Due today: having read through page 109 of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
Due Thursday: vocabulary practice sheet
Due Friday: vocabulary quiz.
FOR HOMEWORK: you will be reading from 126 to 131 [ending with "I don't recollect it much anymore."]
Today we're using accountable talk again in class to read pages 110 through 126 [ending at, "... but Lord she was ugly."].
Think back to the themes we talked about...
- Beauty
- Self-loathing
- The "outdoors"
- Duality
- Growth and Nature
- The Female Persona
- Violence and Intimacy
- Eyes
- Babies
- And Much more...
Which of these themes does Pauline exemplify?
Now that you know some of the back story to Mrs. Breedlove, what makes more sense in the novel?
As you read, be sure to write down 3 questions you still have about the novel.
Use these words in the following sentences:
The Bluest Eye from page 110 - 131.
As you read, be sure to write down 3 questions you still have about the novel.
VOCABULARY DUE THURSDAY QUIZ FRIDAY
Below are 13 vocabulary terms taken from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye, Study these and develop a command of their meanings and usages. Complete the attached practice sheet.
1.
gelid--(adjective) very cold; icy.
2.
genuflected--(verb) to bend the knee or touch
one knee to the floor in reverence or worship.
3.
eddy--(noun) a small whirlpool. (verb)
to move or whirl in eddies.
4.
haughty--(adjective) disdainfully proud;
snobbish; scornfully arrogant.
5.
croup--(noun) any condition of the
larynx or trachea characterized by a hoarse cough and difficult breathing.
6.
macabre--(adjective) gruesome and
horrifying; ghastly; horrible. dealing with or representing death, especially
its grimmer or uglier aspect.
7.
belies--(verb) to show to be false;
contradict; to misrepresent
8.
threnody--(noun) a poem, speech, or song
of lamentation, especially for the dead; dirge; funeral song.
9.
bereaved--(adjective) [of a person]
greatly saddened at being deprived by death of a loved one.
10.
misanthrope--(noun) a hater of
humankind.
11.
antipathy--(noun) a natural, basic, or
habitual repugnance; aversion.
12.
asceticism--(noun) the doctrine that a
person can attain a high spiritual and moral state by practicing self-denial,
self-mortification, and the like.
13.
sloven--(noun) a person who is
habitually negligent of neatness or cleanliness in dress, appearance, etc.
Use these words in the following sentences:
At the crime scene pages of instructions spelled out
a ____________ scavenger hunt.
But in the queen’s presence they lost their resolve
and _____________.
By the time it comes to its sad end, it has the substance of
a tender _______________.
Heartfelt sympathy is extended to
the _______________ family.
Jobs for smart _______________s are harder to come by
nowadays.
Monastic _______________ stands at odds with the
physical quality of human nature.
Next to the palm tree, three _________ girls with
pocket mirrors gossip as they reapply their makeup.
Run-ins with the police gave him a
lifelong _______________ to authority.
The beauty is superficial and _______________ deep,
deep problems.
The homeless are among the most depressing _______________s
this country has ever known.
The water around the iceberg was _________ and dangerous.
The water circled and circled as the ___________ seamed to
drain out of the world itself.
When he was seven he suffered from _____________and
choking fits and even in his sleep had nightmares about suffocation.
The Bluest Eye from page 110 - 131.
