The Bluest Eye

The second section of "Spring" is preceded by lines from the Dick and Jane primer in which Jane says that her mother is "VERYNICE" (110), asks her mother to play with her, and says that her mother laughs. These lines are also written in all capital letters without intervening punctuation or spaces.

In the second section, Pauline Breedlove (born Pauline Williams), Pecola's mother, wonders when her life went awry and concludes that it began when she lost one of her front teeth and before that, with a childhood injury that left her with a floppy foot. Pauline theorizes that the foots explains why she was shown little affection and was always treated as an outsider by her family. Her only pleasure as a girl was to arrange items in neat rows with like items. She spent only four years in school, where she "was enchanted by numbers and depressed by words" (111). Pauline "missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons" (111).

Pauline's parents, like many other African Americans at the start of World War I, decided to leave Alabama for a better life farther north. They first settled in Kentucky, where there was work. Mrs. William became a housekeeper, leaving Pauline, now the eldest girl, to keep up their own home. Pauline deeply enjoyed this work at first, especially since it gave her something to do once she quit attending school.

When Pauline turned 15, she stopped enjoying keeping house her family. She grew moody and longed for romance, embodied in her mind as “a simple Presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest" (113). The closest Pauline ever got to fulfilling these yearnings was when she listened to a soloist at church sing the spiritual "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." Pauline imagined that "the Stranger who knew" (114) would somehow find her. When Cholly Breedlove walked up to her and began tickling her on her lame foot one day, she imagined that he was the Stranger for whom she had been waiting.

Cholly was handsome and strong with light-colored eyes that Pauline admired. In a first-person monologue, she recounts that her first sight of Cholly evoked "bits of color from that time down home"—the purple stains of berries mashed on the front of her dress when she went berrying with the other children, the "cool and yellowish" color of the lemonade her mother made when her father came in from the fields, and "the streak of green them june bugs made on the night" her family left Alabama (115).

Cholly made Pauline feel special. He treated her foot as something that needed care and merited attention, and their lovemaking made Pauline feel "secure and grateful" (116). The honeymoon period seemed to end once they moved to Ohio, however. Pauline was lonely, felt uncomfortable living side by side with so many whites, and could never find the trick of fitting in with northern African Americans, who ridiculed her country speech. Cholly got tired of her dependence on him and found plenty of friends outside of their home.

Pauline's few efforts to fit in—straightening her hair, putting on make-up—never quite succeeded. Pauline nevertheless started looking for work so that she could afford clothes. She and Cholly began to argue constantly about money. When she finally found work with a stingy, sloppy white family, the fights with Cholly got worse, and he began drinking to excess.

Cholly even showed up drunk at the home of the family for whom Pauline worked, she recounts in another monologue. Her employer's wife told Pauline that she needed to leave Cholly if she wished to continue working for the family. Pauline refused and is still bitter years later as she recalls how the woman refused to give her the last 11 dollars she earned.

Pauline got pregnant one winter, and for a time the ease of her relationship with Cholly returned. Pauline, shut up in her house all day, felt lonely. She added to her dreams of romance a desire for "physical beauty," the "most destructive idea in the history of human thought" (122) according to the third-person narrator. Pauline obsessively attended movies, where she was able to sink into the fantasy life on the screen in front of her. Her movie-going led her to judge every face she encountered by where it fit on "the scale of absolute beauty" (122) she encountered at the movies. She basked in the images of beautiful white people in their fine homes.

She was sitting in a Jean Harlow movie one day, five months pregnant and with her hair done up in imitation of one of Harlow's style, when her front tooth came out in a piece of candy she was eating. With the loss of her tooth, Pauline gave up her efforts to be beautiful and instead "settled down to just being ugly" (123). She fought violently with Cholly, who ridiculed her over the loss of her tooth.

Pauline had baby Sammy at home and then had Pecola several years later during a dehumanizing labor experience attended by insensitive white doctors at a hospital. When Pecola was born, Pauline saw her as "a black ball of hair" (125), a smart baby who was nevertheless ugly to her. After Pecola was born, Pauline went back to work, this time for the Fishers, a rich white family, and she subsumed her desire for beauty and love with churchgoing and prayer that transformed her into a martyr to Cholly's abuse. The Fishers told their friends that Pauline was "the ideal servant” (127). She was the ideal servant because she felt a deep sense of contentment and ownership as she took care of their home.

