The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

  If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin di-i-ime to my name.” I looked forward to the delicious time when “my man” would leave me, when I would “hate to see that evening sun go down…” ’cause then I would know “my man has left this town.” Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

  But without song, those Saturdays sat on my head like a coal scuttle, and if Mama was fussing, as she was now, it was like somebody throwing stones at it.

  “…and here I am poor as a bowl of yak-me. What do they think I am? Some kind of Sandy Claus? Well, they can just take they stocking down ’cause it ain’t Christmas…”

  We fidgeted.

  “Let’s do something,” Frieda said.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.” Frieda stared at the tops of the trees. Pecola looked at her feet.

  “You want to go up to Mr. Henry’s room and look at his girlie magazines?”

  Frieda made an ugly face. She didn’t like to look at dirty pictures. “Well,” I continued, “we could look at his Bible. That’s pretty.” Frieda sucked her teeth and made a phttt sound with her lips. “O.K., then. We could go thread needles for the half-blind lady. She’ll give us a penny.”

  Frieda snorted. “Her eyes look like snot. I don’t feel like looking at them. What you want to do, Pecola?”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Anything you want.”

  I had another idea. “We could go up the alley and see what’s in the trash cans.”

  “Too cold,” said Frieda. She was bored and irritable.

  “I know. We could make some fudge.”

  “You kidding? With Mama in there fussing? When she starts fussing at the walls, you know she’s gonna be at it all day. She wouldn’t even let us.”

  “Well, let’s go over to the Greek hotel and listen to them cuss.”

  “Oh, who wants to do that? Besides, they say the same old words all the time.”

  My supply of ideas exhausted, I began to concentrate on the white spots on my fingernails. The total signified the number of boyfriends I would have. Seven.

  Mama’s soliloquy slid into the silence “…Bible say feed the hungry. That’s fine. That’s all right. But I ain’t feeding no elephants…. Anybody need three quarts of milk to live need to get out of here. They in the wrong place. What is this? Some kind of dairy farm?”

  Suddenly Pecola bolted straight up, her eyes wide with terror. A whinnying sound came from her mouth.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Frieda stood up too.

  Then we both looked where Pecola was staring. Blood was running down her legs. Some drops were on the steps. I leaped up. “Hey. You cut yourself? Look. It’s all over your dress.”

  A brownish-red stain discolored the back of her dress. She kept whinnying, standing with her legs far apart.

  Frieda said, “Oh. Lordy! I know. I know what that is!”

  “What?” Pecola’s fingers went to her mouth.

  “That’s ministratin’.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know.”

  “Am I going to die?” she asked.

  “Noooo. You won’t die. It just means you can have a baby!”

  “What?”

  “How do you know?” I was sick and tired of Frieda knowing everything.

  “Mildred told me, and Mama too.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t have to, dummy. Look. Wait here. Sit down, Pecola. Right here.” Frieda was all authority and zest. “And you,” she said to me, “you go get some water.”

  “Water?”

  “Yes, stupid. Water. And be quiet, or Mama will hear you.”

  Pecola sat down again, a little less fear in her eyes. I went into the kitchen.

  “What you want, girl?” Mama was rinsing curtains in the sink.

  “Some water, ma’am.”

  “Right where I’m working, naturally. Well, get a glass. Not no clean one neither. Use that jar.”

  I got a Mason jar and filled it with water from the faucet. It seemed a long time filling.

  “Don’t nobody never want nothing till they see me at the sink. Then everybody got to drink water…”

  When the jar was full, I moved to leave the room.

  “Where you going?”

  “Outside.”

  “Drink that water right here!”

  “I ain’t gonna break nothing.”

  “You don’t know what you gonna do.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I do. Lemme take it out. I won’t spill none.”

  “You bed’ not.”

  I got to the porch and stood there with the Mason jar of water. Pecola was crying.

  “What you crying for? Does it hurt?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then stop slinging snot.”

  Frieda opened the back door. She had something tucked in her blouse. She looked at me in amazement and pointed to the jar. “What’s that supposed to do?”

  “You told me. You said get some water.”

  “Not a little old jar full. Lots of water. To scrub the steps with, dumbbell!”

  “How was I supposed to know?”

  “Yeah. How was you. Come on.” She pulled Pecola up by the arm. “Let’s go back here.” They headed for the side of the house where the bushes were thick.

  “Hey. What about me? I want to go.”

  “Shut uuuup,” Frieda stage-whispered. “Mama will hear you. You wash the steps.”

  They disappeared around the corner of the house.

  I was going to miss something. Again. Here was something important, and I had to stay behind and not see any of it. I poured the water on the steps, sloshed it with my shoe, and ran to join them.

  Frieda was on her knees; a white rectangle of cotton was near her on the ground. She was pulling Pecola’s pants off. “Come on. Step out of them.” She managed to get the soiled pants down and flung them at me. “Here.”