SEEMOTHERMOTHERISVERYNICEMO
THERWILLYOUPLAYWITHJANEMOTH
ERLAUGHSLAUGHMOTHERLAUGHLA
The easiest thing to do would be to build a case out of her
foot. That is what she herself did. But to find out the truth
about how dreams die, one should never take the word of
the dreamer. The end of her lovely beginning was probably
the cavity in one of her front teeth. She preferred, however,
to think always of her foot. Although she was the ninth of
eleven children and lived on a ridge of red Alabama clay
seven miles from the nearest road, the complete indifference
with which a rusty nail was met when it punched clear
through her foot during her second year of life saved Pauline
Williams from total anonymity. The wound left her with a
crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked—not a
limp that would have eventually twisted her spine, but a way
of lifting the bad foot as though she were extracting it from
little whirlpools that threatened to pull it under. Slight as it
was, this deformity explained for her many things that
would have been otherwise incomprehensible: why she
alone
[page 111]
of all the children had no nickname; why there were
no funny jokes and anecdotes about funny things she had
done; why no one ever remarked on her food preferences—
no saving of the wing or neck for her—no cooking of the
peas in a separate pot without rice because she did not like
rice; why nobody teased her; why she never felt at home
anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace. Her general feeling
of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her
foot. Restricted, as a child, to this cocoon of her family’s
spinning, she cultivated quiet and private pleasures. She
liked, most of all, to arrange things. To line things up in
rows—jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step,
sticks, stones, leaves—and the members of her family let
these arrangements be. When by some accident somebody
scattered her rows, they always stopped to retrieve them for
her, and she was never angry, for it gave her a chance to
rearrange them again. Whatever portable plurality she
found, she organized into neat lines, according to their size,
shape, or gradations of color. Just as she would never align a
pine needle with the leaf of a cottonwood tree, she would
never put the jars of tomatoes next to the green beans.
During all of her four years of going to school, she was
enchanted by numbers and depressed by words. She
missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and
crayons.
Near the beginning of World War I, the Williamses discovered,
from returning neighbors and kin, the possibility of
living better in another place. In shifts, lots, batches, mixed
in with other families, they migrated, in six months and four
journeys, to Kentucky, where there were mines and millwork.
[page 112]
“When all us left from down home and was waiting
down by the depot for the truck, it was nighttime. June
bugs was shooting everywhere. They lighted up a tree
leaf, and I seen a streak of green every now and again.
That was the last time I seen real june bugs. These things
up here ain’t june bugs. They’s something else. Folks here
call them fireflies. Down home they was different. But I
recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well.”
In Kentucky they lived in a real town, ten to fifteen houses
on a single street, with water piped right into the kitchen.
Ada and Fowler Williams found a five-room frame house
for their family. The yard was bounded by a once-white
fence against which Pauline’s mother planted flowers and
within which they kept a few chickens. Some of her brothers
joined the Army, one sister died, and two got married,
increasing the living space and giving the entire Kentucky
venture a feel of luxury. The relocation was especially comfortable
to Pauline, who was old enough to leave school.
Mrs. Williams got a job cleaning and cooking for a white
minister on the other side of town, and Pauline, now the oldest
girl at home, took over the care of the house. She kept the
fence in repair, pulling the pointed stakes erect, securing
them with bits of wire, collected eggs, swept, cooked,
washed, and minded the two younger children—a pair of
twins called Chicken and Pie, who were still in school. She
was not only good at housekeeping, she enjoyed it. After her
parents left for work and the other children were at school
or in mines, the house was quiet. The stillness and isolation
both calmed and energized her. She could arrange and clean
without interruption until two o’clock, when Chicken and
Pie came home.
[page 113]
When the war ended and the twins were ten years old,
they too left school to work. Pauline was fifteen, still keeping
house, but with less enthusiasm. Fantasies about men
and love and touching were drawing her mind and hands
away from her work. Changes in weather began to affect
her, as did certain sights and sounds. These feelings translated
themselves to her in extreme melancholy. She thought
of the death of newborn things, lonely roads, and strangers
who appear out of nowhere simply to hold one’s hand,
woods in which the sun was always setting. In church especially
did these dreams grow. The songs caressed her, and
while she tried to hold her mind on the wages of sin, her
body trembled for redemption, salvation, a mysterious rebirth
that would simply happen, with no effort on her part.
