Toni Morrison’s Profound and Unrelenting Vision

by Hilton Als

The New Yorker, January 27, 2020

Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The book? Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye,” which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she’s left to wander the streets in madness:

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 her 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 valley of the mind.

Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread—William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930), say, or Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” or Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (both published in 1952)—Morrison’s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story.

Like all the principal characters in “The Bluest Eye,” Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone—God, perhaps—will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free—free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She knows what she’d find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. But in those harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison’s spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the town: “Grown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.”

In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking—and seeing—is described again and again. One example of many: Peering through a window in their family home, Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, catch a first glimpse of sex. A beloved boarder is consorting with a notorious prostitute. What can it mean, him sucking on that woman’s fingers? Is that love? Or is it what a man does to, and not with, a female? Another example: When Pecola goes to buy some of her treasured Mary Janes, the white shopkeeper sees her but can’t fix his attention on her; nothing in his experience has prepared him to recognize a little black girl as an entity.

Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change. Instead, there’s a great deal of condemnation and parochial disapproval. And it’s mostly aimed at black women—especially those mothers who don’t keep their home or their children clean. Cleanliness, of course, is next to godliness, and who would want to commit the double sin of being black and dirty? Pecola’s very presence exacerbates some of the other characters’ not so buried feelings about their own race and poverty—liabilities that push these Ohioans apart, rather than unite them: no one wants to be confronted with her own despair, especially when it’s reflected in the eyes of another despairing person. And the truth is, by the time we leave Pecola, pecking at the waste on the margins of the world, we, too, may feel a measure of relief at no longer having to see what Morrison sees, her profound and unrelenting vision of what life can do to the forsaken.

Morrison said that she wrote “The Bluest Eye” because she wanted to read it. She began the book in 1965, when she was thirty-four years old. She had majored in English at Howard University, after which she did her M.A. at Cornell. (Her thesis, which she described as “shaky,” was about suicide as a theme in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.) Morrison went on to teach at Texas Southern University, and then at Howard, in D.C., where she joined a writers’ group and worked on a short story about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes. The character was based on a girl she’d known growing up in Ohio, who’d wanted those eyes and decided that God didn’t exist when He didn’t give them to her. Morrison put the draft in a drawer and got on with the business of living. In 1958, she married the Jamaican architect Harold Morrison; seven years later, the couple was divorced, and Toni was by herself, supporting two young boys and working as an editor at L. W. Singer, a textbook company in Syracuse, New York. During an argument, a neighbor called Morrison a tramp in front of her children. Morrison filed a two-hundred-thousand-dollar lawsuit, which she later dropped. She fought to protect herself, but how do you protect yourself from isolation or loneliness?

Loneliness and hurt are often an artist’s first tools, and Morrison put hers to work by remembering and writing about the world she’d come from: the funk of poverty as well as its flowers, the ghost stories that her father, a welder and a Jack-of-all-trades, told his children. In a way, “The Bluest Eye” builds on those tales and honors the years when, without knowing it, Morrison was preparing to become an artist. Set near the start of the Second World War, before postwar prosperity changed Lorain, the book is narrated by Claudia, a feisty child, but the tone is elegiac, since a lot of the novel is driven by memory and the stories that shape it. Before the narrative begins, Morrison gives us the crux of the tale in a sort of preface:

Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow. . . . It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. . . . It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. . . . The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too. There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

By dispensing with narrative suspense up front, Morrison the modernist focusses our attention on character, on how the stories we tell about and to one another often are the story. We first meet Claudia and Frieda when a white neighbor taunts them, and we are shown that whiteness has no erotic pull for Claudia; she has no interest in being defiled or overtaken by it. Given white dolls for Christmas, she destroys them. But, she says, “The dismemberment of the 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.” Claudia has already learned to hate; she knows that the world doesn’t admire and validate her the way it does white girls, and she compensates for her vulnerability by fighting for attention and respect.

Pecola has no fight in her. (To see her name and read her story is to be reminded of Peola, another girl of color who is tormented by the question and the reality of race, in Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel “Imitation of Life.”) But, to be fair, Pecola comes to Claudia’s family under humbling circumstances: the county places her there because she and the other Breedloves—her father, Cholly, who works at the local plant; her mother, Polly, who works as a domestic; and her older brother, Sammy—have no home. Cholly, in addition to burning his house down, went “upside his wife’s head, and everybody, as a result, was outdoors.” (“There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors,” Morrison writes, in one of the book’s fabulous clarifying paragraphs. “If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go. . . . Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition.”) At Claudia’s, Pecola falls in love with an image of a blue-eyed Shirley Temple on a cup, and in order to peer at it as much as possible she drinks three quarts of milk, which angers Claudia’s mother. Testing charity’s patience can get you put outdoors, too.

