The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
If you’re new here, this is the part of my newsletter where I write about banned books. Here is my first post explaining some of the format and goals of this section, and here are links to my first two posts, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. Read along if you’d like and comment if you have thoughts. I’d love to hear them.
The Stats
This is another one. According to the American Library Association (ALA), The Bluest Eye was in the top 10 most banned books in the US between the years 2000 and 2020. That doesn’t refer to government restrictions, but bans in various school districts and libraries.
The Wentzville School District in St Louis, Missouri banned the book in January of this year. The reason given: it deals with issues of race, gender and sexual identity. As of March, 2022, that has since been overturned after a class action lawsuit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of students.
If you’ve read my previous posts, I don’t even know if I have to tell you why it’s banned.
But I’ll do it anyway. The first reason, is sexual content. But I have to say that unlike the lusty but very consensual affair in 1984, or the strange, rigid descriptions of what amounts to government mandated rape of the religious variety in The Handmaid’s Tale, the descriptions in The Bluest Eye are violent, incestual, pedophilic, and even when consensual, very graphic.
It was a hard read. A very hard read. Spellbinding for many reasons, but a primary one being the utter tragedy and rare literary look into the mind of a father who rapes and impregnates his 11-year-old daughter, and the aftermath when her baby is born prematurely and passes away.
There’s more to this ban. Race issues.
The story follows a little black girl, Pecola. Abused by her parents, considered ugly by even her own mother, she idolizes Shirley Temple and longs for blue eyes. Like the blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby dolls that all the little black girls get for Christmas, to the gasps of their adoring parents. Adoration, not for them, but for the little white baby dolls.
To be honest, I’m astounded that you can list race issues as a reason to ban a book at all. Ignore an entire perspective and experience? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Because it’s uncomfortable for you to address? Again, I think this is the power of fiction. Turn the Other into your friend, your daughter, your mother, your husband, your brother. Feel what they feel. Bleed when they bleed. Weep when they weep.
And this ban would not be complete in this day and age without…Sexual Identity.
I had to think about this one before I remembered that there is one gay character. The light-skinned, West Indian man named Soaphead Church. He is a self-proclaimed spiritualist, a man who makes money by defrauding people into thinking he has some kind of supernatural power. He longs to be with a man, fantasizes about it, but never allows himself to act on those fantasies. In fact, he is celibate, his urges twisted into pedophilia that he acts out, not on boys, but on little girls. A perverse form of purity that aligns with his interpretation of God’s will in the world and his place in it. He is the quintessential “dirty old man” cloaked in religious façade.
An attempt to summarize.
The book follows the story of a little girl named Pecola Breedlove. It takes place in the years 1940 to 1941, just after The Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio (the same town the writer, Toni Morrison is from). Her hair is beautiful, but nothing else is. Told from the perspective of Claudia MacTeer, who meets Pecola when she is placed in her home as her foster sister, the story chronicles one destructive year in her life . Her abusive, drunken father has just burned down their home, leaving his wife Pauline Breedlove, his son Sammy, and his daughter Pecola, homeless.
While living with the MacTeer’s, Claudia and her sister Frieda befriend Pecola. They bear witness as the boys in school call her “black,” an insult they heap out though they themselves are black. She is unnoticed by all the adults around her. Isolated and without any friends besides the young narrator and her sister. Each character in their own way embodies internalized racism, hating their blackness in varying degrees. Pecola sees her black skin as the root of all her problems, ugly and unchanging.
“The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.”
Pecola goes back to live with her abusive family, and it is then that she is raped by her father, Cholly, for the first time, and we find out later, again a second time. She becomes pregnant, and when her mother finds out, she beats her, refusing to believe that her father did it.
Claudia recounts the adult talk she hears about the pregnancy.
“She bears some of the fault,” and, “Hopefully the baby dies.”
No one will look at Pecola. No one acknowledges her existence. Not after what happened to her. What she allowed to happen. Claudia and her sister Frieda are the only ones who wish and pray that the baby will live.
“I felt a need for someone to want the black baby…to counteract the…love of white baby dolls.”