In none of her fantasies was she ever aggressive; she was
usually idling by the river bank, or gathering berries in a
field when a someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating
eyes, who—with no exchange of words—understood; and
before whose glance her foot straightened and her eyes
dropped. The someone had no face, no form, no voice, no
odor. He was a simple Presence, an all-embracing tenderness
with strength and a promise of rest. It did not matter
that she had no idea of what to do or say to the Presence—
after the wordless knowing and the soundless touching, her
dreams disintegrated. But the Presence would know what to
do. She had only to lay her head on his chest and he would
lead her away to the sea, to the city, to the woods . . .
forever.
There was a woman named Ivy who seemed to hold in
her mouth all of the sounds of Pauline’s soul. Standing a little
apart from the choir, Ivy sang the dark sweetness that
Pauline could not name; she sang the death-defying death
[page 113]
that Pauline yearned for; she sang of the Stranger who
knew . . .
Precious Lord take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storms, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on.
When my way grows drear
Precious Lord linger near,
When my life is almost gone
Hear my cry hear my call
Hold my hand lest I fall
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me on.
Thus it was that when the Stranger, the someone, did
appear out of nowhere, Pauline was grateful but not
surprised.
He came, strutting right out of a Kentucky sun on the
hottest day of the year. He came big, he came strong, he
came with yellow eyes, flaring nostrils, and he came with his
own music.
Pauline was leaning idly on the fence, her arms resting
on the crossrail between the pickets. She had just put down
some biscuit dough and was cleaning the flour from
under her nails. Behind her at some distance she heard
whistling. One of these rapid, high-note riffs that black
boys make up as they go while sweeping, shoveling, or just
walking along. A kind of city-street music where laughter
belies anxiety, and joy is as short and straight as the blade
[page 115]
of a pocketknife. She listened carefully to the music and let
it pull her lips into a smile. The whistling got louder, and
still she did not turn around, for she wanted it to last.
While smiling to herself and holding fast to the break in
somber thoughts, she felt something tickling her foot. She
laughed aloud and turned to see. The whistler was bending
down tickling her broken foot and kissing her leg. She
could not stop her laughter—not until he looked up at her
and she saw the Kentucky sun drenching the yellow, heavylidded
eyes of Cholly Breedlove.
“When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was
like all the bits of color from that time down home when
all us chil’ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put
some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed
up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed
with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor
me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that
lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the
fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near
the bottom. And that streak of green them june bugs
made on the trees the night we left from down home. All
of them colors was in me. Just sitting there. So when
Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them
berries, that lemonade, them streaks of green the june
bugs made, all come together. Cholly was thin then, with
real light eyes. He used to whistle, and when I heerd him,
shivers come on my skin.”
Pauline and Cholly loved each other. He seemed to relish
her company and even to enjoy her country ways and lack
of knowledge about city things. He talked with her about
[page 116]
her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or
in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity,
pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something
special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt
that her bad foot was an asset.
And he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had
dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely
river banks. She was secure and grateful; he was kind and
lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in the
world.
They agreed to marry and go ’way up north, where
Cholly said steel mills were begging for workers. Young, loving,
and full of energy, they came to Lorain, Ohio. Cholly
found work in the steel mills right away, and Pauline started
keeping house.
And then she lost her front tooth. But there must have
been a speck, a brown speck easily mistaken for food but
which did not leave, which sat on the enamel for months,
and grew, until it cut into the surface and then to the brown
putty underneath, finally eating away to the root, but
avoiding the nerves, so its presence was not noticeable or
uncomfortable. Then the weakened roots, having grown
accustomed to the poison, responded one day to severe
pressure, and the tooth fell free, leaving a ragged stump
behind. But even before the little brown speck, there must
have been the conditions, the setting that would allow it to
exist in the first place.
In that young and growing Ohio town whose side streets,
even, were paved with concrete, which sat on the edge of a
calm blue lake, which boasted an affinity with Oberlin, the
underground railroad station, just thirteen miles away, this
[page 117]
melting pot on the lip of America facing the cold but receptive
Canada—What could go wrong?
