As we emerged from the school with Maureen, we began to moult immediately. We put our head scarves in our coat pockets, and our coats on our heads. I was wondering how to maneuver Maureen’s fur muff into a gutter when a commotion in the playground distracted us. A group of boys was circling and holding at bay a victim, Pecola Breedlove.
Bay Boy, Woodrow Cain, Buddy Wilson, Junie Bug—like a necklace of semiprecious stones they surrounded her. Heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of a majority, they gaily harassed her.
“Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo…”
They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.
Black e mo Black e mo Ya daddy sleeps nekked.
Stch ta ta stch ta ta
stach ta ta ta ta ta
Pecola edged around the circle crying. She had dropped her notebook, and covered her eyes with her hands.
We watched, afraid they might notice us and turn their energies our way. Then Frieda, with set lips and Mama’s eyes, snatched her coat from her head and threw it on the ground. She ran toward them and brought her books down on Woodrow Cain’s head. The circle broke. Woodrow Cain grabbed his head.
“Hey, girl!”
“You cut that out, you hear?” I had never heard Frieda’s voice so loud and clear.
Maybe because Frieda was taller than he was, maybe because he saw her eyes, maybe because he had lost interest in the game, or maybe because he had a crush on Frieda, in any case Woodrow looked frightened just long enough to give her more courage.
“Leave her ’lone, or I’m gone tell everybody what you did!”
Woodrow did not answer; he just walled his eyes.
Bay Boy piped up, “Go on, gal! Ain’t nobody bothering you.”
“You shut up, Bullet Head.” I had found my tongue.
“Who you calling Bullet Head?”
“I’m calling you Bullet Head, Bullet Head.”
Frieda took Pecola’s hand. “Come on.”
“You want a fat lip?” Bay Boy drew back his fist at me.
“Yeah. Gimme one of yours.”
“You gone get one.”
Maureen appeared at my elbow, and the boys seemed reluctant to continue under her springtime eyes so wide with interest. They buckled in confusion, not willing to beat up three girls under her watchful gaze. So they listened to a budding male instinct that told them to pretend we were unworthy of their attention.
“Come on, man.”
“Yeah. Come on. We ain’t got time to fool with them.”
Grumbling a few disinterested epithets, they moved away.
I picked up Pecola’s notebook and Frieda’s coat, and the four of us left the playground.
“Old Bullet Head, he’s always picking on girls.”
Frieda agreed with me. “Miss Forrester said he was incorrigival.”
“Really?” I didn’t know what that meant, but it had enough of a doom sound in it to be true of Bay Boy.
While Frieda and I clucked on about the near fight, Maureen, suddenly animated, put her velvet-sleeved arm through Pecola’s and began to behave as though they were the closest of friends.
“I just moved here. My name is Maureen Peal. What’s yours?”
“Pecola.”
“Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?”
“I don’t know. What is that?”
“The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it. Claudette Colbert too.”
“Oh.” Pecola’s voice was no more than a sigh.
“Anyway, her name was Pecola too. She was so pretty. When it comes back, I’m going to see it again. My mother has seen it four times.”
Frieda and I walked behind them, surprised at Maureen’s friendliness to Pecola, but pleased. Maybe she wasn’t so bad, after all. Frieda had put her coat back on her head, and the two of us, so draped, trotted along enjoying the warm breeze and Frieda’s heroics.
“You’re in my gym class, aren’t you?” Maureen asked Pecola.
“Yes.”
“Miss Erkmeister’s legs sure are bow. I bet she thinks they’re cute. How come she gets to wear real shorts, and we have to wear those old bloomers? I want to die every time I put them on.”
Pecola smiled but did not look at Maureen.
“Hey.” Maureen stopped short. “There’s an Isaley’s. Want some ice cream? I have money.”
She unzipped a hidden pocket in her muff and pulled out a multifolded dollar bill. I forgave her those knee socks.
“My uncle sued Isaley’s,” Maureen said to the three of us. “He sued the Isaley’s in Akron. They said he was disorderly and that that was why they wouldn’t serve him, but a friend of his, a policeman, came in and beared the witness, so the suit went through.”
“What’s a suit?”
“It’s when you can beat them up if you want to and won’t anybody do nothing. Our family does it all the time. We believe in suits.”
At the entrance to Isaley’s Maureen turned to Frieda and me, asking, “You all going to buy some ice cream?”
We looked at each other. “No,” Frieda said.
Maureen disappeared into the store with Pecola.
Frieda looked placidly down the street; I opened my mouth, but quickly closed it. It was extremely important that the world not know that I fully expected Maureen to buy us some ice cream, that for the past 120 seconds I had been selecting the flavor, that I had begun to like Maureen, and that neither of us had a penny.
