jacket. Morrison, in the photograph on
the back cover, looked like the kind of
person my family might have known,
and if she was one of us that meant that
one of my four beautiful older sisters
could, perhaps, write a book, too.
Now I can see that my hope for my
sisters was a way of having hope for my-
self, hope that I might become the art-
ist I wanted to be. I held on to every bit
of hope I could find. I felt Pecola’s pre-
dicament in the pit of my stomach not
because folks thought I was ugly but be-
cause I knew that, in my small, work-
ing-class West Indian community in
Brooklyn, my sexuality was considered
ugly. My black world then (and, to be
frank, it hasn’t changed much) defined
itself by the rules of heterosexuality, and
one of the few things its inhabitants could
agree on was how spiritually abhorrent
gay people were—at best, objects of de-
rision. I felt as trapped in Brooklyn as
Pecola did in Lorain. I didn’t have a dream
of blue eyes, but I did dream of a world
full of culture and artists to which I would
one day belong, if, like Toni Morrison, I
wrote books. I would try to write a per-
fect book, like Morrison’s first novel, but
in my version the character of Soaphead
Church—a celibate gay West Indian who
Pecola believes has conjured up her blue
eyes—wouldn’t be yet another manifes-
tation of black American prejudice
against West Indian difference. Instead,
he would fall in love, and maybe pros-
per, and not live his life as an outsider.
In short, I would try to overturn what
the society in “The Bluest Eye” said layin store for me: a kind of madness. This
understanding, of course, took many years
to form, because I didn’t know back then
that gay men could find ways to love one
another, let alone themselves. I didn’t
grow up at a time when you talked about
the problem of not seeing yourself in
books or of “negative” portrayals; you
hunted and dug for the characters and
metaphors that mattered to you, and that
was the fun—and the reward—of read-
ing and looking at pictures.M
orrison was thirty-nine years old
when she published “The Bluest
Eye.” Although she claimed in a
1981 interview with Charles Ruas, “I
never wanted to grow up to be a writer,
I just wanted to grow up to be an adult,”
it is the work of a mature artist who has
tired of waiting for someone else to ex-
press her views. Meanwhile, Morrison
the editor was also gaining in strength.
By the time “The Bluest Eye” came out,
she had been an editor of poetry, fic-
tion, and nonfiction at Random House
for nearly three years. Her colleagues
didn’t know she was a burgeoning nov-
elist, because she didn’t tell them. “They
weren’t paying me for that,” she once
said. Eventually, a co-worker spotted a
copy of “The Bluest Eye,” and Morri-
son’s subsequent novels were published
by Knopf, a Random House imprint.
Like Morrison’s writing, her editing
had a very particular goal: to offer read-
ers stories about blacks, women, and
other marginalized characters which
hadn’t been told before. This desire—
this need—seems to have been with
Morrison since she was a student at
Howard. In a 2019 documentary about
her, “The Pieces I Am,” Morrison re-
calls that as a student she wanted to
write about the black characters in
Shakespeare’s plays, but her professor
was “outraged” at the idea. As an editor,
she chose to bring those black stories
to the fore. Now it’s astonishing to look
back at the range of her projects: a book
on Southern cuisine; a history of the
Cotton Club; fiction by Gayl Jones and
Toni Cade Bambara; poems by Lucille
Clifton and by Henry Dumas, who was
killed at thirty-three by a New York
City subway cop; the autobiography of
Angela Davis; and, in 1974, the historic
anthology “The Black Book,” which was
reissued in December.