Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye

Heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of a majority, they gaily harassed her. "Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo…" They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control; the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds-cooled-and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit.

Black e mo Black e mo Ya daddy sleeps nekked Stch ta ta stch ta ta stach ta ta ta ta ta Pecola edged around the circle crying. She had dropped her notebook, and covered her eyes with her hands. We watched, afraid they might notice us and turn their energies our way. Then Frieda, with set lips and Mama's eyes, snatched her coat from her head and threw it on the ground. She ran toward them and brought her books down on Woodrow Cain's head. The circle broke. Woodrow Cain grabbed his head.

"Hey, girl!"

"You cut that out, you hear?" I had never heard Frieda's voice so loud and clear. Maybe because Frieda was taller than he was, maybe because he saw her eyes, maybe because he had lost interest in the game, or maybe because he had a crush on Frieda, in any case Woodrow looked frightened just long enough to give her more courage. "Leave her 'lone, or I'm gone tell everybody what you did!" Woodrow did not answer; he just walled his eyes. Bay Boy piped up, "Go on, gal. Ain't nobody bothering you."

"You shut up, Bullet Head." I had found my tongue. "Who you calling Bullet Head?"

"I'm calling you Bullet Head, Bullet Head."

Frieda took Pecola's hand. "Come on."

"You want a fat lip?" Bay Boy drew back his fist at me. "Yeah. Gimme one of yours."

"You gone get one." Maureen appeared at my elbow, and the boys seemed reluctant to continue under her springtime eyes so wide with interest. They buckled in confusion, not willing to beat up three girls under her watchful gaze. So they listened to a budding male instinct that told them to pretend we were unworthy of their attention. "Come on, man."

"Yeah. Come on. We ain't got time to fool with them." Grumbling a few disinterested epithets, they moved away. I picked up Pecola's notebook and Frieda's coat, and the four of us left the playground. "Old Bullet Head, he's always picking on girls." Frieda agreed with me. "Miss Forrester said he was incorrigival." Really?" I didn't know what that meant, but it had enough of a doom sound in it to be true of Bay Boy. While Frieda and I clucked on about the near fight, Maureen, suddenly animated, put her velvet-sleeved arm through Pecola's and began to behave as though they were the closest of friends.

"I just moved here. My name is Maureen Peal. What's yours?"

"Pecola."

"Pecola? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?"

"I don't know. What is that?"

"The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother 'cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad.

Everybody cries in it. Claudette Colbert too."

"Oh." Pecola's voice was no more than a sigh. "Anyway, her name was Pecola too.

She was so pretty. When it comes back, I'm going to see it again.

My mother has seen it four times." Frieda and I walked behind them, surprised at Maureen's friendliness to Pecola, but pleased.

Maybe she wasn't so bad, after all. Frieda had put her coat back on her head, and the two of us, so draped, trotted along enjoying the warm breeze and Frieda's heroics. "You're in my gym class, aren't you?" Maureen asked Pecola. "Yes."

"Miss Erkmeister's legs sure are bow. I bet she thinks they're cute.

How come she gets to wear real shorts, and we have to wear those old bloomers? I want to die every time I put them on." Pecola smiled but did not look at Maureen. "Hey." Maureen stopped short.

"There's an Isaley's. Want some ice cream? I have money." She unzipped a hidden pocket in her muff and pulled out a multifolded dollar bill. I forgave her those knee socks. "My uncle sued Isaley's." Maureen said to the three of us. "He sued the Isaley's in Akron. They said he was disorderly and that that was why they wouldn't serve him, but a friend of his, a policemen, came in and beared the witness, so the suit went through."

"What's a suit?"

"It's when you can beat them up if you want to and won't anybody do nothing. Our family does it all the time. We believe in suits." At the entrance to Isaley's Maureen turned to Frieda and me, asking, "You all going to buy some ice cream?" We looked at each other. "No," Frieda said. Maureen disappeared into the store with Pecola. Frieda looked placidly down the street; I opened my mouth, but quickly closed it. It was extremely important that the world not know that I fully expected Maureen to buy us some ice cream, that for the past 120 seconds I had been selecting the flavor, that I had begun to like Maureen, and that neither of us had a penny. We supposed Maureen was being nice to Pecola because of the boys, and were embarrassed to be caught-even by each other-thinking that she would treat us, or that we deserved it as much as Pecola did. The girls came out. Pecola with two dips of orange-pineapple, Maureen with black raspberry. "You should have got some," she said. "They had all kinds. Don't eat down to the tip of the cone," she advised Pecola. "Why?"

"Because there's a fly in there."

"How you know?"

"Oh, not really. A girl told me she found one in the bottom of hers once, and ever since then she throws that part away."

"Oh."

We passed the Dreamland Theater, and Betty Grable smiled down at us. "Don't you just love her?" Maureen asked. "Uh-huh," said Pecola. I differed. "Hedy Lamarr is better." Maureen agreed.

"Ooooo yes. My mother told me that a girl named Audrey, she went to the beauty parlor where we lived before, and asked the lady to fix her hair like Hedy Lamarr's, and the lady said, 'Yeah, when you grow some hair like Hedy Lamarr's.'" She laughed long and sweet. "Sounds crazy," said Frieda. "She sure is. Do you know she doesn't even menstrate yet, and she's sixteen. Do you, yet?"

"Yes." Pecola glanced at us. "So do I." Maureen made no attempt to disguise her pride. "Two months ago I started. My girl friend in Toledo, where we lived before, said when she started she was scared to death. Thought she had killed herself."

"Do you know what it's for?" Pecola asked the question as though hoping to provide the answer herself. "For babies." Maureen raised two pencil-stroke eyebrows at the obviousness of the question.

"Babies need blood when they are inside you, and if you are having a baby, then you don't menstrate. But when you're not having a baby, then you don't have to save the blood, so it comes out."

"How do babies get the blood?" asked Pecola. "Through the like-line. You know. Where your belly button is. That is where the like-line grows from and pumps the blood to the baby."

"Well, if the belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies, how come boys have belly buttons?" Maureen hesitated. "I don't know," she admitted. "But boys have all sorts of things they don't need." Her tinkling laughter was somehow stronger than our nervous ones. She curled her tongue around the edge of the cone, scooping up a dollop of purple that made my eyes water. We were waiting for a stop light to change. Maureen kept scooping the ice cream from around the cone's edge with her tongue; she didn't bite the edge as I would have done. Her tongue circled the cone. Pecola had finished hers; Maureen evidently liked her things to last. While I was thinking about her ice cream, she must have been thinking about her last remark, for she said to Pecola, "Did you ever see a naked man?" Pecola blinked, then looked away. "No.