“The Bluest Eye,” the debut novel of Toni Morrison, tells the story of Picola Breedlove and her longing for acceptance. The book often finds itself the target of censors who object to its depictions of sexual assault and unblinking look at the ugly racial caste system in America. Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Penguin
If the three Canadians who discovered insulin in 1921 were themselves diabetic and trying to save their own lives, would that make their accomplishment less significant?
I’d say no. Their breakthrough still benefits uncounted millions.
Similarly, I do not discount the American Revolution because the colonists were thinking mostly of their own interests.
They still forged a new type of freedom. For themselves. At first.
But that freedom began to spread — rather like a virus escaping a lab — and kept infecting others.
That is the American story in a nutshell: One group secures rights for itself, then those rights are claimed by a more disadvantaged group.
While soaked with blood and outrage, it is still an inspiring story. That’s why I’m so puzzled that Florida and Texas pretend that telling the core American narrative somehow hurts their children.
Which is more inspiring? That wealthy planter and slave owner Thomas Jefferson paused from gardening at Monticello to write the Declaration of Independence? Or that his grandchildren, descendants of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman Jefferson made his concubine, would some day gain their rights as free citizens — in theory — under that very same document?
I’ll take the second story. It displays the promise of America. You can’t feel bad hearing it, unless you’re rooting for slavery.
The past helps us understand the present. If you are agog at the Alabama court casting embryos as children — albeit very well-behaved children — it might help to remember that while Black Americans won the right to vote in 1865, American women would not receive the same right for another 55 years, until 1920. American wives and mothers and sisters lagged two generations behind those once considered sub-human chattel.
Small wonder those trying to roll back civil rights don’t want our real history told. They’re afraid and don’t want children learning about the hard-won freedoms they’re trying to snatch back.
Tough. We’re all Americans. We all share the same past. All need education, to correct the prejudices we all harbor. It’s unfortunate that some people so vigorously guard and cherish their ignorance, because being ignorant can also be an opportunity to learn something new.
For instance: Last September, during Banned Books Week, I was looking over a list of banned authors. Toni Morrison jumped out. I read a lot but had never read a word of hers. Why? Growing up in the 1970s, school didn’t teach her. Since then, the thought to read her work never occurred to me.
Not my fault, then. But a lapse that should be corrected, now. So I started with Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, “The Bluest Eye.” I listened to the book on Audible, read by Morrison herself. It opens with a pastiche of Dick and Jane books.
“Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy …”
Morrison reads it in a flat, accelerating cadence that was frankly terrifying. In the printed text, the words compress crazily together: “Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhite…” Like something out of a Stephen King novel.
Literature can slice to the heart of things. Reading that prologue, I really felt how awful it must be to have an unfamiliar culture ground in your face.
But that wasn’t the most troubling part.
The novel is raw, direct, honest. Gorgeously written. As shocking a start as that Dick and Jane nightmare was, the story begins, “Quiet, as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” Talk about writing that leaps out of the blocks and races away.
I was surprised at how well-written “The Bluest Eye” is. Think about that. You’d imagine that Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in Literature would give away the game.
But no, it really didn’t. Not for me. Maybe I assumed the Nobel committee felt obligated to give the prize to someone like Morrison. A clear form of bigotry, on my part, the racism of low expectations.
And if I adhered to the far left blunder that anyone with a spot of prejudice on their soul should be hustled offstage to some unseen racist purgatory to prevent the pathogen from spreading, then I’d never admit this.
But we all have these spots on our characters, and the thing to do when you find one is to scrub, vigorously. I don’t think mentioning it disqualifies me from my job — heck, that is my job.