Eventually, the Breedloves are reunited in a storefront. But how can you be reunited if you’ve never really been together? The three women who live above the Breedloves, prostitutes named China, Poland, and Miss Marie, have formed a kind of family. Unlike the rest of town, the prostitutes do not despise Pecola, so she visits with them, and Morrison’s fantastic ear for dialogue is given free rein; she revels in how women speak, not only to one another but to themselves:

“Hi, dumplin’. Where your socks?” Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

“Hello, Miss Marie. Hello, Miss China. Hello, Miss Poland.”

“You heard me. Where your socks? You as barelegged as a yard dog.”

“I couldn’t find any.”

“Couldn’t find any? Must be somethin’ in your house that loves socks.”

China chuckled. Whenever something was missing, Marie attributed its disappearance to “something in the house that loved it.” “There is somethin’ in this house that loves brassieres,” she would say with alarm. . . .

“How come you got so many boyfriends, Miss Marie?”

“Boyfriends? Boyfriends? Chittlin’, I ain’t seen a boy since nineteen and twenty-seven.” . . .

Pecola fingered the fringe of a scarf that lay on the back of a sofa. “I never seen nobody with as many boyfriends as you got, Miss Marie. How come they all love you?”

Marie opened a bottle of root beer. “What else they gone do? They know I’m rich and good-lookin’. They wants to put their toes in my curly hair, and get at my money.”

The accuracy of Morrison’s dialogue can render you a child again, eavesdropping on those thrilling ladies, whose talk feels like a delicious tease, a promise of warmth and attention. Will these women love Pecola—and stay adults in the process, which is to say, give her the five minutes of innocence and comfort that a black girl of her class is allowed in Lorain? Although Pecola is continually robbed of her innocence, she holds on to the scraps of her dreams with a steadfastness that breaks the heart. Her upstairs neighbors are another aspect of her hope. She loves to listen to these women’s stories because, despite the demands of their work, they are free: free to love whomever and spend their money however they like. Later in the conversation, Morrison reveals what the prostitutes keep from Pecola: how life can break you down. Pecola asks Marie if she had children with the man she loved, and Marie answers, “Yeah. Yeah. We had some.” Morrison continues, “Marie fidgeted. She pulled a bobby pin from her hair and began to pick her teeth. That meant she didn’t want to talk anymore.”

Again and again, Morrison asks what happens to the children. Where are Marie’s kids? And what does it do to Pecola to see the furious and grieving Polly Breedlove, who works for a white family, extend more tenderness to her white charge than she ever has to her own children? To tell Polly’s story, Morrison’s novel expands like an accordion. The music is mournful, and in it we hear Polly’s griping monologues about how she came to be with Cholly, who, as a baby, was abandoned on a pile of trash by his mother. Polly met him after her family moved from Alabama to Kentucky as part of the Great Migration. Once married, she and Cholly crossed the river to Ohio, where Polly went to work for a mean white woman. “Look like working for that woman and fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome. But I holt on to my jobs.” Like her daughter, Polly fell in love with what she was not—the white images she saw flickering on a movie screen:

The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture show. . . . [T]he screen would light up, and I’d move right on in them pictures. White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with the bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. I don’t know. I ’member one time I went to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I fixed my hair up like I’d seen hers on a magazine. A part on the side, with one little curl on my forehead. It looked just like her. . . . I got up to get me some candy. I was sitting back in my seat, and I taken a big bite of that candy, and it pulled a tooth right out of my mouth. I could of cried. . . . There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly.

When Pecola is born, Polly wants to love her, but in the end she can’t. “I knowed she was ugly,” she says. “Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” Black, poor, female, ugly: one gives birth to what one feels oneself to be. And other black women don’t help, especially if they’re like Geraldine, a minor character, who’s trying to maintain order and thus keep dirtiness, blackness, and chaos out of her life. One day, Geraldine’s son, Junior, convinces Pecola to come to his house, where he plays a terrible trick on her involving a cat. Geraldine arrives and puts an end to the mayhem, but her disgust bubbles up like vomit when she looks at Pecola, who, she feels, is surely more to blame than her son:

She had seen this little girl all of her life. Hanging out of windows over saloons in Mobile, crawling over the porches of shotgun houses on the edge of town, sitting in bus stations holding paper bags and crying to mothers who kept saying “Shet up!” Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. . . . The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.

We belong as much to the things we throw away as to the things we keep. Pecola is shunned by Cholly and Polly and Geraldine and nearly every other person she comes into contact with, but that doesn’t mean they can shake her, in part because they can’t shake themselves: she embodies their pain and anguish and disrupts their dreams, no matter how flimsy they may be. And, as horrible as it is, Cholly’s abuse of his daughter is an attempt for him to love someone. What he knows about love is informed by abandonment and contempt. Like Pecola, he grew up in a world where love was not only largely absent; it was an emotion to be despised. By extending his stunted understanding—violently, selfishly—to his powerless daughter, he acts out in one of the few ways available to him. But, in a life full of violations, it’s the last straw, and Pecola folds in on herself. We listen, at the end of the book, as she talks with the only person she has left: her blue-eyed self.

