The principal themes of the novel are summed up in the spring section, when the narrator speaks of the ideas of physical beauty and romantic love as “probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” In this novel with no single major white character, white ideas about beauty still exert their power upon the lives of Black people, creating within the Black community a strict caste system based on shades of blackness. Black adults and children alike, with the exception of Frieda and Claudia it seems, admire the “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal. The minor character Geraldine teaches her light-skinned son that there is a line between colored people and “niggers,” a line that must be carefully guarded against attempts to erode it. At the opposite extreme from Maureen Peal is Pecola, whose own mother knew from the moment of Pecola’s birth that her very Black baby was ugly. At both the beginning and the end of the novel, Pecola is identified with a certain type of seed that the soil will not nurture. Pecola is described at the beginning as the plot of black dirt into which her father had dropped his seed. By the end, Cholly, Pecola, and their baby are all dead, and Claudia tries to explain why:

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. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.