“Me and Cholly was getting along good then. We
come up north; supposed to be more jobs and all. We
moved into two rooms up over a furniture store, and I
set about housekeeping. Cholly was working at the steel
plant, and everything was looking good. I don’t know
what all happened. Everything changed. It was hard to
get to know folks up here, and I missed my people. I
weren’t used to so much white folks. The ones I seed
before was something hateful, but they didn’t come
around too much. I mean, we didn’t have too much truck
with them. Just now and then in the fields, or at the
commissary. But they want all over us. Up north they
was everywhere—next door, downstairs, all over the
streets—and colored folks few and far between. Northern
colored folk was different too. Dicty-like. No better than
whites for meanness. They could make you feel just as
no-count, ’cept I didn’t expect it from them. That was
the lonesomest time of my life. I ’member looking out
them front windows just waiting for Cholly to come
home at three o’clock. I didn’t even have a cat to talk
to.”
In her loneliness, she turned to her husband for reassurance,
entertainment, for things to fill the vacant places.
Housework was not enough; there were only two rooms,
and no yard to keep or move about in. The women in the
town wore high-heeled shoes, and when Pauline tried to
wear them, they aggravated her shuffle into a pronounced
[page 117]
limp. Cholly was kindness still, but began to resist her total
dependence on him. They were beginning to have less and
less to say to each other. He had no problem finding other
people and other things to occupy him—men were always
climbing the stairs asking for him, and he was happy to
accompany them, leaving her alone.
Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she
met. They were amused by her because she did not
straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as
they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and
private snickers at her way of talking (saying “chil’ren”) and
dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes. When
Cholly began to quarrel about the money she wanted, she
decided to go to work. Taking jobs as a day worker helped
with the clothes, and even a few things for the apartment,
but it did not help with Cholly. He was not pleased with her
purchases and began to tell her so. Their marriage was
shredded with quarrels. She was still no more than a girl,
and still waiting for that plateau of happiness, that hand of
a precious Lord who, when her way grew drear, would
always linger near. Only now she had a clearer idea of what
drear meant. Money became the focus of all their discussions,
hers for clothes, his for drink. The sad thing was that
Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She
merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her
way.
After several months of doing day work, she took a
steady job in the home of a family of slender means and
nervous, pretentious ways.
“Cholly commenced to getting meaner and meaner and
wanted to fight me all of the time. I give him as good as
[page 119]
I got. Had to. Look like working for that woman and
fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome. But I holt on to
my jobs, even though working for that woman was more
than a notion. It wasn’t so much her meanness as just
simpleminded. Her whole family was. Couldn’t get along
with one another worth nothing. You’d think with a
pretty house like that and all the money they could holt
on to, they would enjoy one another. She haul off and
cry over the leastest thing. If one of her friends cut her
short on the telephone, she’d go to crying. She should of
been glad she had a telephone. I ain’t got one yet. I
recollect oncet how her baby brother who she put
through dentistry school didn’t invite them to some big
party he throwed. They was a big to-do about that.
Everybody stayed on the telephone for days. Fussing and
carrying on. She asked me, ‘Pauline, what would you do
if your own brother had a party and didn’t invite you?’ I
said ifn I really wanted to go to that party, I reckoned I’d
go anyhow. Never mind what he want. She just sucked
her teeth a little and made out like what I said was
dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was.
Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks
can’t like folks just ’cause they has the same mama. I
tried to like that woman myself. She was good about
giving me stuff, but I just couldn’t like her. Soon as I
worked up a good feeling on her account, she’d do
something ignorant and start in to telling me how to
clean and do. If I left her on her own, she’d drown in
dirt. I didn’t have to pick up after Chicken and Pie the
way I had to pick up after them. None of them knew so
much as how to wipe their behinds. I know, ’cause I did
the washing. And couldn’t pee proper to save their lives.
