Toni Morrison is one of those authors who have always been on my list, mostly due to the controversy around their books (stupid book banners), but I’ve never gotten around to reading them. Both The Bluest Eye and Beloved were on my The Classics Club list I created back in 2012 and I picked up physical copies sometime after that.
When Morrison passed in 2019, I told myself I would read her works and it took me this long to get to them thanks to always being distracted and just not making an effort. Both are relatively short so ended up on my Rando Book Selector spreadsheet using randomly generated titles from roughly 60 books to slowly chip away at my TBR pile and The Bluest Eye came up as I was planning for a recent vacation and here we are.
I want to start by saying I 100% do not agree with banning books and it drives me wild when I hear about it (looking at you Maus), especially when they are by an author of color or an LGBT author, I mean come the f*ck on talk about agendas. This being said, I think there is a time and place for some of these books to be read and discovered. If I had to read this in high school I’m not sure my maturity level could’ve handled it. It is DEFINITELY a book that should be read, but it does not deal with light subjects.
While he moves inside her, she will wonder why they didn’t put the necessary parts of the body in some more convenient place—like the armpit, for example, or the palm of the hand. Someplace one could get to easily, and quickly, without undressing. (84)
From racism and rape to misogyny, abuse, and poverty, Morrison paints a bleak and disparaging picture of small-town Ohio. This book could create fascinating discussions and really make you think, especially if you’re a white middle-class man, but I do think maturity has to be taken into account. Even with a teacher-guided discussion, I feel like my brain would’ve shut down and I would not have appreciated the masterpiece this is. In undergrad, absolutely this should be read because minds are constantly being stretched and strained to adapt to new ideas and a wider world. But as I type this, I think it probably defeats the purpose and just further highlights how sheltered I was growing up and says more about me than about whether or not high school students SHOULD be reading this. So maybe my point is idiotic and we should be challenging students to read this at a younger age. With a protagonist and narrator younger, not even teenagers, who would read this in school, it is the real world and issues like race and abuse shouldn’t be avoided to soften the blow . . . so ugh.
We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. our limitations were not known to us—not then. Our only handicap was our size; people gave us orders because they were bigger and stronger. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity and pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a human life. (191)
These two little girls Claudia and Frieda already know at such a young age (9 and 10) that society is not for them and that they are going to have to carve their own space out of it, is soul-crushing while simultaneously moving. They are forced to find their way in society, even with a family present, but with their youthful naivete, they truly believe they have the power to affect change as big as they try because they’ve had to fight for every ounce of who they are.
They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian. And the sound of these places in their mouths make you think of love. When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say ‘Mobile’ and you think you’ve been kissed. They say ‘Aiken’ and you see a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing. They say ‘Nagadoches’ and you want to say ‘Yes, I will.’ You don’t know what these towns are like, but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out. (81)
The most shocking thing to me about this book wasn’t the racism, the abuse, the rape, or even the abject poverty. It was how beautiful Morrison’s language was. She wrote about these super heavy subjects and societal issues but did it with such stunning prose that I glided through the book with the oppressive heaviness of the story only slowly building in me. It’s really made me look forward to reading more of her work, so hopefully Beloved won’t languish too much longer on my shelf.
Morrison’s writing of the Black experience was incredibly visceral. This was written in the 1960s and I’m not shocked (but I am angry) that so much hasn’t changed over the past FIFTY years. Two scenes, in particular, stood out to me. An early scene where Claudia is coming to terms with the systemic oppression of Black people and the idolization of white women:
I destroyed white baby dolls.
But the dismember of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. (23)
I read this scene with both awe and horror. The transference that occurs is both genius and creepy like you could lift this passage out of The Bluest Eye and drop it into the start of a serial killer murder thriller and it would fit perfectly. And what happens before and after this immediate passage just adds to the intensity of it.
The second scene started more overt with two white men coming across Cholly (Pecola’s father) and Darlene having sex in the woods and treating them like animals at a zoo. And rather than jumping straight to the rage against the white men or the system, we see a more nuanced rage against Darlene because of Cholly’s broader impotence as a young black man (I want to say mid-teens):
Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. (151)
And OMG, y’all the characters of this novel were so real. I honestly felt like the protagonist was probably the least real, but I think that was a strategic decision as everything in the novel revolved around Pecola. We got a lot more about her father, Cholly, and her mother, Polly/Mrs. Breedlove, which gives us why Pecola is the way she is, but still not who she is, and that I think has to do with the trauma she goes through and the complete loss of self in her first eleven years of life. But the minor characters from the three prostitutes and Maureen, to the little white girl Mrs. Breedlove takes care of to the creepy AF Soaphead Church that no small town exists without:
It was as though his disdain of human contact had converted itself into a craving for things humans had touched. The residue of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he could withstand of humanity. (165)
There’s just so much I could write about and I feel like I haven’t done the book any justice at all. I should probably re-read this again in a few years and see what sort of impact it has then.
Recommendation: This was a fascinating, horrifying, moving novel that really should be required reading. It was fascinating how Morrison wove the storylines together from the elementary school primer to the violence with flashbacks and foreshadowing. It was horrifying because Morrison’s blunt and frank presentation (through beautiful language) of that same violence and the abject poverty the characters lived in, while still providing a juxtaposition of the poor and the even poorer. And it was moving, mostly from Morrison’s pulling the reader in and making you feel every emotion and every physical reaction from the shame of Cholly in the woods to the empowerment/helplessness of Claudia and Freida as they planted and then witnessed the failure of their flower plan.
Opening Line: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door.”
Closing Line: “At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)