SOURCE: Harris, Trudier. “Reconnecting Fragments: Afro-American Folk Tradition in The Bluest Eye.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay, pp. 68-76. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.

[In the following essay, Harris examines the influence of African American folk traditions in The Bluest Eye with respect to the relation between communal patterns of survival and coping and the shaping of individual character.]

The Bluest Eye is not only the story of the destructive effects of inter- and intraracial prejudice upon impressionable black girls in the midwest; it is also the story of Afro-American folk culture in process. Through subtle and not-so-subtle ways, Toni Morrison suggests that the vibrancy of the folk culture persists through the fortunes and misfortunes of the characters, and it serves to baptize them into kinship with each other. From folk wisdom to the blues, from folk speech to myths and other beliefs, Lorain, Ohio, shares with historical black folk communities patterns of survival and coping, traditions that comfort in times of loss, and beliefs that point to an enduring creativity.

The setting mirrors perhaps one of the greatest beliefs in black communities during and after slavery—that the North is a freer place for black people economically and socially. It does not matter that Lorain, Ohio, is just a shade north of south, or that Pauline Breedlove has only come from Kentucky, a couple of hundred miles away; it is still relevant that the city is north of where she was, that it holds out to her the traditional expectations of existence above the Mason Dixon line. It was irrelevant that some blacks arrived in the North and found conditions hardly better than the ones they thought they were escaping in the South. These migrants felt they had to hold out the promise to their relatives and friends in the South even if the promise had failed them. So tales circulated about how wonderful things could be “up North.” Then, too, the myth was reinforced in those blacks who tamed the concrete jungle, acquired good jobs, and sent their children to school well clothed. In time they formed a middle class, separated from the hordes of their still-migrating sisters and brothers.

For Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, the myth of the North is temporarily a reality. For awhile, in Ohio, they have a house and the money they need. But Pauline's restlessness and Cholly's drinking eventually lead them to the triangular storefront house that comes to epitomize their economic and mental state. When Pauline loses a tooth and gives up trying to imitate white movie heroines, she resigns herself to poverty and ugliness. When her children are born, she conditions them to see the North as the nightmare into which her dream has turned. In short, her trading of myth for reality becomes detrimental to her whole family; even when the mythical images were those of the distorting silver screen, Pauline could believe that the promise of the North could be fulfilled. Once she loses faith in the possibility for change, she gives up beliefs that have tied her to historical black communities as well as to prevailing folk traditions. Giving up reflects, in part, her ultimate transference of identification from blacks to whites, as illustrated in her worship of the “little pink-and-yellow” Fisher girl. Her severing of ties to the folk culture in turn short circuits any connections she could pass on to Pecola that would aid her in reconnecting to that culture.

In general, Morrison's characters adhere to many folk beliefs, superstitions, and signs common to historical communities. This is especially true of beliefs surrounding sickness and death. For example, the novel opens with Claudia's remembrances of her mother's treatment for colds when she was growing up: a massage with Vicks salve, a bit to swallow, neck and chest wrapped in a “hot flannel.” All were designed to induce sweating, which was believed to be effective in reducing fevers. In black communities where doctors were expensive or scarce, home remedies and items that could be purchased without prescription were relied on. Wrappings frequently became preventive medicine; children warded off colds and other ailments by wearing roots held on by flannel applied under their dresses and shirts. The belief extends to some of the older women in Morrison's community. Cholly's Aunt Jimmy wears her asefetida bag “around her neck”;¹ other older women in the community “wrapped their heads in rags, and their breasts in flannel” (110). For them, belief in natural cures is a way of life, and they are not willing to part with their practices.

The specifics of these details are less important than that they show how people in such communities cared for each other, a caring that is in stark contrast to most of the characters in The Bluest Eye. Where such caring touches the lives of the characters, as with Claudia and with Cholly when Aunt Jimmy was alive, there is a positive influence upon behavior. When such caring disappears, as with Cholly after Aunt Jimmy's death, or was never available, as with Pecola, disastrous results ensue. Thus, through these sometimes casual references, Morrison offers a part of the pattern of black interaction that sustains against the dissolution represented by Pauline's refusal to mother her children, Geraldine's distortion of the notion of family, and Cholly's destructive abuse of his daughter.

