Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
The Bluest Eye is a tale of longing and desire, love and hate, pain and beauty, all rolled together into one. It has one ostensible narrative which follows a young black girl, Pecola, as she navigates a difficult coming of age and ends up pregnant with her father's child. Another line follows Claudia, our narrator, who is close to Pecola in age, and her sister, Frieda, as they, too, adolesce in ways both trying and amusing. Still other arcs trace backward in the history of several characters, like Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's father, and Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's mother. We see not only what happens to each person, but why it came to be, and why, in fact, we should have sympathy or understanding for each character, particularly in exploring the ways that their blackness (and/or a white definition of blackness) impacts their sense of self. In the end, the actual events feel immaterial. What one leaves the book with is a sense of fulfillment and emptiness in equal measure, which echoes the complex, contradictory, and nearly impossible childhoods of our three female leads.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

If you haven't read this one, I highly recommend. It's definitely not what I would call a light read, but it's a must read, for sure. It's also quite short, so you really don't have any excuse, blobbers. ;)
My thoughts, in no specific order...

On being a phenom
I guess I knew that Toni Morrison had been around and on the literary scene for quite some time, but did you know that this book will be 50 years old next year? Beloved was my first introduction to Toni Morrison's work, and in my head I think I thought that book was newer, too, but it was actually published a year after I was born, so it's over 30 years old, too. Toni Morrison is a gift to the world. Here's a passage to give you a flavor of her prose: 

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly...We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.

On white dolls
Much of this novel centers on the concept of a desire for transformation, to escape the confines of blackness and be what seems to be America's definition of beautiful (blue eyes, blond-haired). I loved the way that Claudia broke this down for us, and how she was simultaneously revolutionary in her thinking and so obviously valid in her feelings. Here's her on white baby dolls: 

I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what what every girl child treasured.

And then later, comparing themselves to Maureen Peal, a white girl from school: 

If [Maureen] was cute - and if anything could be believed, if she was then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser.

How often do we as children define ourselves in opposites like this? How damaging is this to our psyche? Can we avoid it? I'm not sure that we can, and certainly it's a habit that persists well through adulthood. I think it's worth cultivating an active resistance to.

On no one asking you what you want for Christmas
I loved Claudia as a character, and I loved both her pointing out that no one had asked her what she wanted for Christmas (which was not a white baby doll, to be quite clear) and what she said she would want if they had. 

I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone. I have mentioned this before, but I, too, love lilacs, and wouldn't mind someone playing the violin or viola or cello for me alone.

On her mother being in 'a singing mood'
This is one of my favorite lines.

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

On Being Mary Jane
One of my best friends put me on to the show Being Mary Jane (which is excellent, btw) and when I read this line, I immediately wondered if this was the inspiration for the title. It's a scene where Pecola takes a few pennies to the store to buy candy, and she buys three Mary Janes.

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

Maureen Peal
I loved the way Maureen was depicted and villainized and just so clearly painted into my mind. 

A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.

On candy dances
Claudia and Frieda make reference to their 'candy dances' when they come home and taunt the neighbor (whom they hate) and I just loved this line. 

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.

On black women
So I'm sure that I'm thinking of this in reverse, but reading this book at this point in my life made it feel like it was an epilogue to Beyoncé's Lemonade. In fact, Beyoncé's Lemonade is a culmination of years and decades and centuries of experience and art and revelations like this one. In any case, here are some lines that stood out, and captured this idea of black female personhood, and its unique burdens and boons. 

Edging into life from the back door. Becoming. Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, "Do this." White children said, "Give me that." White men said, "Come here." Black men said, "Lay down." The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and re-created it in their own image.

And on comparing blackness against other blackness - 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.

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.

On Pecola's baby - I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live - just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.

Cholly, on children
I mention in my opening that Morrison has a way of informing all of her characters so that we see not just their motivations, but the ways in which race and poverty and happenstance define their view of the world. I feel like the best way to describe is that there's no easy depiction of 'good' or 'bad' characters, because they are all layered by and influenced by the systemic and personal moments in their lives. Here's an example of why Cholly could do something like have sex with his eleven-year-old daughter, but also why that act, while feeling heinous to the reader, is not imbued with hate or evil intent: 

Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children. As it was, he reacted to them, and his reactions were based on what he felt at the moment.