She neglected her own home, however. She "bent [her children] toward respectability" (128) through intimidation, yelling, and beatings. "All the meaningfulness of her life was in her work" (129), and the world saw her as the ideal of the respectable, hard-working black woman. Her relationship with Cholly deteriorated until it consisted mostly of fights, interspersed with rare moments when their lovemaking made her feel again "the little bits of color" or even the sense that she was "laughing between [her] legs" (131). Cholly usually enters Pauline while she is asleep, and Pauline places her faith in the hope that God will reward her after she dies.

The third section of "Spring" is preceded by lines from the Dick and Jane primer in which Jane describes her father as "BIGANDSTRONG” (132), asks him to play with her, and smiles at the father when he smiles at her. These lines are also written in all capital letters without intervening punctuation or spaces.

In this section, Cholly thinks over his origins and childhood. Cholly was rescued by Aunt Jimmy from the garbage heap where his mother left him when he was just four days old. Aunt Jimmy told Cholly that she thought his father was one Samson Fuller, who had left for Macon before Cholly was born. She named Cholly after her deceased brother, Charles Breedlove, and took care of Cholly once his mother also abandoned him.

Cholly quit school after attending for six years and went to work cleaning up a store where he met Blue Jack, an older man who was born a slave and loved to tell Cholly stories about his love affairs and ghosts. Cholly had a deep affection for Blue; he idolized him, in fact, and remembers fondly the time Blue shared the heart of a watermelon with him one Fourth of July.

Cholly remembers the spring that Aunt Jimmy finally died. Everyone claimed that it was a peach cobbler that did it. Jimmy got sick after sitting in damp seats at a religious revival meeting. When all the regular remedies failed—tea and Bible verses—the neighbors sent for M'Dear, the local midwife and healer. She diagnosed Jimmy with "'a cold in [her] womb'“ (137), told Jimmy to take nothing but vegetable broth, and asked someone to bury Jimmy's waste. She predicted that Aunt Jimmy would likely mend.

Aunt Jimmy took nothing but broth and listened to the shared stories with the other African American women, all of whom were older and glad to have escaped the burdens of sex and childbearing. Jimmy did improve for a few days, but she ultimately died after eating a peach cobbler prepared by Essie Foster, one of her neighbors.

Jimmy's family and neighbors prepared her body for burial, cleaned the house, and made sure Cholly was dressed for the funeral. Everyone treated Cholly with sympathy, which he liked, and Cholly listened to the gossip about the small amount of money left to bury Jimmy and plans for Cholly to go live with Jimmy's brother. The funeral was emotional and the banquet that followed "was a peal of joy" (143) by contrast. At the burial, Cholly still did not quite feel the reality of Jimmy's death and he celebrated like the adults by stuffing himself back at the house.

Afterward, Cholly went outside to hang out with Jake, an older cousin who joined in the laughter that came when Cholly tried to smoke a cigarette from the lit end. Eager to save face, Cholly tagged along with Jake to talk with several girls. Although Cholly expected the girls to ignore the boys, they did not. Jake convinced one girl, Suky, to walk with him, and Darlene agreed to walk with Cholly.

The two couples walked down the road and ate muscadine grapes from a wild vineyard at a distance from the house. After throwing grapes at each other, the couples split apart, and Cholly found himself alone with Darlene at the edge of the woods. They began to rub against each other (or perhaps have sex—the point is not made clear), but just as Cholly was on the verge of climaxing, the couple was discovered by two white men, one with a flashlight and both with rifles. The white men laughed and told Cholly that he should continue having sex with Darlene.

Unable to sustain an erection, Cholly simulated sex, feeling deep hatred for Darlene, who covered her face with her hands all the while. The two men finally left when they heard the sounds of their hunting dogs. Cholly and Darlene walked backed to Jimmy's house without talking to each other. The adults, having eaten too much and had too much to drink, barely remarked on their return and disheveled appearance.

The following day, as the adults distributed Aunt Jimmy's belongings, Cholly could do nothing but think about the laughter of the white men and what they had forced him to do. Despite what they had done, "[n]ever did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters" because doing so "would have consumed him" (150-151). Darlene, "the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect” (151), was the object of his hatred instead. Cholly could not even tell Blue, who was mostly drunk these days and whose reputation for success with women would have made Cholly feel even more ashamed to tell the truth.

On the day Cholly was scheduled to leave with his uncle, Cholly decided that Darlene might be pregnant. Cholly decided to run away to Macon to look for his father. He retrieved a stash of money that Aunt Jimmy had hidden away, then he took off on foot. He worked and begged for food until he reached a town with a bus station and bought a ticket that took him to Macon.