The emphasis upon caring applies to the cures offered Aunt Jimmy during her illness. While they do not save her, they illustrate a variety of beliefs and convey the altruistic concern absent from many relationships in the novel. Taken ill after a camp meeting during a rainstorm, Jimmy is told: “Don't eat no whites of eggs,” “Drink new milk,” “Chew on this root” (108). Refusing such advice, Jimmy does not get better until M'Dear, the local healer, is brought in. “A competent and decisive diagnostician,” M'Dear is usually called in when all the “ordinary means” of curing illnesses have failed. She determines that Jimmy has caught a cold in her womb and advises her to “drink pot liquor and nothing else” (108). Jimmy does well until a neighbor decides that she is strong enough to eat a peach cobbler; the next morning Cholly finds her dead. Since the community believes M'Dear “infallible,” Jimmy could only have died from eating the peach cobbler. With the logic of the beliefs that guide their cures and preventions, the women rationally conclude that deviation from the advice (drink pot liquor) that had shown itself effective led to Jimmy's death. In their minds the peach cobbler was not blameless, or Jimmy's condition irreversible. A natural cure had been put into effect, and the natural flow was interrupted by the introduction of an alien element. That alien element was responsible for the death. The women accept that with the same stoicism that they combat the waywardness of their husbands and children and the racism of whites.

Their belief in and the very description of M'Dear is also reminiscent of historical folk communities where local healers, or conjurers, or hoodoo doctors usually had distinctive physical characteristics or deformities that set them apart from others in the community. Newbell Niles Puckett, in his study of conjuration in the South,² emphasized that many of the conjurers had one blue eye and one black eye, were extremely dark skinned, might be crippled or walked with a cane, and that they frequently lived apart from the rest of the community. M'Dear “was a quiet woman who lived in a shack near the woods” (108). Her power and the confidence the community has in her are reflected in her physical characteristics. Cholly expects her to be “shriveled and hunched over” because he has heard that “she was very, very old”: “But M'Dear loomed taller than the preacher who accompanied her. She must have been over six feet tall. Four big white knots of hair gave power and authority to her soft black face. Standing straight as a poker, she seemed to need her hickory stick not for support but for communication” (108). The preacher's accompaniment lends power to M'Dear's authority, for in this realm of belief, the secular and the sacred come together. M'Dear's place in the community is as secure, or more so, than the preacher's; her practical status as midwife lends credence to, if not actual tolerance for, her other areas of expertise. Her ties to the community, despite her seeming outsider status, provide another contrast to Pecola, who, severed from those traditions that could incorporate her, merely remains outside the bonds of caring.

The community that believes in M'Dear's powers and in the killing power of peach cobbler also has its share of other folk beliefs and entertainments. Blue Jack, the old man who befriends Cholly after he quits school, is an active tradition bearer of various kinds of tales: “Blue used to tell him old-timey stories about how it was when the Emancipation Proclamation came. How the black people hollered, cried, and sang. And ghost stories about how a white man cut off his wife's head and buried her in the swamp, and the headless body came out at night and went stumbling around the yard, knocking over stuff because it couldn't see, and crying all the time for a comb. They talked about the women Blue had had, and the fights he'd been in when he was younger, about how he talked his way out of getting lynched once, and how others hadn't” (106). The story about the headless woman ties in to many tales of decapitation that circulate in oral tradition, those that are legendary in form, that is, told for true, and those that are etiological in form, explaining, for example, how the jack-o-lantern came into existence.

