The Bluest Eye (6 page)

She walks down Garden Avenue to a small grocery store which sells penny candy. Three pennies are in her shoe—slipping back and forth between the sock and the inner sole. With each step she feels the painful press of the coins against her foot. A sweet, endurable, even cherished irritation, full of promise and delicate security. There is plenty of time to consider what to buy. Now, however, she moves down an avenue gently buffeted by the familiar and therefore loved images. The dandelions at the base of the telephone pole. Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty. But grown-ups say, “Miss Dunion keeps her yard so nice. Not a dandelion anywhere.” Hunkie women in black babushkas go into the fields with baskets to pull them up. But they do not want the yellow heads—only the jagged leaves. They make dandelion soup. Dandelion wine. Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.

There was the sidewalk crack shaped like a Y, and the other one that lifted the concrete up from the dirt floor. Frequently her sloughing step had made her trip over that one. Skates would go well over this sidewalk—old it was, and smooth; it made the wheels glide evenly, with a mild whirr. The newly paved walks were bumpy and uncomfortable, and the sound of skate wheels on new walks was grating.

These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her.

She climbs four wooden steps to the door of Yacobowski’s Fresh Veg. Meat and Sundries Store. A bell tinkles as she opens it. Standing before the counter, she looks at the array of candies. All Mary Janes, she decides. Three for a penny. The resistant sweetness that breaks open at last to deliver peanut butter—the oil and salt which complement the sweet pull of caramel. A peal of anticipation unsettles her stomach.

She pulls off her shoe and takes out the three pennies. The gray head of Mr. Yacobowski looms up over the counter. He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Blear-dropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss,
see
a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary.

“Yeah?”

She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes.

She points her finger at the Mary Janes—a little black shaft of finger, its tip pressed on the display window. The quietly inoffensive assertion of a black child’s attempt to communicate with a white adult.

“Them.” The word is more sigh than sense.

“What? These? These?” Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice.

She shakes her head, her fingertip fixed on the spot which, in her view, at any rate, identifies the Mary Janes. He cannot see her view—the angle of his vision, the slant of her finger, makes it incomprehensible to him. His lumpy red hand plops around in the glass casing like the agitated head of a chicken outraged by the loss of its body.

“Christ. Kantcha talk?”

His fingers brush the Mary Janes.

She nods.

“Well, why’nt you say so? One? How many?”

Pecola unfolds her fist, showing the three pennies. He scoots three Mary Janes toward her—three yellow rectangles in each packet. She holds the money toward him. He hesitates, not wanting to touch her hand. She does not know how to move the finger of her right hand from the display counter or how to get the coins out of her left hand. Finally he reaches over and takes the pennies from her hand. His nails graze her damp palm.

Outside, Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb.

Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, “They
are
ugly. They
are
weeds.” Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging. Her thoughts fall back to Mr. Yacobowski’s eyes, his phlegmy voice. The anger will not hold; the puppy is too easily surfeited. Its thirst too quickly quenched, it sleeps. The shame wells up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into her eyes. What to do before the tears come. She remembers the Mary Janes.

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

Three pennies had bought her nine lovely orgasms with Mary Jane. Lovely Mary Jane, for whom a candy is named.

Three whores lived in the apartment above the Breedloves’ storefront. China, Poland, and Miss Marie. Pecola loved them, visited them, and ran their errands. They, in turn, did not despise her.

On an October morning, the morning of the stove-lid triumph, Pecola climbed the stairs to their apartment.

Even before the door was opened to her tapping, she could hear Poland singing—her voice sweet and hard, like new strawberries:

I got blues in my mealbarrel

Blues up on the shelf

I got blues in my mealbarrel

Blues up on the shelf

Blues in my bedroom

’Cause I’m sleepin’ by myself

“Hi, dumplin’. Where your socks?” Marie seldom called Pecola the same thing twice, but invariably her epithets were fond ones chosen from menus and dishes that were forever uppermost in her mind.

“Hello, Miss Marie. Hello, Miss China. Hello, Miss Poland.”

“You heard me. Where your socks? You as barelegged as a yard dog.”

“I couldn’t find any.”

“Couldn’t find any? Must be somethin’ in your house that loves socks.”

China chuckled. Whenever something was missing, Marie attributed its disappearance to “something in the house that loved it.” “There is somethin’ in this house that loves brassieres,” she would say with alarm.

Poland and China were getting ready for the evening. Poland, forever ironing, forever singing. China, sitting on a pale-green kitchen chair, forever and forever curling her hair. Marie never got ready.

The women were friendly, but slow to begin talk. Pecola always took the initiative with Marie, who, once inspired, was difficult to stop.

“How come you got so many boyfriends, Miss Marie?”

“
Boy
friends?
Boy
friends? Chittlin’, I ain’t seen a
boy
since nineteen and twenty-seven.”

“You didn’t see none then.” China stuck the hot curlers into a tin of Nu Nile hair dressing. The oil hissed at the touch of the hot metal.

“How come, Miss Marie?” Pecola insisted.

“How come what? How come I ain’t seen a boy since nineteen and twenty-seven? Because they ain’t
been
no boys since then. That’s when they stopped. Folks started gettin’ born old.”

“You mean that’s when
you
got old,” China said.

“I ain’t never got old. Just fat.”

“Same thing.”

“You think ’cause you skinny, folks think you young? You’d make a haint buy a girdle.”

“And you look like the north side of a southbound mule.”

“All I know is, them bandy little legs of yours is every bit as old as mine.”