How many times a minute are you going to look inside that old thing?

I didn’t look in a long time.

You did too—

So what? I can look if I want to. . . .

They aren’t going anywhere.

I know it. I just like to look. . . .

I’d just like to do something else besides watch you stare in that mirror.

You’re just jealous.

I am not.

You are. You wish you had them.

Ha. What would I look like with blue eyes?

I remember finishing that section of the novel, at age ten or eleven, and feeling the sharp chill and awfulness of being split in two. What did it mean to not be a “whole” person? Part of Morrison’s genius had to do with knowing that our cracked selves are a manifestation of a sick society, the ailing body of America, whose racial malaise keeps producing Pecolas. You can find her everywhere. She’s the dark-skinned woman trying to lighten her complexion with bleaching creams; she’s the woman who undergoes surgery to thin her lips or her nose; she’s the girl who wears colored contact lenses so that the world can see her differently.

When you’re a kid, a black- or brown- or yellow- or red-skinned kid, most of the time you don’t start the morning thinking about how racism will ruin your day. What you want to know is who will love you, and what surprises that love will bring you that day. It’s the world that brings hate to your front door, and it’s hate that makes you hide who you are. As a kid, I responded viscerally to “The Bluest Eye,” for a number of reasons, starting with the book jacket. Morrison, in the photograph on the back cover, looked like the kind of person my family might have known, and if she was one of us that meant that one of my four beautiful older sisters could, perhaps, write a book, too.

Now I can see that my hope for my sisters was a way of having hope for myself, hope that I might become the artist I wanted to be. I held on to every bit of hope I could find. I felt Pecola’s predicament in the pit of my stomach not because folks thought I was ugly but because I knew that, in my small, working-class West Indian community in Brooklyn, my sexuality was considered ugly. My black world then (and, to be frank, it hasn’t changed much) defined itself by the rules of heterosexuality, and one of the few things its inhabitants could agree on was how spiritually abhorrent gay people were—at best, objects of derision. I felt as trapped in Brooklyn as Pecola did in Lorain. I didn’t have a dream of blue eyes, but I did dream of a world full of culture and artists to which I would one day belong, if, like Toni Morrison, I wrote books. I would try to write a perfect book, like Morrison’s first novel, but in my version the character of Soaphead Church—a celibate gay West Indian who Pecola believes has conjured up her blue eyes—wouldn’t be yet another manifestation of black American prejudice against West Indian difference. Instead, he would fall in love, and maybe prosper, and not live his life as an outsider. In short, I would try to overturn what the society in “The Bluest Eye” said lay in store for me: a kind of madness. This understanding, of course, took many years to form, because I didn’t know back then that gay men could find ways to love one another, let alone themselves. I didn’t grow up at a time when you talked about the problem of not seeing yourself in books or of “negative” portrayals; you hunted and dug for the characters and metaphors that mattered to you, and that was the fun—and the reward—of reading and looking at pictures.

Morrison was thirty-nine years old when she published “The Bluest Eye.” Although she claimed in a 1981 interview with Charles Ruas, “I never wanted to grow up to be a writer, I just wanted to grow up to be an adult,” it is the work of a mature artist who has tired of waiting for someone else to express her views. Meanwhile, Morrison the editor was also gaining in strength. By the time “The Bluest Eye” came out, she had been an editor of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at Random House for nearly three years. Her colleagues didn’t know she was a burgeoning novelist, because she didn’t tell them. “They weren’t paying me for that,” she once said. Eventually, a co-worker spotted a copy of “The Bluest Eye,” and Morrison’s subsequent novels were published by Knopf, a Random House imprint.

Like Morrison’s writing, her editing had a very particular goal: to offer readers stories about blacks, women, and other marginalized characters which hadn’t been told before. This desire—this need—seems to have been with Morrison since she was a student at Howard. In a 2019 documentary about her, “The Pieces I Am,” Morrison recalls that as a student she wanted to write about the black characters in Shakespeare’s plays, but her professor was “outraged” at the idea. As an editor, she chose to bring those black stories to the fore. Now it’s astonishing to look back at the range of her projects: a book on Southern cuisine; a history of the Cotton Club; fiction by Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara; poems by Lucille Clifton and by Henry Dumas, who was killed at thirty-three by a New York City subway cop; the autobiography of Angela Davis; and, in 1974, the historic anthology “The Black Book,” which was reissued in December.

