Authors: Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye (18 page)
We saw her sometimes. Frieda and I—after the baby came too soon and died. After the gossip and the slow wagging of heads. She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.
The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green 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 the mind.
We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was absurd, or repulsive, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her. Our flowers never grew. I was convinced that Frieda was right, that I had planted them too deeply. How could I have been so sloven? So we avoided Pecola Breedlove—forever.
And the years folded up like pocket handkerchiefs. Sammy left town long ago; Cholly died in the workhouse; Mrs. Breedlove still does housework. And Pecola is somewhere in that little brown house she and her mother moved to on the edge of town, where you can see her even now, once in a while. The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. 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. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.
She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end.
Oh, some of us “loved” her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I’m sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.
And now when I see her searching the garbage—for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did
not
plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. 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
Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.
ALSO BY TONI MORRISON
FICTION
Love
Paradise
Jazz
Beloved
Tar Baby
Song of Solomon
Sula
NONFICTION
The Dancing Mind
Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
ACCLAIM FOR
Toni Morrison
“[Toni Morrison] may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner.”
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“She is the best writer in America.”
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“[Toni Morrison] has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison.”
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“Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability.”
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New York
“Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.”
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“Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today.”
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2007
Copyright © 1970, copyright renewed 1998 by Toni Morrison
Foreword © 1993, 2007 by Toni Morrison
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, in 1970, and subsequently published in slightly different form in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1993.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of the foreword were previously published as the afterword to the 1993 Knopf edition.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Morrison, Toni.
The bluest eye / by Toni Morrison.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Afro-Americans—Ohio—Fiction. 2. Girls—Ohio—Fiction. I. Title
PS3563.08749855 1993
813.54—DC20
93-43124
eISBN: 978-0-307-38658-8
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