  “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “Bury them, moron.”

  Frieda told Pecola to hold the cotton thing between her legs.

  “How she gonna walk like that?” I asked.

  Frieda didn’t answer. Instead she took two safety pins from the hem of her skirt and began to pin the ends of the napkin to Pecola’s dress.

  I picked up the pants with two fingers and looked about for something to dig a hole with. A rustling noise in the bushes startled me, and turning toward it, I saw a pair of fascinated eyes in a dough-white face. Rosemary was watching us. I grabbed for her face and succeeded in scratching her nose. She screamed and jumped back.

  “Mrs. MacTeer! Mrs. MacTeer!” Rosemary hollered. “Frieda and Claudia are out here playing nasty! Mrs. MacTeer!”

  Mama opened the window and looked down at us.

  “What?”

  “They’re playing nasty, Mrs. MacTeer. Look. And Claudia hit me ’cause I seen them!”

  Mama slammed the window shut and came running out the back door.

  “What you all doing? Oh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Playing nasty, huh?” She reached into the bushes and pulled off a switch. “I’d rather raise pigs than some nasty girls. Least I can slaughter them!”

  We began to shriek. “No, Mama. No, ma’am. We wasn’t! She’s a liar! No, ma’am, Mama! No, ma’am, Mama!”

  Mama grabbed Frieda by the shoulder, turned her around, and gave her three or four stinging cuts on her legs. “Gonna be nasty, huh? Naw you ain’t!”

  Frieda was destroyed. Whippings wounded and insulted her.

  Mama looked at Pecola. “You too!” she said. “Child of mine or not!” She grabbed Pecola and spun h
er around. The safety pin snapped open on one end of the napkin, and Mama saw it fall from under her dress. The switch hovered in the air while Mama blinked. “What the devil is going on here?”

  Frieda was sobbing. I, next in line, began to explain. “She was bleeding. We was just trying to stop the blood!”

  Mama looked at Frieda for verification. Frieda nodded. “She’s ministratin’. We was just helping.”

  Mama released Pecola and stood looking at her. Then she pulled both of them toward her, their heads against her stomach. Her eyes were sorry. “All right, all right. Now, stop crying. I didn’t know. Come on, now. Get on in the house. Go on home, Rosemary. The show is over.”

  We trooped in, Frieda sobbing quietly, Pecola carrying a white tail, me carrying the little-girl-gone-to-woman pants.

  Mama led us to the bathroom. She prodded Pecola inside, and taking the underwear from me, told us to stay out.

  We could hear water running into the bathtub.

  “You think she’s going to drown her?”

  “Oh, Claudia. You so dumb. She’s just going to wash her clothes and all.”

  “Should we beat up Rosemary?”

  “No. Leave her alone.”

  The water gushed, and over its gushing we could hear the music of my mother’s laughter.

  That night, in bed, the three of us lay still. We were full of awe and respect for Pecola. Lying next to a real person who was really ministratin’ was somehow sacred. She was different from us now—grown-up-like. She, herself, felt the distance, but refused to lord it over us.

  After a long while she spoke very softly. “Is it true that I can have a baby now?”

  “Sure,” said Frieda drowsily. “Sure you can.”

  “But…how?” Her voice was hollow with wonder.

  “Oh,” said Frieda, “somebody has to love you.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a long pause in which Pecola and I thought this over. It would involve, I supposed, “my man,” who, before leaving me, would love me. But there weren’t any babies in the songs my mother sang. Maybe that’s why the women were sad: the men left before they could make a baby.

  Then Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?” But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know.

  HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWH

  ITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETT

  YITISVERYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYP

  There is an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio. It does not recede into its background of leaden sky, nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone poles around it. Rather, it foists itself on the eye of the passerby in a manner that is both irritating and melancholy. Visitors who drive to this tiny town wonder why it has not been torn down, while pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it.

  At one time, when the building housed a pizza parlor, people saw only slow-footed teen-aged boys huddled about the corner. These young boys met there to feel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrages. The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth. They moved slowly, laughed slowly, but flicked the ashes from their cigarettes too quickly too often, and exposed themselves, to those who were interested, as novices to the habit. But long before the sound of their lowing and the sight of their preening, the building was leased to a Hungarian baker, modestly famous for his brioche and poppy-seed rolls. Earlier than that, there was a real-estate office there, and even before that, some gypsies used it as a base of operations. The gypsy family gave the large plate-glass window as much distinction and character as it ever had. The girls of the family took turns sitting between yards of velvet draperies and Oriental rugs hanging at the windows. They looked out and occasionally smiled, or winked, or beckoned—only occasionally. Mostly they looked, their elaborate dresses, long-sleeved and long-skirted, hiding the nakedness that stood in their eyes.