Once in Macon, Cholly went looking for his father in an alley where some men were playing craps. When Cholly attempted to talk to the man who had been pointed out to him, Fuller assumed Cholly was the son of a woman looking for child support. Cholly's father cursed at Cholly and told him to leave so that he could finish his game. Cholly was so devastated by this outcome that he soiled his pants. He ran until he reached the Ocmulgee River, where he curled into a ball until evening. He washed his clothes in the river in the dark. Later, three women took him in and "[gave] him back his manhood” (159).

As a man, Cholly was "[d]angerously free” (159). He did whatever he wanted without respect to societal standards or social pressure. He killed white men, beat women and treated them tenderly later, and drank himself silly. This free Cholly was the man Pauline met that day when she stood on the road scratching her leg with her foot, and her response to him made him want "to nest with her” (160)—for a little while.

In the spring of the novel, Cholly no longer desired Pauline and had no idea of what to do with his children. As an orphan and a man without material wealth, he had no models of parenting and nothing tangible to give the children. He felt no sense of kinship to them and merely reacted to them based on how he felt in a given moment.

When a drunk Cholly came across Pecola hunched over a sink of dirty dish water one Saturday, the "[s]equence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love” (161). He knew there was little he could give her or do to relieve the painful sense of fear that seemed to hang over her. When Pecola scratched the back of her leg just as her mother did all those years ago, Cholly followed his impulses by crawling to her and nibbling on her foot, the same thing he did when he met Pauline. When Pecola stumbled, Cholly caught her and then raped her. She fainted when he abruptly withdrew from her. Cholly covered Pecola with a quilt and left her on the kitchen floor, where her mother later found her.

The fourth section of "Spring" is preceded by lines from the Dick and Jane primer in which Jane sees her dog and asks if he wants to play with her. These lines are also written in all capital letters without intervening punctuation or spaces.

In the fourth section, Morrison introduces Soaphead Church, a self-admitted misanthrope who "loved things, for the slightest contact with people produced in him a faint but persistent nausea" (165). Church advertised himself as the local "Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams“ (165), having failed at being an Anglican priest and every other job he attempted. A consequence of Church's distaste for physical contact with others because of their perceived uncleanliness was that he was a pedophile.

Soaphead's actual name was Elihue Micah Whitcombe, but the black inhabitants of Lorain gave him his new name because of his curly hair, which looked like it had been lathered with soap, and because they were aware that he once worked as a minister. Soaphead's family was from a woman of color and a British noble. The family felt a sense of superiority because of its white heritage and over the generations had accomplished much in terms of financial and academic success. The family did have a strain of eccentricity resulting from intermarrying too much, however, and every generation produced a misfit like Soaphead.

Soaphead was the product of his father's harsh discipline and is a narrow, self-hating person who always found a way to justify his most despicable actions. The tragedy of his life was that Velma, a shopgirl he met at a Chinese department store, married and then abandoned him because she felt suffocated by his obsession with cleanliness.

Soaphead became celibate after that and worked a series of menial, white-collar jobs before coming to Lorain in 1931 and moving into a room rented out to him by Bertha. Soaphead despised Bob, Bertha's aging, smelly dog and had even bought poison to kill the dog. However, he could not bring himself to kill the dog.

Pecola's appearance at his door one day that spring presented the perfect opportunity for Soaphead to rid himself of the dog. Pecola was by then visibly pregnant, had been expelled from school, and asked Soaphead if he could give her blue eyes. Soaphead, who believed Pecola to be ugly and assumed that white physical features were more attractive than black ones, felt sympathy for her request and regret that he could not grant her wish. He told her as much at first but then told Pecola that if she performed some action, God might grant her wish.

Pecola needed to give an offering of food to Bob the dog and observe the dog's reaction to discover if God was likely to grant her wish. If the dog reacted strangely, Soaphead promised Pecola, God was likely to grant her wish. What Pecola did not know was that Soaphead had poisoned the food. When Pecola went out to the porch and fed the poisoned food to Bob, the dog convulsed and walked around the yard "like a broken toy" (176).

Satisfied that he had gotten what he wanted at last with the death of Bob, Soaphead sat down to write a long letter to God in which he takes God to task for creating evil in the world, allowing Velma to leave him, giving him a predilection for molesting girls, and allowing children to suffer. He closes the letter by telling God he has "caused a miracle" (184) where God failed by giving Pecola blue eyes that no one but Pecola will be able to see and that God should be jealous. Soaphead fell asleep, and Bertha discovered the body of Bob a little later.