Free The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Page A

room with us. Friendly-like.
    “I’m not talking to you,” said Maureen. “Besides, I don’t care if she sees her father naked. She can look at him all day if she wants to. Who cares?”
    “You do,” said Frieda. “That’s all you talk about.”
    “It is not.”
    “It is so. Boys, babies, and somebody’s naked daddy. You must be boy-crazy.”
    “You better be quiet.”
    “Who’s gonna make me?” Frieda put her hand on her hip and jutted her face toward Maureen.
    “You all ready made. Mammy made.”
    “You stop talking about my mama.”
    “Well, you stop talking about my daddy.”
    “Who said anything about your old daddy?”
    “You did.”
    “Well, you started it.”
    “I wasn’t even talking to you. I was talking to Pecola.”
    “Yeah. About seeing her naked daddy.”
    “So what if she did see him?”
    Pecola shouted, “I never saw my daddy naked. Never.”
    “You did too,” Maureen snapped. “Bay Boy said so.”
    “I did not.”
    “You did.”
    “I did not.”
    “Did. Your own daddy, too!”
    Pecola tucked her head in—a funny, sad, helpless movement. A kind of hunching of the shoulders, pulling in of the neck, as though she wanted to cover her ears.
    “You stop talking about her daddy,” I said.
    “What do I care about her old black daddy?” asked Maureen.
    “Black? Who you calling black?”
    “You!”
    “You think you so cute!” I swung at her and missed, hitting Pecola in the face. Furious at my clumsiness, I threw my notebook at her, but it caught her in the small of her velvet back, for she had turned and was flying across the street against traffic.
    Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, “I
am
cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I
am
cute!”
    She ran down the street, the green knee socks making her legs look like wild dandelion stems that had somehow lost their heads. The weight of her remark stunned us, and it was a second or two before Frieda and I collected ourselves enough to shout, “Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie!” We chanted this most powerful of our arsenal of insults as long as we could see the green stems and rabbit fur.
    Grown people frowned at the three girls on the curbside, two with their coats draped over their heads, the collars framing the eyebrows like nuns’ habits, black garters showing where they bit the tops of brown stockings that barely covered the knees, angry faces knotted like dark cauliflowers.
    Pecola stood a little apart from us, her eyes hinged in the direction in which Maureen had fled. She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.
    Frieda snatched her coat from her head. “Come on, Claudia. ’Bye, Pecola.”
    We walked quickly at first, and then slower, pausing every now and then to fasten garters, tie shoelaces, scratch, or examine old scars. We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she
was
—then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that