90. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

[90 down - 10 to go!!!]
Told from the point of view of Claudia MacTeer, an African American girl growing up in Ohio in the 1930's, this story is mostly about a girl that Claudia's parents take into their home named Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is eleven years old and has a hard life: her parents, Paulina and Cholly, are always fighting, and Cholly is often drunk. Pecola's brother, Sammy, often runs away to get away from the family; Pecola, on the other hand, prays for blue eyes. She believes that if she had blue eyes, her life would be much better and people would stop telling her that she is so ugly.

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights - if those eyes of hers were
different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different .... If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove, too. Maybe they'd say, "Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty eyes" .... Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year, she prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time.

Pauline treats the daughter of the wealthy white family (the Fosters) that she works for better than she treats Pecola, her own daughter. The Fosters' daughter has blond curls and blue eyes, and their lifestyle is the closest that Pauline will ever get to having it herself.
Eventually, Pecola goes to live with the MacTeers because Cholly burns down her family's home. Claudia MacTeer and her sister Frieda become friends with Pecola and go through a lot of typical pre-adolescent experiences together (e.g. being fascinated when Pecola is the first to start "ministrating").

It becomes apparent that Cholly, Pecola's father, has a thing for little girls. One day, while Pecola is doing dishes, he rapes her. Morrison's writing is exquisite - and the story is really heart-wrenching.

Following the disintegration - the falling away - of sexual desire, he was conscious of her wet, soapy hands on his wrists, the fingers clenching, but whether her grup was from a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or from some other emotion, he could not tell. Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted. Cholly stood up and could only see her grayish panties, so sad and limp around her ankles. Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her. So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her.

Claudia and Frieda hear that Pecola is pregnant by her father and feel sorry for her. They decide not to sell the marigold seeds they were planning on selling: they plant them and determine that if they bloom, then that would mean that everything would be fine. The seeds do not bloom. The story concludes (from Clauda's point of view):

I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.

I'm surprised that two common themes in several well-known works of African American literature I've read recently are child molestation and incest (this, The Color Purple, and Push). Though very sad, this was a great book.