1. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

Note: This book figures large in my bookish past, and I started writing this essay for an (unfinished) post for IBARW. Not all of my posts will be this personal.


I first read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye more than thirty years ago. I haven't read it very often since (about three times, once for a class in college) but it has stayed with me, lodged firmly on my memory's bookshelf. It's one of my "foundational" books -- those books that you find just when you need them (even if you didn't know you needed it) and which fit into your brain like a puzzle piece from the Big Picture of, you know, life, the universe, and How Things Really Work.

When I was a kid, I was poor. I lived in one of those suburban working class/poor neighborhoods where bell hooks says America's white poor people are hidden. When I was in my teens, I started looking for stories about "people like me," as young people tend to do. The problem was, there wasn't a lot of really… contemporary working class literature by white authors laying around for me to find and devour. Not then. No Dorothy Allison, or Carolyn Chute, or Larry Brown or Raymond Carver. Yes, there was proletarian fiction. But that was too… historical and adult and I didn't grab ahold of that (not that I even saw a copy of Bottom Dogs or Christ in Concrete until I was much, much older). Even Tillie Olsen's characters were too old for me. John Steinbeck was assigned for school, again framed as historical and distant, with a test on Friday.

What I did grab ahold of was Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. And I devoured Morrison's early books -- and then went on to Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Anzaldua; later still bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, and Audre Lorde -- because I was (and still am!) hungry for stories about poor and working class people like me. I wanted to make sense of the differences between my family and the people around us. I had only a nebulous idea of what "class" meant. These writers taught me a lot about that, helping to form and inform my "class consciousness," to use the old skool term. I'm sure that had I found the "white" stories I was looking for all those years ago, I wouldn't have learned nearly as much, because by reading working class women of color to learn about class, I learned about racism at the same time. (Bookworm-style, at least!) It wasn't (and isn't) always easy, but I listened to these writers, not only because the lives they wrote about were similar to mine, but because they were different. You know that thing where you celebrate what people have in common at the same time respect what they do not? That's hard. Even when it's just you, alone, with a book.

So, first, it was what I had in common with the character of nine-year-old Claudia McTeer that drew me into The Bluest Eye. The book appealed to me because a lot of the story is told from her perspective. I could identify with her; and her family's place in the scheme of things is very much like mine was then. That is, poor, and respectable at the heart, but always, intimately, bumping up against outcasts and outsiders like the Breedloves. I had cousins like the Breedloves. I knew the Breedloves. And I knew they didn't just appear out of nowhere bad, poor, and miserable. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove are broken by the world.

They are broken by the white world. I knew that. Morrison is clear on that! But still, I could fit pieces of the novel into my own puzzle; I could see parallels between Claudia's life and mine. Between Pecola's life and mine. In one of the most awful moments in the book, when Pecola's mother beats her when she drops the berry pie on her white employer's kitchen floor, I grieved for both of them; for Pecola because of her mother's rejection and betrayal, and for Pauline because of her sad, doomed love for that unattainable house: solid (where hers was rickety) comfortable (she lived in an abandoned storefront), full of beautiful things (instead of worn and broken junk), shiny (she cleaned it, yes, but it sparkled when she was done, as her own would never do) and safe. She doesn't live there; she's only there on sufferance, and her "ugly," black, awkward daughter doesn't belong there at all.

I lived in a rickety, ugly house. I knew what it was like to want a clean and pretty and house -- and I knew what ugly things that wanting did to you, a want so strong it could make you turn your back on your own. I knew that pain. Not exactly the same way Pauline and Pecola knew it, not as poor black people know it. But I knew it well enough that my guts clenched up while reading that scene. And so I could move from identifying with the young Claudia, to Pecola, to Pauline, to the world of poor black adults, whose lives were a lot like that of the adults I knew. Only worse.

Re-reading the book now, I find I remembered the characters -- Claudia and her sister Frieda; Pecola, Pauline and Cholly Breedlove; the three whores, China, Poland and The Maginot Line, Soaphead Church. I remembered the terrible scenes -- and a few sweet ones. But somehow I had forgotten the beauty of Morrison's writing, which sings even during the bleakest moments. The language changes, and twists, and flows, and hammers down, as it moves from character to character: from the innocent, violent coarseness of a nine-year-old girl, to her mother's hours-long complaints about "some people" to Cholly's dull rage, Pauline's fantasy life, Soaphead Church's letter to God. It soars as an omniscient narrator that swoops down into each character's point of view, then draws back to view the larger story.

An excerpt:

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 a 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.

This family, on a Saturday morning in October, began, one by one, to stir out of their dreams of affluence and vengeance into the anonymous misery of their storefront.

--Toni Morrison

Comments

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

This is a really great idea. (The community I mean.) Hopefully it will prod me to read some stuff by non-dead-white-males....

I read The Bluest Eye in college, as the final book in a year-long "Great Books of Western Civ" class, but I'm ashamed to say I can't remember anything about it except that it introduced me to the concept of Dick and Jane books (we didn't have them in New Zealand, or I didn't, when I was a kid) and contained lots of violence. I should give it a reread one of these days.

[decarnin.livejournal.com]

Really interesting description of how and why the book affected you so strongly. I read it much later in life but *also* about 30 years ago, and my memory is very hazy, "not a happy book" is where it's categorized somewhere in my brain cellars, and only the names of the characters you mention ring bells (The Maginot Line!) It makes me wonder what books did similar things for me, though of course none would be exactly the same -- I grew up in that clean, pretty, safe house, so from books I could only get "insights" and some amount of identification in the literary sense with characters living in poverty, not the kind of Recognition you feel when something resonates truthfully with your own past. But some identification does happen, and from those books come a lot of our later political leanings. I'll have to think about this, try to remember. I mean, there are those I loved and deeply deeply respected, like Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man", but I know that wasn't early enough to be the big Aha for me. Hm...

Meanwhile, really look forward to your comments on the next one, and everyone else's 2 cents as well!