They use money they were saving for a bike to buy marigold seeds, believing that if the flowers they plant grow and live, the baby too will grow and live. But the marigolds don’t grow, and the baby does die.
All along, Pecola believes that if she could only have blue eyes, all of her pain and ugliness would go away. She prays and prays, and finally goes to Soaphouse Church with her request. The old spiritualist fraud takes pity on her, more so because he knows he cannot give her blue eyes. But he can make her think that she will have blue eyes.
In the end, following the death of her baby, Pecola loses her mind. Left with only her mother in a house on the edge of town after her brother Sammy runs away, and her father Cholly is arrested and then dies in a workhouse, she wanders between sunflowers and piles of trash in the back yard. In the last chapter, we hear her conversation with an imaginary friend about her blue eyes. Eyes that she does not really have, but believes she does. She wants to know for certain that she has the bluest eyes, the bluest eyes of anyone in the world.
Claudia, our narrator, finishes the story describing the life that Pecola lives.
“She spent her days…walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of her mind.”
When you pick up a book…
I could also say, when you make a friend. When you go on a date. When you have a child. Whenever your heart opens up and you listen to another person’s experience of the world. What stories are off limits for you? At what point do you turn your head away from someone telling you, This Happened To Me?
This is the way I view books. I listened to this one on Audible, and it was read by Toni Morrison herself. I finished it late on a Saturday, laying in the dark of my living room with the screen door open. Crickets alive and the only sound in the night. When she finished reading the last line, lamenting Pecola’s insanity and the town and people that drove her there, I was speechless.
“This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late”
-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
This was the first banned book that I’ve read so far, and thought, “I get why parents don’t want their kids reading this.” It rips, tears innocence in layers as you read a year in Pecola’s life. Her descent into madness. The people who beat her, rape her, taunt her.
But…can I tell you something?
I have sat up late with more people than you would think possible, and heard stories of rape, molestation, abuse, self-hatred, eating disorders, bipolar mania and the depression that follows, loneliness, addiction. So many people, so many people lived these stories. But we want to ban the reading of them? Is it different than the adults who will not turn their heads towards Pecola, who will not look at her because of her story?
Can you stop your child from meeting someone that has been raped or molested or abused or hated themselves? Can you stop them from knowing someone who thinks they are too ugly or too black or too male or too fat? The scary truth of parenting is that the world, to a large extent, is out of our control, and with each passing year, the influence and the bubble you can hold your child in shrinks. They grow too large for it and go out into a world where this, I think, is a deep truth. The experience of many.
My point here is that reading is dangerous. It cuts you sometimes. Hurts you deeper than you ever thought it could. You live alongside a new world, and discover shards of pain that you may never have lived through, may never live through, but for opening the cover of a book. And I think we need bravery in this time. Instead of closing our eyes, refusing to look, we need to experience and open ourselves to something that is not ourselves. Books, this book, allows us to do that.
An anecdote
I grew up in Colorado Springs, a city as white as can be, and I am myself white. There’s a little diversity, much more now than when I was growing up. But compared to so much of the country, it is lacking. My experiences with Black America were therefore also totally lacking. It wasn’t until I turned eighteen and moved to Kansas City that I experienced what is normal in much of the country: a culturally, ethnically, racially diverse city.
The neighborhoods I lived in during my twelve years there were predominately Black. It was my first time encountering neighborhoods that still bore the sting of redlining1. Main streets2 throughout the city to this day, are divided by black and white. Not legally anymore mind you, but reality has not caught up to the laws mandating fair housing regardless of race or ethnicity.
I was nineteen when I gave a Black coworker a ride home deep into the inner city. I stayed for a while to talk with her elderly neighbor who babysat a gaggle of young children while their parents worked. I didn’t read much into it as we drove in, when she proudly pointed out that her street wasn’t so bad because she lived right near a police station. Something she picked out in a neighborhood, like a big yard or a spacious kitchen.
As the sun started to set, she told me that it would be best to go home now.
“It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay after dark.”