We supposed Maureen was being nice to Pecola because of the boys, and were embarrassed to be caught—even by each other—thinking that she would treat us, or that we deserved it as much as Pecola did.
The girls came out. Pecola with two dips of orange-pineapple, Maureen with black raspberry.
“You should have got some,” she said. “They had all kinds. Don’t eat down to the tip of the cone,” she advised Pecola.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a fly in there.”
“How you know?”
“Oh, not really. A girl told me she found one in the bottom of hers once, and ever since then she throws that part away.”
“Oh.”
We passed the Dreamland Theater, and Betty Grable smiled down at us.
“Don’t you just love her?” Maureen asked.
“Uh-huh,” said Pecola.
I differed. “Hedy Lamarr is better.”
Maureen agreed. “Ooooo yes. My mother told me that a girl named Audrey, she went to the beauty parlor where we lived before, and asked the lady to fix her hair like Hedy Lamarr’s, and the lady said, ‘Yeah, when you grow some hair like Hedy Lamarr’s.’” She laughed long and sweet.
“Sounds crazy,” said Frieda.
“She sure is. Do you know she doesn’t even menstrate yet, and she’s sixteen. Do you, yet?”
“Yes.” Pecola glanced at us.
“So do I.” Maureen made no attempt to disguise her pride. “Two months ago I started. My girl friend in Toledo, where we lived before, said when she started she was scared to death. Thought she had killed herself.”
; “Do you know what it’s for?” Pecola asked the question as though hoping to provide the answer herself.
“For babies.” Maureen raised two pencil-stroke eyebrows at the obviousness of the question. “Babies need blood when they are inside you, and if you are having a baby, then you don’t menstrate. But when you’re not having a baby, then you don’t have to save the blood, so it comes out.”
“How do babies get the blood?” asked Pecola.
“Through the like-line. You know. Where your belly button is. That is where the like-line grows from and pumps the blood to the baby.”
“Well, if the belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies, how come boys have belly buttons?”
Maureen hesitated. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But boys have all sorts of things they don’t need.” Her tinkling laughter was somehow stronger than our nervous ones. She curled her tongue around the edge of the cone, scooping up a dollop of purple that made my eyes water. We were waiting for a stop light to change. Maureen kept scooping the ice cream from around the cone’s edge with her tongue; she didn’t bite the edge as I would have done. Her tongue circled the cone. Pecola had finished hers; Maureen evidently liked her things to last. While I was thinking about her ice cream, she must have been thinking about her last remark, for she said to Pecola, “Did you ever see a naked man?”
Pecola blinked, then looked away. “No. Where would I see a naked man?”
“I don’t know. I just asked.”
“I wouldn’t even look at him, even if I did see him. That’s dirty. Who wants to see a naked man?” Pecola was agitated. “Nobody’s father would be naked in front of his own daughter. Not unless he was dirty too.”
“I didn’t say ‘father.’ I just said ‘a naked man.’”
“Well…”
“How come you said ‘father’?” Maureen wanted to know.
“Who else would she see, dog tooth?” I was glad to have a chance to show anger. Not only because of the ice cream, but because we had seen our own father naked and didn’t care to be reminded of it and feel the shame brought on by the absence of shame. He had been walking down the hall from the bathroom into his bedroom and passed the open door of our room. We had lain there wide-eyed. He stopped and looked in, trying to see in the dark room whether we were really asleep—or was it his imagination that opened eyes were looking at him? Apparently he convinced himself that we were sleeping. He moved away, confident that his little girls would not lie open-eyed like that, staring, staring. When he had moved on, the dark took only him away, not his nakedness. That stayed in the room with us. Friendly-like.
“I’m not talking to you,” said Maureen. “Besides, I don’t care if she sees her father naked. She can look at him all day if she wants to. Who cares?”
“You do,” said Frieda. “That’s all you talk about.”
“It is not.”
“It is so. Boys, babies, and somebody’s naked daddy. You must be boy-crazy.”
“You better be quiet.”
“Who’s gonna make me?” Frieda put her hand on her hip and jutted her face toward Maureen.
“You all ready made. Mammy made.”
“You stop talking about my mama.”
“Well, you stop talking about my daddy.”
“Who said anything about your old daddy?”
“You did.”
“Well, you started it.”
“I wasn’t even talking to you. I was talking to Pecola.”
“Yeah. About seeing her naked daddy.”
“So what if she did see him?”
Pecola shouted, “I never saw my daddy naked. Never.”