[page 120]
Her husband ain’t hit the bowl yet. Nasty white folks is
about the nastiest things they is. But I would have stayed
on ’cepting for Cholly come over by where I was
working and cut up so. He come there drunk wanting
some money. When that white woman see him, she
turned red. She tried to act strong-like, but she was
scared bad. Anyway, she told Cholly to get out or she
would call the police. He cussed her and started pulling
on me. I would of gone upside his head, but I don’t want
no dealings with the police. So I taken my things and left.
I tried to get back, but she didn’t want me no more if I
was going to stay with Cholly. She said she would let me
stay if I left him. I thought about that. But later on it
didn’t seem none too bright for a black woman to leave a
black man for a white woman. She didn’t never give me
the eleven dollars she owed me, neither. That hurt bad.
The gas man had cut the gas off, and I couldn’t cook
none. I really begged that woman for my money. I went
to see her. She was mad as a wet hen. Kept on telling me
I owed her for uniforms and some old broken-down bed
she give me. I didn’t know if I owed her or not, but I
needed my money. She wouldn’t let up none, neither,
even when I give her my word that Cholly wouldn’t
come back there no more. Then I got so desperate I
asked her if she would loan it to me. She was quiet for a
spell, and then she told me I shouldn’t let a man take
advantage over me. That I should have more respect, and
it was my husband’s duty to pay the bills, and if he
couldn’t, I should leave and get alimony. All such simple
stuff. What was he gone give me alimony on? I seen she
didn’t understand that all I needed from her was my
[page 121]
eleven dollars to pay the gas man so I could cook. She
couldn’t get that one thing through her thick head. ‘Are
you going to leave him, Pauline?’ she kept on saying. I
thought she’d give me my money if I said I would, so I
said ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You leave him,
and then come back to work, and we’ll let bygones be
bygones.’ ‘Can I have my money today?’ I said. ‘No’ she
said. ‘Only when you leave him. I’m only thinking of you
and your future. What good is he, Pauline, what good is
he to you?’ How you going to answer a woman like that,
who don’t know what good a man is, and say out of one
side of her mouth she’s thinking of your future but won’t
give you your own money so you can buy you something
besides baloney to eat? So I said, ‘No good, ma’am. He
ain’t no good to me. But just the same, I think I’d best
stay on.’ She got up, and I left. When I got outside, I felt
pains in my crotch, I had held my legs together so tight
trying to make that woman understand. But I reckon
now she couldn’t understand. She married a man with a
slash in his face instead of a mouth. So how could she
understand?”
One winter Pauline discovered she was pregnant. When
she told Cholly, he surprised her by being pleased. He began
to drink less and come home more often. They eased back
into a relationship more like the early days of their marriage,
when he asked if she were tired or wanted him to
bring her something from the store. In this state of ease,
Pauline stopped doing day work and returned to her own
housekeeping. But the loneliness in those two rooms had not
gone away. When the winter sun hit the peeling green paint
[page 122]
of the kitchen chairs, when the smoked hocks were boiling
in the pot, when all she could hear was the truck delivering
furniture downstairs, she thought about back home, about
how she had been all alone most of the time then too, but
that this lonesomeness was different. Then she stopped staring
at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the
movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed,
and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along
with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to
another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive
ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in
envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In
equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind,
bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot
lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive
mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would
be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the
most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking
to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to
look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of
absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full
from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened
woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing
eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and
the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death
was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of
music. There the black-and-white images came together,
making a magnificent whole—all projected through the ray
of light from above and behind.
It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there
was to love and all there was to hate.
[page 123]
“The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was
in the picture show. Every time I got, I went. I’d go
early, before the show started. They’d cut off the lights,
and everything be black. Then the 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. Well, almost just like. Anyway, I sat in that
show with my hair done up that way and had a good
time. I thought I’d see it through to the end again, and 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. I had good
teeth, not a rotten one in my head. I don’t believe I ever
did get over that. 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. I still went to the
pictures, though, but the meanness got worse. I wanted
my tooth back. Cholly poked fun at me, and we started
fighting again. I tried to kill him. He didn’t hit me too
hard, ’cause I were pregnant I guess, but the fights, once
they got started up again, kept up. He begin to make me
madder than anything I knowed, and I couldn’t keep my
hands off him. Well, I had that baby—a boy—and after
[page 124]
that got pregnant again with another one. But it weren’t
like I thought it was gone be. I loved them and all, I
guess, but maybe it was having no money, or maybe it
was Cholly, but they sure worried the life out of me.