Blue becomes a folk hero to Cholly, and, long into adulthood, after he has killed three white men and become his own legend, Cholly remembers the good times he has had with Blue. The veneration comes as much from the stories Blue has told as from his admiration of Blue's life—carefree and without responsibilities to anyone. It also comes from the fact that Blue has been one of the few people, besides Aunt Jimmy, who cared for Cholly, who responded to him as a human being, rather than as a phallic symbol, a “nigger,” or a burden. No such model exists for Pecola; even the prostitutes who befriend her are equally alienated from the community.

Elements of folk speech, like the folktales and folk heroes are also relevant to the novel. Metaphors comparable to those Zora Neale Hurston uses in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) occur intermittently, making contrasts between the characters like Geraldine, who deny any ties to folk roots, and those who are closer to the selves inherent in their blackness, such as Claudia's mother. When Mrs. MacTeer exclaims that she has “as much business with another mouth to feed as a cat has with side pockets” (23), she exhibits philosophical ties with black people who express their conditions in metaphoric language that is arresting in its vividness. Pauline Breedlove's observation that it is as “cold as a witch's tit” (35) in her house is also a familiar folk expression. When Miss Marie notes that Pecola, on a visit to her house, is without socks, she describes her “as barelegged as a yard dog” (44), a comparison that again evokes the folk creativity that draws similes and metaphors from animals and the natural world. Such expressions tie these characters to historic folk communities even if they should later, as Pauline does, choose to reject most of those bonds of kinship.

Other traditions relevant to the shaping of black character are nicknaming and name calling, which again reflect patterns of caring and incorporation into community. Pauline is pained that she does not have a nickname and blames it on the family's pity for her, for the “slight deformity” she suffers, left from a nail puncture in her foot when she was two years old. Nicknaming is an old and venerated tradition in the black community, and not having been given one, Pauline felt excluded. Without that special favor bestowed upon her, and without being teased or having anecdotes told about her, Pauline “never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace” (88). In their studies of nicknames in black communities, scholars have focused on the tremendous value they have, the special recognition they bestow upon an individual for a feat accomplished, a trait emphasized, or a characteristic noticed. Without a nickname, Pauline feels unclaimed by her family in any special way. When the rich white family for which she works in Ohio assigns her a nickname—Polly—it serves in part to explain Pauline's attachment to them: “they gave her what she never had” (101) and thereby claim her attention and her loyalty more so than anyone in her family had done. The white family tells anecdotes about her, of how they could “never find anybody like Polly,” of how “she will not leave the kitchen until everything is in order,” and of how she is ultimately the “ideal servant” (101). A perversion of the functions nicknames serve in black communities, Pauline, as Polly, illustrates the potential identity-shaping purpose such naming provides. She desperately clings to her relationship with the Fishers, but fails to see in her daughter a similar need to be claimed in a special way. Pecola's formal name, reminiscent of movies and books, suggests distance rather than claiming.

To be called “out of one's name,” as Bernice Reagan has asserted in some of her research on naming, can be just as negatively powerful as a nickname can be positive.³ The person so defamed is denied a confirming identity, and thereby suffers a lack comparable to what Pauline feels for not being singled out. The school children who shout names at Pecola shame her and use her features as a way of denying her admission into their society. When the boys circle her in a ritual of insult and shout “Black e mo Black e mo Ya daddy sleeps nekked” (55), Pecola becomes the victim who invites further abuse because she suffers visibly. The game is tantamount to a rite of separation. In the process, Pecola is given another opportunity to view her status as an outsider. Her rescue by Maureen Peal, Claudia, and Frieda is only temporary, because Maureen indulges Pecola only in an effort to discover if the insult the boys have shouted about her father is really true. Unsatisfied, the light-skinned Maureen draws a circle of acceptance around herself that excludes the other three girls: “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!” (61). Conscious of her unattractiveness and her color, Pecola seems to disappear where she stands, unable to join Claudia and Frieda in returning insults to Maureen, or to appreciate that they are fighting for her. She senses too strongly rejection at an irredeemable level. Children, teachers, neighbors, and other adults have confirmed what her mother concluded upon her birth: that Pecola will never be an insider in the black community and cannot possibly hope for acceptance beyond it. All combine to reinforce Pecola's belief that the only escape for her is to become beautiful through obtaining the bluest eyes of all, ones that will dazzle everyone into loving her.