“You did too,” Maureen snapped. “Bay Boy said so.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
“I did not.”
“Did. Your own daddy, too!”
Pecola tucked her head in—a funny, sad, helpless movement. A kind of hunching of the shoulders, pulling in of the neck, as though she wanted to cover her ears.
“You stop talking about her daddy,” I said.
“What do I care about her old black daddy?” asked Maureen.
“Black? Who you calling black?”
“You!”
“You think you so cute!” I swung at her and missed, hitting Pecola in the face. Furious at my clumsiness, I threw my notebook at her, but it caught her in the small of her velvet back, for she had turned and was flying across the street against traffic.
Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”
She ran down the street, the green knee socks making her legs look like wild dandelion stems that had somehow lost their heads. The weight of her remark stunned us, and it was a second or two before Frieda and I collected ourselves enough to shout, “Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie!” We chanted this most powerful of our arsenal of insults as long as we could see the green stems and rabbit fur.
Grown people frowned at the three girls on the curbside, two with their coats draped over their heads, the collars framing the eyebrows like nuns’ habits, black garters showing where they bit the tops of brown stockings that barely covered the knees, angry faces knotted like dark cauliflowers.
Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.
Frieda snatched her coat from her head. “Come on, Claudia. ’Bye, Pecola.”
We walked quickly at first, and then slower, pausing every now and then to fasten garters, tie shoelaces, scratch, or examine old scars. We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.
The house was quiet when we opened the door. The acrid smell of simmering turnips filled our cheeks with sour saliva.
“Mama!”
There was no answer, but a sound of feet. Mr. Henry shuffled part of the way down the stairs. One thick, hairless leg leaned out of his bathrobe.
“Hello there, Greta Garbo; hello, Ginger Rogers.”
We gave him the giggle he was accustomed to. “Hello, Mr. Henry. Where’s Mama?”
“She went to your grandmaw’s. Left word for you to cut off the turnips and eat some graham crackers till she got back. They in the kitchen.”
We sat in silence at the kitchen table, crumbling the crackers into anthills. In a little while Mr. Henry came back down the stairs. Now he had his trousers on under his robe.
“Say. Wouldn’t you all like some cream?”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“Here. Here’s a quarter. Gone over to Isaley’s and get yourself some cream. You been good girls, ain’t you?”
His light-green words restored color to the day. “Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Henry. Will you tell Mama for us if she comes?”
“Sure. But she ain’t due back for a s
pell.”
Coatless, we left the house and had gotten all the way to the corner when Frieda said, “I don’t want to go to Isaley’s.”
“What?”
“I don’t want ice cream. I want potato chips.”
“They got potato chips at Isaley’s.”
“I know, but why go all that long way? Miss Bertha got potato chips.”
“But I want ice cream.”
“No you don’t, Claudia.”
“I do too.”
“Well, you go on to Isaley’s. I’m going to Miss Bertha’s.”
“But you got the quarter, and I don’t want to go all the way up there by myself.”
“Then let’s go to Miss Bertha’s. You like her candy, don’t you?”
“It’s always stale, and she always runs out of stuff.”
“Today is Friday. She orders fresh on Friday.”
“And then that crazy old Soaphead Church lives there.”
“So what? We’re together. We’ll run if he does anything at us.”
“He scares me.”
“Well, I don’t want to go up by Isaley’s. Suppose Meringue Pie is hanging around. You want to run into her, Claudia?”
“Come on, Frieda. I’ll get candy.”
Miss Bertha had a small candy, snuff, and tobacco store. One brick room sitting in her front yard. You had to peep in the door, and if she wasn’t there, you knocked on the door of her house in back. This day she was sitting behind the counter reading a Bible in a tube of sunlight.
Frieda bought potato chips, and we got three Powerhouse bars for ten cents, and had a dime left. We hurried back home to sit under the lilac bushes on the side of the house. We always did our Candy Dance there so Rosemary could see us and get jealous. The Candy Dance was a humming, skipping, foot-tapping, eating, smacking combination that overtook us when we had sweets. Creeping between the bushes and the side of the house, we heard voices and laughter. We looked into the living-room window, expecting to see Mama. Instead we saw Mr. Henry and two women. In a playful manner, the way grandmothers do with babies, he was sucking the fingers of one of the women, whose laughter filled a tiny place over his head. The other woman was buttoning her coat. We knew immediately who they were, and our flesh crawled. One was China, and the other was called the Maginot Line. The back of my neck itched. These were the fancy women of the maroon nail polish that Mama and Big Mama hated. And in our house.
The Bluest Eye Page 6