“Don’t worry ’bout my bandy legs. That’s the first thing they push aside.”

All three of the women laughed. Marie threw back her head. From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea. China giggled spastically. Each gasp seemed to be yanked out of her by an unseen hand jerking an unseen string. Poland, who seldom spoke unless she was drunk, laughed without sound. When she was sober she hummed mostly or chanted blues songs, of which she knew many.

Pecola fingered the fringe of a scarf that lay on the back of a sofa. “I never seen nobody with as many boyfriends as you got, Miss Marie. How come they all love you?”

Marie opened a bottle of root beer. “What else they gone do? They know I’m rich and good-lookin’. They wants to put their toes in my curly hair, and get at my money.”

“You rich, Miss Marie?”

“Puddin’, I got money’s mammy.”

“Where you get it from? You don’t do no work.”

“Yeah,” said China, “where you get it from?”

“Hoover give it me. I did him a favor once, for the F. B. and I.”

“What’d you do?”

“I did him a favor. They wanted to catch this crook, you see. Name of Johnny. He was as low-down as they come….”

“We
know
that.” China arranged a curl.

“…the F. B. and I. wanted him bad. He killed more people than TB. And if you
crossed
him? Whoa, Jesus! He’d run you as long as there was ground. Well, I was little and cute then. No more than ninety pounds, soaking wet.”

“You ain’t never been soaking wet,” China said.

“Well, you ain’t never been dry. Shut up. Let me tell you, sweetnin’. To tell it true, I was the only one could handle him. He’d go out and rob a bank or kill some people, and I’d say to him, soft-like, ‘Johnny, you shouldn’t do that.’ And he’d say he just had to bring me pretty things. Lacy drawers and all. And every Saturday we’d get a case of beer and fry up some fish. We’d fry it in meal and egg batter, you know, and when it was all brown and crisp—not hard, though—we’d break open that cold beer….” Marie’s eyes went soft as the memory of just such a meal sometime, somewhere transfixed her. All her stories were subject to breaking down at descriptions of food. Pecola saw Marie’s teeth settling down into the back of crisp sea bass; saw the fat fingers putting back into her mouth tiny flakes of white, hot meat that had escaped from her lips; she heard the “pop” of the beer-bottle cap; smelled the acridness of the first stream of vapor; felt the cold beeriness hit the tongue. She ended the daydream long before Marie.

“But what about the money?” she asked.

China hooted. “She’s makin’ like she’s the Lady in Red that told on Dillinger. Dillinger wouldn’t have come near you lessen he was going hunting in Africa and shoot you for a hippo.”

“Well, this hippo had a ball back in Chicago. Whoa Jesus, ninety-nine!”

“How come you always say ‘Whoa Jesus’ and a number?” Pecola had long wanted to know.

“Because my mama taught me never to cuss.”

“Did she teach you not to drop your drawers?” China asked.

“Didn’t have none,” said Marie. “Never saw a pair of drawers till I was fifteen, when I left Jackson and was doing day work in Cincinnati. My white lady gave me some old ones of hers. I thought they was some kind of stocking cap. I put it on my head when I dusted. When she saw me, she liked to fell out.”

“You must have been one dumb somebody.” China lit a cigarette and cooled her irons.

“How’d I know?” Marie paused. “And what’s the use of putting on something you got to keep taking off all the time? Dewey never let me keep them on long enough to get used to them.”

“Dewey who?” This was a somebody new to Pecola.

“Dewey who? Chicken! You never heard me tell of
Dewey?
” Marie was shocked by her negligence.

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, honey, you’ve missed half your life. Whoa Jesus, one-nine-five. You talkin’ ’bout smooth! I met him when I was fourteen. We ran away and lived together like married for three years. You know all those klinker-tops you see runnin’ up here? Fifty of ’em in a bowl wouldn’t make a Dewey Prince ankle bone. Oh, Lord. How that man loved me!”

China arranged a fingerful of hair into a bang effect. “Then why he left you to sell tail?”

“Girl, when I found out I could sell it—that somebody would pay cold cash for it, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

Poland began to laugh. Soundlessly. “Me too. My auntie whipped me good that first time when I told her I didn’t get no money. I said ‘Money? For what? He didn’t owe me nothin’.’ She said, ‘The hell he didn’t!’”

They all dissolved in laughter.

Three merry gargoyles. Three merry harridans. Amused by a long-ago time of ignorance. They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels, with great and generous hearts, dedicated, because of the horror of circumstance, to ameliorating the luckless, barren life of men, taking money incidentally and humbly for their “understanding.” Nor were they from that sensitive breed of young girl, gone wrong at the hands of fate, forced to cultivate an outward brittleness in order to protect her springtime from further shock, but knowing full well she was cut out for better things, and could make the right man happy. Neither were they the sloppy, inadequate whores who, unable to make a living at it alone, turn to drug consumption and traffic or pimps to help complete their scheme of self-destruction, avoiding suicide only to punish the memory of some absent father or to sustain the misery of some silent mother. Except for Marie’s fabled love for Dewey Prince, these women hated men, all men, without shame, apology, or discrimination. They abused their visitors with a scorn grown mechanical from use. Black men, white men, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Jews, Poles, whatever—all were inadequate and weak, all came under their jaundiced eyes and were the recipients of their disinterested wrath. They took delight in cheating them. On one occasion the town well knew, they lured a Jew up the stairs, pounced on him, all three, held him up by the heels, shook everything out of his pants pockets, and threw him out of the window.