I scrambled out of there, afraid of what that meant. I still don’t know if she meant it in general, or because I was white in an all (that I could see) black neighborhood. My own neighborhoods in that city were racially blended. There was trouble sometimes, but to be honest I never saw it. The families on the blocks that I drove and walked through were kind. Working families. Elderly people who retired and did nothing but look after their lawns.
I was (and experientially still am) ignorant to the true plight of Black America. I only knew what was taught in my classrooms. Slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, then Martin Luther King and aren’t we all happy? Obviously the last few years have shown that no, we aren’t all happy. There is still work to be done. But I have to say that living and talking with black people, I knew that things weren’t solved the way I probably imagined from my desk seat in high school.
I had a conversation with my neighbor one night. She invited me to a cookout. There was barbecued chicken and corn. Her daughter would play at my house often with my toddler son, and on the weekends her husband had his kids from his first marriage over, four of them. All boys if I remember right. They were polite, smiling, bursting with energy. Eager to run through a sprinkler and eat summer popsicles.
On that night, my neighbor told me that she was happy her own daughter was light skinned. That was my introduction to the self hatred that plagues the black community (maybe other races and ethnicities as well) in the form of colorism. I don’t know if it is a worldwide issue (though I suspect it is), the putting down of dark skin, but it is certainly alive and well in America. My ears have been perked and set at attention since, and I’ve heard other things like it over the years, always from the mouths of black people.
“Don’t stay out in the sun too long. You’ll get dark.”
“I’m just glad I’m not black, black.”
And so on, and so forth. To say I was shocked by this undiscovered reality is an understatement. My own fair-skinned family members were always lamenting that they couldn’t tan. My ignorant white ass thought this was dealt with when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. In truth, I had never known that the white hatred of this country, poured out in its varying degrees of total outright savagery, and written more quietly into the legalities and politics of the land, had affected so deeply black people, and particularly black children, in this country.
Toni Morrison so aptly captures and expands upon this subject in soft prose, a quiet truth woven through it, the feeling that a little black girl must have had when there were no black baby dolls, and only yellow-haired, blue-eyed, pink ones.
And it captures what all people have felt and do feel when they look into the eyes of an Instagram model, or a guy at a gym, or the stranger in Starbucks who looks to have all their shit together, skinny or curvy, black or white or brown, female or male, young or old. That feeling when we look at ourselves, and see so utterly, that we are not them. And feel the twinge of longing to be like them, whatever it takes.
But it captures something else too, summed up in these lines. The feeling we have when we look at someone deemed ugly. Too big or too small, too poor or too rich, not female enough, not tall enough, not young enough. And decide that they are unworthy. Hear these words describing what ugly little Pecola meant to those around her.
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. 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. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares.”
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
The scapegoat. The one where all the people in the little town of Lorain, Ohio got to dump their garbage. Wash their sins. Compare and find her lacking. Cleanse themselves. Imagine all the people heaped with the sins of humanity. Bearing crosses made not by God, but by man. Torn and broken by the words and actions of the world. That is what this book teaches us. We see ourselves in little Pecola.
The times we were rejected and despised, sometimes even by our own families. We have our own bluest eye that we wish for. The bluest of the blue. But we have also pushed on someone all the things we most hate, called them ugly, turned our faces away. Made them unhuman. Yes, we have that as well.
But this book at its core, is about being black, and even more about being black and female in America. Toni Morrison wrote it at the height of the Black is Beautiful movement in 1970, and placed it in the 1940’s, when black was not beautiful. Told the quiet stories about the blue-eyed baby dolls that Claudia MacTeer hates and her parents fawn over. Not lynching. Not murder. Not white hooded men with burning crosses. The quiet self-hatred and destruction from the inside, and then the outside.
Toni Morrison was inspired to write the story based on a conversation she had with a friend as a child. Her friend told her that she did not believe in God, because she had been praying for two years to have blue eyes. And she did not have them. And she never would have them. No, she never would.
A discriminatory practice wherein mortgages, insurance loans and other financial services are denied based on race or ethnicity. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to fight this practice.
This is such a stark and powerful book and I love the way it begins by parodying the old Dick and Jane book series: “See Dick, see Dick run.” The way she uses language is so captivating. It reminds me of Nabokov (another banned author).