Sometimes I’d catch myself hollering at them and beating
them, and I’d feel sorry for them, but I couldn’t seem to
stop. When I had the second one, a girl, I ’member I said
I’d love it no matter what it looked like. She looked like
a black ball of hair. I don’t recollect trying to get
pregnant that first time. But that second time, I actually
tried to get pregnant. Maybe ’cause I’d had one already
and wasn’t scairt to do it. Anyway, I felt good, and
wasn’t thinking on the carrying, just the baby itself. I
used to talk to it whilst it be still in the womb. Like good
friends we was. You know. I be hanging wash and I
knowed lifting weren’t good for it. I’d say to it holt on
now I gone hang up these few rags, don’t get froggy; it
be over soon. It wouldn’t leap or nothing. Or I be mixing
something in a bowl for the other chile and I’d talk to it
then too. You know, just friendly talk. On up til the end
I felted good about that baby. I went to the hospital
when my time come. So I could be easeful. I didn’t want
to have it at home like I done with the boy. They put me
in a big room with a whole mess of women. The pains
was coming, but not too bad. A little old doctor come to
examine me. He had all sorts of stuff. He gloved his hand
and put some kind of jelly on it and rammed it up
between my legs. When he left off, some more doctors
come. One old one and some young ones. The old one
was learning the young ones about babies. Showing them
how to do. When he got to me he said now these here
women you don’t have any trouble with. They deliver
[page 125]
right away and with no pain. Just like horses. The young
ones smiled a little. They looked at my stomach and
between my legs. They never said nothing to me. Only
one looked at me. Looked at my face, I mean. I looked
right back at him. He dropped his eyes and turned red.
He knowed, I reckon, that maybe I weren’t no horse
foaling. But them others. They didn’t know. They went
on. I seed them talking to them white women: ‘How you
feel? Gonna have twins?’ Just shucking them, of course,
but nice talk. Nice friendly talk. I got edgy, and when
them pains got harder, I was glad. Glad to have
something else to think about. I moaned something
awful. The pains wasn’t as bad as I let on, but I had to
let them people know having a baby was more than a
bowel movement. I hurt just like them white women. Just
’cause I wasn’t hooping and hollering before didn’t mean
I wasn’t feeling pain. What’d they think? That just ’cause
I knowed how to have a baby with no fuss that my
behind wasn’t pulling and aching like theirs? Besides, that
doctor don’t know what he talking about. He must never
seed no mare foal. Who say they don’t have no pain? Just
’cause she don’t cry? ’Cause she can’t say it, they think it
ain’t there? If they looks in her eyes and see them
eyeballs lolling back, see the sorrowful look, they’d
know. Anyways, the baby come. Big old healthy thing.
She looked different from what I thought. Reckon I
talked to it so much before I conjured up a mind’s eye
view of it. So when I seed it, it was like looking at a
picture of your mama when she was a girl. You knows
who she is, but she don’t look the same. They give her to
me for a nursing, and she liked to pull my nipple off
right away. She caught on fast. Not like Sammy, he was
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the hardest child to feed. But Pecola look like she
knowed right off what to do. A right smart baby she
was. I used to like to watch her. You know they makes
them greedy sounds. Eyes all soft and wet. A cross
between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was
ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.”
When Sammy and Pecola were still young Pauline had to
go back to work. She was older now, with no time for
dreams and movies. It was time to put all of the pieces
together, make coherence where before there had been none.