Her belief in what blue eyes will accomplish for her is just as strong as some of the folk beliefs expressed in the novel. Belief is the single most important factor in conjuration as in Christianity, the two systems to which Pecola is most frequently exposed. Her prayers to God to make her disappear are predicated upon the belief that such a feat is possible. Her giving of the poisoned meat to the old dog is similarly predicated upon the belief that, if a reaction occurs, her wish for blue eyes will be granted. Hope for a magical transformation underlies both desires, and Pecola's belief in the possible transformation ties her to all believers in sympathetic magic. Her conviction that the blue eyes have been granted her may be viewed as insanity, but it simultaneously fits the logic that has led to that final reward. It is no stranger than the community women's belief that Jimmy has died from eating a peach cobbler. Belief is the single most important element in both outcomes.

Pecola's basic wish for blue eyes ties her to all believers in fairy tales and other magical realms. It is Cinderella wanting to be transformed from char girl to belle of the ball, or Sleeping Beauty waiting a hundred years for the prince to awaken her. It is the classic tale of the ugly duckling turned beautiful swan, of the beast transformed through love and caring into the beautiful prince, of Sir Gawain's pig lady turned into a dazzling woman. While Pecola seems doomed whatever she does—if she resorts to fantasy, she is considered crazy, and if she tries to live in the real world, there is no place for her—her desire for blue eyes ties her to many heroines of fairy tales, and to many young girls who have wished for features other than the ones they have. While many of the latter desires are no more than passing fancies, Pecola's is more intense because she is never given the opportunity, in any realm (home, school, playground), to see anything positive in herself as she is. The patterns of caring and incorporation hinted at in some of the occurrences in the novel never reach her strongly enough to reshape her opinion of herself.

Belief in magical realms or in the power to make present conditions seem magical is also seen in the desire of Claudia and Frieda to influence Pecola's fate by planting the marigolds correctly. They hope, as Pecola does with the offering to the dog, to bring about a kind of sympathetic magic, to create a space and circumstances in which Pecola will have a healthier future. When they fail, they blame themselves for not performing the rites correctly, for not having the right amount of belief. Destined to live in the realistic world, which promises a sane future for them, Claudia and Frieda are encouraged to put aside their childish beliefs. Diverging into a different world, Pecola makes the transition into fantasy, into a world from which Claudia's and Frieda's destinies have effectively and happily shut them out.

Beliefs that are adhered to over long periods of time and repeated occurrences can be defined as rituals. One of these operative in Morrison's novel is the ritual surrounding the funeral of Aunt Jimmy; certainly the funeral itself is a ritual, but so too is the traditional gathering of neighbors, relatives, and friends immediately after the death. They come as if in a dance, to perform the movements that custom and tradition have assigned to them. First, they must prepare for the burial. Then, they prepare food for those who come from near and far. They, and the relatives, must divide the belongings of the loved one and see that those left homeless are provided for. Since Cholly has never witnessed the ceremonies surrounding a funeral, he gets an education simultaneous with our witnessing of the unfolding of a tradition. The ladies of Jimmy's generation take over: they “cleaned the house, aired everything out, notified everybody, and stitched together what looked like a white wedding dress for Aunt Jimmy” (111). They also manage to get clothes for Cholly to attend the funeral, and they ensure that all of his physical needs are met.

After the traditional viewing of the body, and the “tearful shrieks and shouts” (113) of the mourners, the processional moves to the cemetery. Although the funeral is not depicted in detail, Morrison captures its emotional intensity in the metaphoric language of classic tradition:

It was like a street tragedy with spontaneity tucked softly into the corners of a highly formal structure. The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.

(113)

The funeral serves to return order to a community disrupted by death. Like all rituals, it provides a functional release, a pattern into which grief can be shaped, for the entire community.