“The Black Book” was intended, like “The Bluest Eye,” to combat the “Black is beautiful” jingoism of the time, and to show real black lives from the ghastly slave ships of the sixteen-hundreds to America in the twentieth century. After she met Middleton (Spike) Harris, a collector of black ephemera, who introduced her to other collectors—among them Roger Furman and Morris Levitt—Morrison got to work with a designer, Jack Ribik, putting together a kind of scrapbook of black American history and life. She jettisoned the idea of having text dominate the collection, for fear that it would give it too much of an ideological spin.

“I am not sure what the project meant to the authors,” she wrote in a 1974 essay, “but for me it was like growing up black one more time.” It’s easy to glean what she meant by that. Morrison, like many black Americans of her generation, had come of age with the idea that black achievement—as well as the hard times—formed a kind of lore, an oral history that was passed down with pride. In the same essay, Morrison wrote:

The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days—there were none!—but to recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks now growing up. . . . To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation and the focal point of all the mindlessness that seems to have joined the smog of California’s movie world. Whatever that “something” was, it would have to be honest, would have to be rendered through our own collective consciousness. It would have to assume that we were still tough, and that our egos were not threads of jelly in constant need of glue.

“Nothing could have interfered with my putting this book together,” Morrison said, in an interview in the Times in 1974. “I was afraid that young people would come to believe that black history began in 1964 or that there was slavery, there was a gap, and then there was 1964.” In “The Black Book,” which she worked on for a feverish eighteen-month period, Morrison wanted to provide visible evidence of where blackness had been and where it was going. She included documents—a patent showing that William B. Purvis had invented the fountain pen, for instance—and photographs, among them one of Lena Horne bathing in her drive and significance, and one of the black cowboy Nat Love. There were descriptions of voodoo charms; a full-color ad showing a black baby in a white cap and gown, advertising Sunlight Soap; pictures of clothes made by slaves; and another patent, this one for Norbert Rillieux’s “improvement in sugar-making.” There were lines of poetry by Langston Hughes and by Henry Dumas, whom she considered one of the most talented of her authors. There were images of black men being burned or lynched, and a clipping about Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed one of her children so that she would not grow up in slavery—a story that haunted Morrison and inspired her 1987 novel, “Beloved,” another tale of innocence lost and of black women alone in the world together. You can also find in “The Black Book” other sources of inspiration for Morrison the novelist. There is an excerpt from Gwendolyn Brooks’s profound poem about abortion, “The Mother”—“Believe me, I loved you all. / Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you / All”—which brings to mind Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (1977) and the extraordinary speech that the healer Pilate delivers near the end of her life about wishing she had known more people so that she could have loved them. With “The Black Book,” which would be nominated for a National Book Award, the editor was also feeding the creator. (As with all great books, one wants “The Black Book” to be all things for all people, and yet the collection is devoid of any story or image of an out gay person—there is no mention of Gladys Bentley, for instance, or Bruce Nugent, let alone of James Baldwin or Audre Lorde. Just as Morrison was afraid that young people might think black history jumped from slavery to the civil-rights era, a young queer kid today may wonder, leafing through the reprint, if black gayness has been deliberately erased or “just” forgotten.)

When the book was published, Margo Jefferson, then a critic at Newsweek, wrote, “As a young girl I was taught that black surgeon Daniel Hale Williams had performed the first successful heart operation; that blacks were shipbuilders, inventors and landowners, and that I was never to sing a song that used the words darky, coon or crow. ‘You need this for yourself,’ cautioned my father; ‘and for ammunition,’ added my mother. ‘The Black Book’ is confirmation and ammunition.” Morrison welcomed and encouraged dialogues between black critics and artists. “White people can’t do it for us,” she said in a 1974 interview. “That’s our responsibility and in some way we have to do it. I say you must always tell the truth. And I tell you that we are not weak people and we can stand it.” But first you need serious and seriously good work to inspire the discourse. For me, “The Bluest Eye” and “The Black Book,” works of the highest quality, were tangible and galvanizing evidence that to be an artist meant arming yourself with the truth—about where you came from and where you hope to go—and that hypocrisy was the enemy of art. Morrison showed me what was possible.

In an unpublished biographical statement that she wrote around the time that she was promoting “The Black Book” and her second novel, “Sula” (1973), she offered a window into her sensibility, which was driven by loss, effort, survival, and not turning away from any of it. Her relatives on both sides were migrants from the South, she explained, who had suffered and persevered. She went on:

Even before I knew what they had done to stay alive, to raise their children, and to be better than their detractors—even before that, their eyes impressed me. They were like wells of stacked mirrors—each with a depth and refraction of its own. . . . The closest I can come to describing it is the look of people who have lived places where there are great distances to view. Desert people, or people who live on savannahs or mountain tops—they have the look I remember in my parents and their relatives. Their eyes were terrible, made bearable only by the frequency of their laughter. ♦