The children gave her this need; she herself was no longer a
child. So she became, and her process of becoming was like
most of ours: she developed a hatred for things that mystified
or obstructed her; acquired virtues that were easy to
maintain; assigned herself a role in the scheme of things; and
harked back to simpler times for gratification.
She took on the full responsibility and recognition of
breadwinner and returned to church. First, however, she
moved out of the two rooms into a spacious first floor of a
building that had been built as a store. She came into her
own with the women who had despised her, by being more
moral than they; she avenged herself on Cholly by forcing
him to indulge in the weaknesses she despised. She joined a
church where shouting was frowned upon, served on Stewardess
Board No. 3, and became a member of Ladies Circle
No. 1. At prayer meeting she moaned and sighed over
Cholly’s ways, and hoped God would help her keep the children
from the sins of the father. She stopped saying
“chil’ren” and said “childring” instead. She let another
tooth fall, and was outraged by painted ladies who thought
only of clothes and men. Holding Cholly as a model of sin
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and failure, she bore him like a crown of thorns, and her
children like a cross.
It was her good fortune to find a permanent job in the
home of a well-to-do family whose members were affectionate,
appreciative, and generous. She looked at their
houses, smelled their linen, touched their silk draperies, and
loved all of it. The child’s pink nightie, the stacks of white
pillow slips edged with embroidery, the sheets with top
hems picked out with blue cornflowers. She became what is
known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically
all of her needs. When she bathed the little Fisher girl, it was
in a porcelain tub with silvery taps running infinite quantities
of hot, clear water. She dried her in fluffy white towels
and put her in cuddly night clothes. Then she brushed the
yellow hair, enjoying the roll and slip of it between her fingers.
No zinc tub, no buckets of stove-heated water, no
flaky, stiff, grayish towels washed in a kitchen sink, dried in
a dusty backyard, no tangled black puffs of rough wool to
comb. Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The
things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or
style, and were absorbed by the dingy storefront. More and
more she neglected her house, her children, her man—they
were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the
early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark
edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more
delicate, more lovely. Here she could arrange things, clean
things, line things up in neat rows. Here her foot flopped
around on deep pile carpets, and there was no uneven
sound. Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and
praise. Mr. Fisher said, “I would rather sell her blueberry
cobblers than real estate.” She reigned over cupboards
stacked high with food that would not be eaten for weeks,
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even months; she was queen of canned vegetables bought
by the case, special fondants and ribbon candy curled up in
tiny silver dishes. The creditors and service people who
humiliated her when she went to them on her own behalf
respected her, were even intimidated by her, when she spoke
for the Fishers. She refused beef slightly dark or with edges
not properly trimmed. The slightly reeking fish that she
accepted for her own family she would all but throw in the
fish man’s face if he sent it to the Fisher house. Power,
praise, and luxury were hers in this household. They even
gave her what she had never had—a nickname—Polly. It
was her pleasure to stand in her kitchen at the end of a day
and survey her handiwork. Knowing there were soap bars
by the dozen, bacon by the rasher, and reveling in her shiny
pots and pans and polished floors. Hearing, “We’ll never let
her go. We could never find anybody like Polly. She will not
leave the kitchen until everything is in order. Really, she is
the ideal servant.”
Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private
world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her
children. Them she bent toward respectability, and in so
doing taught them fear: fear of being clumsy, fear of being
like their father, fear of not being loved by God, fear of madness
like Cholly’s mother’s. Into her son she beat a loud
desire to run away, and into her daughter she beat a fear of
growing up, fear of other people, fear of life.
All the meaningfulness of her life was in her work. For
her virtues were intact. She was an active church woman,
did not drink, smoke, or carouse, defended herself mightily
against Cholly, rose above him in every way, and felt she
was fulfilling a mother’s role conscientiously when she
pointed out their father’s faults to keep them from having
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them, or punished them when they showed any slovenliness,
no matter how slight, when she worked twelve to sixteen
hours a day to support them. And the world itself
agreed with her.
It was only sometimes, sometimes, and then rarely, that
she thought about the old days, or what her life had
turned to. They were musings, idle thoughts, full sometimes
of the old dreaminess, but not the kind of thing she
cared to dwell on.
“I started to leave him once, but something came up.
Once, after he tried to set the house on fire, I was all set
in my mind to go. I can’t even ’member now what held
me. He sure ain’t give me much of a life. But it wasn’t all
bad. Sometimes things wasn’t all bad. He used to come
easing into bed sometimes, not too drunk. I make out
like I’m asleep, ’cause it’s late, and he taken three dollars
out of my pocketbook that morning or something. I hear
him breathing, but I don’t look around. I can see in my
mind’s eye his black arms thrown back behind his head,
the muscles like great big peach stones sanded down,
with veins running like little swollen rivers down his
arms. Without touching him I be feeling those ridges on
the tips of my fingers. I sees the palms of his hands
calloused to granite, and the long fingers curled up and
still. I think about the thick, knotty hair on his chest, and
the two big swells his breast muscles make. I want to rub
my face hard in his chest and feel the hair cut my skin. I
know just where the hair growth slacks out—just above
his navel—and how it picks up again and spreads out.
Maybe he’ll shift a little, and his leg will touch me, or I
feel his flank just graze my behind. I don’t move even yet.
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Then he lift his head, turn over, and put his hand on my
waist. If I don’t move, he’ll move his hand over to pull
and knead my stomach. Soft and slow-like. I still don’t
move, because I don’t want him to stop. I want to
pretend sleep and have him keep on rubbing my stomach.
Then he will lean his head down and bite my tit. Then I
don’t want him to rub my stomach anymore. I want him
to put his hand between my legs. I pretend to wake up,
and turn to him, but not opening my legs. I want him to
open them for me. He does, and I be soft and wet where
his fingers are strong and hard. I be softer than I ever
been before. All my strength in his hand. My brain curls
up like wilted leaves. A funny, empty feeling is in my
hands. I want to grab holt of something, so I hold his
head. His mouth is under my chin. Then I don’t want his
hand between my legs no more, because I think I am
softening away. I stretch my legs open, and he is on top
of me. Too heavy to hold, and too light not to. He puts
his thing in me. In me. In me. I wrap my feet around his
back so he can’t get away. His face is next to mine. The
bed springs sounds like them crickets used to back home.
He puts his fingers in mine, and we stretches our arms
outwise like Jesus on the cross. I hold on tight. My
fingers and my feet hold on tight, because everything else
is going, going. I know he wants me to come first. But I
can’t. Not until he does. Not until I feel him loving me.
Just me. Sinking into me. Not until I know that my flesh
is all that be on his mind. That he couldn’t stop if he had
to. That he would die rather than take his thing out of
me. Of me. Not until he has let go of all he has, and give
it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I
be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then I wait. He
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shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough,
pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me
come. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on
his behind. My legs drop back onto the bed. I don’t make
no noise, because the chil’ren might hear. I begin to feel
those little bits of color floating up into me—deep in me.
That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple
from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama’s
lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I’m
laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all
mixed up with the colors, and I’m afraid I’ll come, and
afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be
rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts. I want
to thank him, but don’t know how, so I pat him like you
do a baby. He asks me if I’m all right. I say yes. He gets
off me and lies down to sleep. I want to say something,
but I don’t. I don’t want to take my mind offen the
rainbow. I should get up and go to the toilet, but I don’t.
Besides, Cholly is asleep with his leg throwed over me. I
can’t move and don’t want to.
“But it ain’t like that anymore. Most times he’s
thrashing away inside me before I’m woke, and through
when I am. The rest of the time I can’t even be next to
his stinking drunk self. But I don’t care ’bout it no more.
My Maker will take care of me. I know He will. I know
He will. Besides, it don’t make no difference about this
old earth. There is sure to be a glory. Only thing I miss
sometimes is that rainbow. But like I say, I don’t recollect
it much anymore.”
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