danced with each other. They’d light out after us and pull our hair or twist
our arms. We were scared of them, Roberta and me, but neither of us wanted
the other one to know it. So we got a good list of dirty names we could shout
back when we ran from them through the orchard. (244)Even as the passage overtly emphasizes hostility and fear, Morrison’s use of the
iterative covertly indicates that Twyla and Roberta are also attracted to these
girls. Despite their fear, they repeatedly return to the orchard to watch the “gar
girls” dance (the nickname itself—Roberta’s distortion of “gargoyles,” which
are simultaneously grotesque and appealing—reinforces their mixed feelings).
This approach/avoidance conflict also plays out in Twyla and Roberta’s
ethically deficient response to the older girls’ treatment of Maggie, the old,
“sandy-colored” “kitchen woman with legs like parentheses,” who could not
speak and who wore a “stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with ear flaps” (245). Twyla
reports that when Maggie fell while walking across the orchard, “the big girls
laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared
of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil” (245). Morrison uses Twyla’s
focus on the “lipstick and eyebrow pencil” in conjunction with her descrip-
tion of Maggie’s “stupid little hat” to convey Twyla and Roberta’s underlying
attraction to the older girls and their implicit alignment with them rather
than Maggie.
Morrison more strongly indicates that attraction by showing that Twyla
and Roberta imitate the gar girls’ meanness to Maggie. With one voice they
call her “Dummy! Dummy!” and “Bow legs! Bow legs!” (245). In aligning
themselves with the gar girls, Twyla and Roberta embrace their effort to ele-
vate themselves by denigrating Maggie, whose disability makes her an easy
target. Morrison has Twyla follow up her report of this name-calling with nar-
ration from her perspective at the time of the telling: “I think she could hear
and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in
there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us” (245;
my emphasis). I highlight the phrase “even now” because it implies that Twyla
felt shame even then. At the same time, Morrison uses the presence and power
of the social mind of the gar girls to mitigate her audience’s negative ethical
judgment of these eight-year-olds.
In parts 2 through 4, Morrison shows how the cultural pressures of Twyla’s
and Roberta’s individual situations and their shame about how they treated
Maggie prevent them from reestablishing their bond. In part 3, Roberta con-
tends that Maggie didn’t fall in the orchard but was pushed by the gar girls—a
situation that makes their failure to help her more ethically deficient. In part
162 • CHAPTER 8