  So fluid has the population in that area been, that probably no one remembers longer, longer ago, before the time of the gypsies and the time of the teen-agers when the Breedloves lived there, nestled together in the storefront. Festering together in the debris of a realtor’s whim. They slipped in and out of the box of peeling gray, making no stir in the neighborhood, no sound in the labor force, and no wave in the mayor’s office. Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality—collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

  The plan of the living quarters was as unimaginative as a first-generation Greek landlord could contrive it to be. The large “store” area was partitioned into two rooms by beaverboard planks that did not reach to the ceiling. There was a living room, which the family called the front room, and the bedroom, where all the living was done. In the front room were two sofas, an upright piano, and a tiny artificial Christmas tree which had been there, decorated and dust-laden, for two years. The bedroom had three beds: a narrow iron bed for Sammy, fourteen years old, another for Pecola, eleven years old, and a double bed for Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove. In the center of the bedroom, for the even distribution of heat, stood a coal stove. Trunks, chairs, a small end table, and a cardboard “wardrobe” closet were placed around the walls. The kitchen was in the back of this apartment, a separate room. There were no bath facilities. Only a toilet bowl, inaccessible to the eye, if not the ear, of the tenants.

  There is nothing more to say about the furnishings. They were anything but describable, having been conceived, manufactured, shipped, and sold in various states of thoughtlessness, greed, and indifference. The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar. People had owned it, but never known it. No one had lost a penny or a brooch under the cushions of either sofa and remembered the place and time of the loss or the finding. No one had clucked and said, “But I had it just a minute ago. I was sitting right there talking to…” or “Here it is. It must have slipped down while I was feeding the baby!” No one had given birth in one of the beds—or remembered with fondness the peeled paint places, because that’s what the baby, when he learned to pull himself up, used to pick loose. No thrifty child had tucked a wad of gum under the table. No happy drunk—a friend of the family, with a fat neck, unmarried, you know, but God how he eats!—had sat at the piano and played “You Are My Sunshine.” No young girl had stared at the tiny Christmas tree and remembered when she had decorated it, or wondered if that blue ball was going to hold, or if HE would ever come back to see it.

  There were no memories among those pieces. Certainly no memories to be cherished. Occasionally an item provoked a physical reaction: an increase of acid irritation in the upper intestinal tract, a light flush of perspiration at the back of the neck as circumstances surrounding the piece of furniture were recalled. The sofa, for example. It had been purchased new, but the fabric had split straight across the back by the time it was delivered. The store would not take the responsibility….

  “Looka here, buddy. It was O.K. when I put it on the truck. The store can’t do anything about it once it’s on the truck….” Listerine and Lucky Strike breath.

  “But I don’t want no tore couch if’n it’s bought new.” Pleading eyes and tightened testicles.

  “Tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit….”

  You could hate a sofa, of course—that is, if you could hate a sofa. But it didn’t matter. You still had to get together $4.80 a month. If you had to pay $4.80 a month for a sofa that started off split, no good, and humiliating—you couldn’t take any joy in owning it. And the joylessness stank, pervading everything. The stink of it kept you from painting the beaverboard walls; from getting a matching piece of material for the chair;
even from sewing up the split, which became a gash, which became a gaping chasm that exposed the cheap frame and cheaper upholstery. It withheld the refreshment in a sleep slept on it. It imposed a furtiveness on the loving done on it. Like a sore tooth that is not content to throb in isolation, but must diffuse its own pain to other parts of the body—making breathing difficult, vision limited, nerves unsettled, so a hated piece of furniture produces a fretful malaise that asserts itself throughout the house and limits the delight of things not related to it.

  The only living thing in the Breedloves’ house was the coal stove, which lived independently of everything and everyone, its fire being “out,” “banked,” or “up” at its own discretion, in spite of the fact that the family fed it and knew all the details of its regimen: sprinkle, do not dump, not too much…. The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die.

  HEREISTHEFAMILYMOTHERFATHER

  DICKANDJANETHEYLIVEINTHEGREE

  NANDWHITEHOUSETHEYAREVERYH

  The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly. Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. Except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair, dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was behavior, the rest of the family—Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove—wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them. The eyes, the small eyes set closely together under narrow foreheads. The low, irregular hairlines, which seemed even more irregular in contrast to the straight, heavy eyebrows which nearly met. Keen but crooked noses, with insolent nostrils. They had high cheekbones, and their ears turned forward. Shapely lips which called attention not to themselves but to the rest of the face. You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his way. Mrs. Breedlove handled hers as an actor does a prop: for the articulation of character, for support of a role she frequently imagined was hers—martyrdom. Sammy used his as a weapon to cause others pain. He adjusted his behavior to it, chose his companions on the basis of it: people who could be fascinated, even intimidated by it. And Pecola. She hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed—peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask.