Having experienced her masterful storytelling in the novels Tar Baby and Home, it felt somewhat sentimental to experience this profound debut from Toni Morrison. While reading, I interpreted her writing as cautious, teetering along the shorelines of the vast ocean that soon became her landmark literary career. I sensed a necessity of prefacing her creative uniqueness to the reader as if we were not yet ready to absorb its magnitude and she was not ready to express it all. That isn't to say that The Bluest Eye isn't a heavy read—it is laden with the traumas of race, color, and children caught in the crossfires of too much too soon. Still, I'm glad that I read her 1993/2007 forward that's in the edition I have. In it, she notes the novel's inspiration (a conversation with a childhood friend), its interrogative intent, and what she saw in hindsight as the novel's imperfections and limitations. The patience, meticulousness, and boldness with which she analyzes her craft and the world around her left an inedible imprint on me.
Of the many things I appreciated about this book, one at the forefront of my mind is how Toni Morrison allows her characters to embody multiple truths. She gave space to both shining qualities and the hideousness laying underneath. She exposed aspects of Blackness, a microcosm within the macrocosm of humanity, with an almost supernatural knowing. The innocent ones, the abusive ones—all of their lives mattered to Morrison's work, which made me both revile and sympathize with a character like Cholly, an abuser in the story. Morrison insisted on the multiplicity in the Black experience, and I am grateful for that stance.
As part of her own criticism of the work, Morrison noted in her foreword that, in the end, "many readers remain touched but not moved" by the novel. I'm grateful I wasn't one of those readers. The horror that Pecola, the young character the novel is centered around, endures is still leading me to unpack how aspects of my confidence and self-worth are fashioned by proximity to what I view as limitations in others. I'm reminded of a scene in the novel regarding a mother, her young son, and a cat.
*A tiny spoiler alert, I guess?*
Fashioning her life as one of "the good Blacks," this mother was so veiled by respectability that she chose to overlook her son's cruelty toward an innocent girl, Pecola. Instead, with disgusting judgment casting Pecola as one of the "bad Blacks," her anger defaulted to maintaining her family's social status.
This scene led to an internal question: In what ways does my desire for decorum overshadow uncomfortable truths?
I'm grateful to Toni Morrison for this brilliant novel and the challenges she presents in it. I'm eager to explore the ways her literary voice expanded in other works I've yet to read.