So much of who we are and who we will be is defined well before we have a real say in it. This is not to sanction any act under the sun, or to nullify Pecola's very real trauma here, but rather, to highlight the nuance embedded in the scene.

On being more alike than unalike
Again, what struck me as I read this novel was that, as Maya Angelou put it, in the end, we are more alike than we are unalike. Here are a few moments of alikeness I found with Claudia:

• It takes a long time for my body to heat its place in the bed. I was literally JUST trying to get my feet warm in the bed as I read this.

• Mom rubbing Vicks on her chest - I, too, have vivid memories of my mother rubbing Vicks on my chest, and the 'hurts so good' feeling associated with it. 

• Mason jars - okay, so I know every hipster has them, but I have them all over not just because I'm a hipster, but because each one reminds me that it used to hold my mother's applesauce, or her jam, or her canned tomatoes, or her peaches. 

• Don't nobody never want nothing till they see me at the sink. Then everybody got to drink water... Claudia's mom says this when Claudia comes to get a glass of water, and I laughed because it reminded me of my mom and I having the exact same argument. We keep the trash under the kitchen sink, and no one EVER needs to throw anything out until Just that moment when Mom was standing in front of the sink. ;)

• I just get tired of having everything last. This is what Claudia says when she's annoyed her sister got touched inappropriately. It's obviously a complicated scene for many reasons, but I love that Claudia's first impression is to be jealous and annoyed. It reminded me of my experience as a third daughter, and often feeling like whatever the thing was, I was tired of getting it last! (Amusingly, Frieda points out that Claudia had scarlet fever first. lolz.)

Marvelous turns of phrase (There are so many - please read it yourself so you can find all of them. But just in case, here are a few I've curated for you.)

• But the unquarreled evening hung like the first note of a dirge in sullenly expectant air.

• From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea. God, I love this line.

• Her light-green words restored color to the day.

• Black people were not allowed in [Lake Shore Park], and so it filled our dreams.

• Over her shoulder she spit out words to us like rotten pieces of apple.

• We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

• Evening came. The dark, the warmth, the quiet, enclosed Cholly like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its own seed.

Referents and Reverberations

This line - Adults do not talk to us. They give us directions. reminded me of Le Petit Prince and his dedication: 

I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up grew.

And this line:
There is somethin' in this house that loves brassieres, said by one of the prostitutes who befriends Pecola, reminded me of these telegrams from Hotel New Hampshire, from Freud to Winslow:

• GOOD YOU COMING! BRING ALL KIDS AND PETS! LOTS OF ROOM. YOU'LL LIKE THE BEAR.

• On the political dissidents: Their typewriters bother the bear.

• EVERYONE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO YOU COMING. EVEN PROSTITUTES!

New Words/Concepts
asafetida - the dried latex exuded from the rhizome or tap root of several species of Ferula, a perennial herb that is part of the celery family Apiaceae. In the African American Hoodoo tradition, asafoetida is used in magic spells, as it is believed to have the power both to protect and to curse. Also used in traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic, among many other uses!

harridan - a strict, bossy, or belligerent old woman

Moirai - The Moirai (Moirae) were the three goddesses of fate who personified the inescapable destiny of man. They assigned to every person his or her fate or share in the scheme of things.

threnody - a lament

This book is full of many things, but in case you're left feeling a little on the dark side of life, I'll close us out with two of my favorite moments that are on the lighter side. 

First, this one, on girlhood: 

Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then.

And this one, when Mrs. Breedlove first meets Cholly: 

She had not known there was so much laughter in the world.

So, dear blobbists, when you wake tomorrow, remember the time when you were guileless and without vanity, when you were still in love with yourself. Inhabit that space, and rest easy in the knowledge that even in years like these, there is so much laughter in the world. 

Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Good night.