After the “thunderous beauty of the funeral,” the funeral banquet is “a peal of joy”; it is “the exultation, the harmony, the acceptance of physical frailty, joy in the termination of misery. Laughter, relief, a steep hunger for food” (113). It is the sign that things can continue without the departed one, and it serves to put the grieving for her in the perspective of the larger force of ongoing life. Concerns return to the practical—who will take Cholly and what relatives will get which of Aunt Jimmy's belongings.

With the ritual over, the “accounts settled,” and the spectacle completed, the individual families return to their own homes, content in the knowledge that they have played well the roles that tradition and custom have assigned to them. Now, comparable to Janie's burying of Tea Cake in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,⁴ there are only the tales to be told, the stories carrying the memories of what happened at Jimmy's funeral, about how well she was “laid out” and how much her family and friends appreciated her. In death, as in life, the pattern of caring that eludes Pecola is a recurring strand in the novel, one that has touched Cholly and Pauline, but from which they have become disconnected in their pursuit of clothes and alcohol.

Jimmy's death provides for one kind of traditional ritual of caring and continuation. Another tradition Morrison draws upon in the novel is that of the blues. In many ways The Bluest Eye is similar to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man⁵ in its very theme and structure: “What did I do to be so black and blue?” Conscious of it or not, that question must reverberate in Pecola's mind throughout her adventures in the novel. Again and again, she is confronted with people who emphasize to her that she must “stay back” because of her blackness. Again and again, she is “boomeranged” over the head with the knowledge that little black boys do not want to “haul no coal” or be identified with a “stovepipe blonde” and that most of her friends, family, and neighbors believe that “white is right.” She lives the blues twenty-four hours a day, through each of the long minutes drawn out in each of those hours. Mrs. MacTeer can sing about “hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me-times” (24) and about “trains and Arkansas” (78); and Poland can sing about “blues in [her] mealbarrel / Blues up on the shelf” (44), but Pecola can give both of them lessons in living the blues. The ugliness that she believes is hers is just as blues-inducing as those levees breaking to release floodwaters in the Mississippi Delta. At least there was release from floods, and perhaps the pantry can be replenished, but Pecola's ugliness is there to stay. The potential for release from her state of the blues will never be fulfilled because the world around her does not believe that relief is her just due; it will always convey to her that the blues is her permanent condition, not a temporary state from which she can reasonably anticipate escape.

Her adventures, like those of her father, would “become coherent only in the head of a musician” (125), or in the structural composition of a novel that resembles a blues creation. Yet the blues are a way for people to touch their pain and that of others, to sing of what, in any given instance, is but an individualized account of collective suffering. But Pecola is unable to articulate the pain she feels or channel it through the form of the blues. Like her belief in fantasies derived from outside the black community, her state of the blues is familiar, but she has no model for it to serve as a way of connecting her to the community rather than cutting her off from it.

Pauline and Cholly Breedlove have both come into contact with forms of Afro-American culture used to tie black people to each other in caring, sharing ways. Yet their move to the North parallels a dissolution in their abilities to use the forms to which they have been exposed for any sustaining purposes. Thus they break the chains of continuity in culture and can only produce children who are outside that which had the potential to nurture them. Pecola and Cholly must therefore exist in a world of fragmentation, in a world where Mrs. MacTeer and Poland might show signs of the more sustaining Southern black culture, but which they cannot effectively transmit to the Breedlove children. They, like other characters in their isolated existences in the novel, are tied together by cultural forces stronger than all of them, but the strands of that cultural net keep breaking away from Pecola to slip her back into a sea of confusion about herself and about her place in the world of Lorain, Ohio.

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 105. Subsequent references to this source appear in the text in parenthesis.

2. Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926).

3. Bernice Reagan, “We Are ‘Girl,’ ‘Chile,’ ‘Lady,’ That and ‘oman,’ ‘Hussy,’ ‘Heifer,’ ‘A Woman’; or, Naming That Imprisons and Naming That Sets You Free,” Unpublished paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, Washington, D.C., 27 December 1984.

4. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937. reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).

5. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1972).