34 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
Morrison said. “There was something
called ‘the paper-bag test’—darker than
the paper bag put you in one category,
similar to the bag put you in another,
and lighter was yet another and the most
privileged category. I thought them to
be idiotic preferences.” She was drawn
to the drama department, which she felt
was more interested in talent than in
skin color, and toured the South with
the Howard University Players. The itin-
eraries were planned very carefully, but
once in a while, because of inclement
weather or a flat tire, the troupe would
arrive in a town too late to check in to
the “colored” motel. Then one of the
professors would open the Yellow Pages
and call the minister of the local Zion
or Baptist church, and the players would
be put up by members of the congrega-
tion. “There was something not just en-
dearing but welcoming and restorative
in the lives of those people,” she said. “I
think the exchange between Irving Howe
and Ralph Ellison is along those lines:
Ralph Ellison said something nice about
living in the South, and Irving Howe
said, ‘Why would you want to live in
such an evil place?’ Because all he was
thinking about was rednecks. And Ralph
Ellison said, ‘Black people live there.’”
After graduating from Howard, in
1953, she went on to Cornell, where she
earned a master’s degree in American
literature, writing a thesis titled “Vir-
ginia Woolf ’s and William Faulkner’s
Treatment of the Alienated.” What she
saw in their work—“an effort to dis-
cover what pattern of existence is most
conducive to honesty and self-knowl-
edge, the prime requisites for living a
significant life”—she emulated in her
own life. She went back to Howard to
teach, and Stokely Carmichael was one
of her students. Around this time, she
met and married Harold Morrison, a
Jamaican-born architect. She joined a
writing group, where the one rule was
that you had to bring something to read
every week. Among the writers in that
group were the playwright and director
Owen Dodson and his companion the
painter Charles Sebree. At first, Mor-
rison said, she brought in “all that old
junk from high school.” Then she began
writing a story about a little black girl,
Pecola Breedlove, who wanted blue eyes.
“I wanted to take the name of Peola”—
the “tragic mulatto” character from the
1934 movie “Imitation of Life”—“and
play with it, turn it around,” Morrison
said. When she was young, she said, “an-
other little black girl and I were discuss-
ing whether there was a real God or not.
I said there was, and she said there wasn’t
and she had proof: she had prayed for,
and not been given, blue eyes. I just re-
member listening to her and imagin-
ing her with blue eyes, and it was a
grotesque thing. She had these high
cheekbones and these great big slanted
dark eyes, and all I remember thinking
was that if she had blue eyes she would
be horrible.”
When Morrison read the story to
the writing group, Sebree turned to her
and said, “You are a writer.”I
n 1964, Morrison returned to Lorain.
Her marriage had fallen apart and she
had to determine how she was going to
take care of her family—her son Ford
was three years old and Slade was on the
way. An ad in The New York Review of
Books listed a position with L. W. Singer,
a textbook division of Random House
that was based in Syracuse. Morrison ap-
plied for and got the job. She took her
babies (Slade was born in 1965) and moved
East. She was thirty-four years old. In
Syracuse, she didn’t care to socialize; in-
stead, she returned to the story about the
girl who wanted blue eyes and began to
expand it. She wrote when she could—
usually after the children went to sleep.
And since she was the sole support for
her children, she couldn’t sacrifice the real
world for her art. “I stole time to write,”
she said. “Writing was my other job—I
always kept it over there, away from my
‘real’ work as an editor or teacher.” It took
her five years to complete the book, be-
cause she enjoyed the process so much.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston published
“The Bluest Eye” in 1970, with a pic-
ture of Morrison lying on her side against
a white backdrop, her hair cut in an
Afro. Taken at the moment when fash-
ion met the counterculture—when Black
was coöpted as Beautiful and soul-food
recipes ran in fashion magazines next
to images of Black Panther wives tying
their heads up in bright fabric—the pic-
ture was the visual equivalent of the
book: black, female, individualistic.
Set in Lorain at the end of the De-
pression, “The Bluest Eye” remains the
most autobiographical of Morrison’snovels. In it, she focusses on the lives
of little black girls—perhaps the least
likely, least commercially viable story
one could tell at the time. Morrison po-
sitioned the white world at the periph-
ery; black life was at the center, and black
females were at the center of that. Mor-
rison wasn’t sentimental about the black
community. Cholly Breedlove rapes his
daughter Pecola because it is one of the
few forms of power he has (“How dare
she love him?” he thinks. “Hadn’t she any
sense at all? What was he supposed to
do about that? Return it? How? What
could his calloused hands produce to
make her smile?”); a group of children
scapegoat her as her misfortune worsens
(“All of us—all who knew her—felt so
wholesome after we cleaned ourselves
on her. We were so beautiful when we
stood astride her ugliness”); and three
whores are her only source of tender-
ness (“Pecola loved them, visited them,
and ran their errands. They, in turn, did
not despise her”).
The writing, on the other hand, was
lush, sensible-minded, and often hilar-
ious. If Morrison had a distinctive style,
it was in her rhythms: the leisurely pace
of her storytelling. Clearly her writing
had grown out of an oral tradition. Rather
than confirm the reader’s sense of alien-
ation by employing distancing tech-
niques, Morrison coaxed the reader into
believing the tale. She rooted her char-
acters’ lives in something real—certainly
in the minds of black readers.
This came at a time when the pre-
vailing sensibility in most American
novels was urban and male, an out-
growth of the political and personal
concerns that Ellison and Bellow, Bald-
win and Roth had developed living in
predominantly black or Jewish neigh-
borhoods. Morrison was different. She
grew up in an integrated town in the
heart of America. “The point was to re-
ally open a book that’s about black peo-
ple, or by a black person, me or any-
body,” she said. “In the sixties, most of
the literature was understood by the
critics as something sociological, a kind
of revelation of the lives of these peo-
ple. So there was a little apprehension,
you know—Is it going to make me feel
bad, is it going to make me feel good?
I said, I’m going to make it as readable
as I can, but I’m not going to pull any
punches. I don’t have an agenda here.”