Lives of Girls and Women

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Vintage. 206 pp. $14.95.

Sula by Toni Morrison. Vintage. 174 pp. $15.00

After seeing the marvelous documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, I immediately decided that, though I’d read four of her novels in the past, I wanted to sit down and read through Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre, in order. My wife agreed, and within a couple of days we had bought three of the books we didn’t have.

The next day, I read the By the Book feature in the New York Times, something I never miss, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.—in answer to the question, “What books would you recommend to someone who wants to know more about American culture?—replied, “I would suggest that they read Toni Morrison’s novels, in chronological order, after reading Faulkner’s novels and Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’” He went on, “Ellison, Morrison and García-Márquez descend straight out of Faulkner, improvising, signifying, playing the dozens and tap-dancing on his Yoknapatawpha head.”

As we were driving to the documentary, my wife had asked me what was special about Morrison’s writing. “What is it she writes about?” I hesitated. “What’s important is the language,” I said. “The way she uses language.”

That seemed a feeble answer, so I was pleased, as we watched the film, when several other people said roughly the same thing, that it was Morrison’s use of language that made her novels great. And when, right after she won the Nobel Prize, a reporter stuck a mike in her face and asked why she thought she had won, she said something to the effect of, “I think I write pretty well.”

I should say so.

The first time I ever heard of Morrison was when I was a young aspiring writer and she was on a PBS program called Book Beat.[1] She spoke briefly about being in a writer’s group, also about sitting and writing longhand while she held a baby on her other shoulder. Later in that show—which I watched avidly in those days, dreaming about being a writer—she read from her book, as other writers had done, and kept looking straight into the camera, as if speaking to the viewer. She read slowly and clearly, as if she wanted us to understand. I’d never seen a writer read that way, with such care for her words.

In the documentary she mentioned that her first subject—in The Bluest Eye—was black girls, because no one else wrote about them. And in Sula she was writing about female friendship. More about young women than just girls.

She also made the fascinating statement that all of the previous African American writers, including Ralph Ellison (whom I would put right at the top of the heap), had written about African American life as if to explain themselves to white people. She didn’t want to do that. She wrote with no reference to white people at all. I didn’t understand what she meant when she said that, but I understand better now, having read these two books.

She also said that, when she wrote The Bluest Eye, she had told the entire plot on the first page, so that readers would continue only because they wanted to understand it, not to find out what happened.

The shocking part of the story is in the first two lines.

“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.”

The book focuses on two sisters—the “we” of the second sentence—named Frieda and Claudia. They were children leading a rather ordinary existence in a middle class household in Lorain, Ohio. The girls’ mother seemed so ordinary and middle class that her conversation reads like a string of clichés.

“Three quarts of milk. That’s what was in that icebox yesterday. Three whole quarts. Now they ain’t none. Not a drop. I don’t mind folks coming in and getting what they want, but three quarts of milk! What the devil does anybody need with three quarts of milk?”

The person who needed all that milk was their friend Pecola, who soaked it up because she wasn’t getting much nourishment at home. Pecola also gets the girls in trouble because, in the midst of her visit to their house, she begins menstruating, with no idea what’s happening. She thinks she might be dying. But Frieda knows. “That’s ministration.’ . . . It just means you can have a baby!’”

Ominous words, in this case.

The early scenes of this novel seem so middle America that you can hardly believe the horrific story that is about to unfold. The exception to the aw shucks nature of the surroundings is the dialogue, and all the discussion, about sex, which is frank and often hilarious. Morrison’s writing about sex is revealing and natural but never prurient. I don’t know of another writer who writes about it so directly.

I was under the impression that Song of Solomon was Morrison’s first great novel, and the early novels apprentice work. I would say now that Morrison was a great writer from the moment she set words to the page, and that this first novel is astonishing not just because of its subject matter, but because of its technical daring. It seems to be this simple story narrated by Claudia, but two-thirds of the way through tells the story first of Pecola’s mother, which Claudia would have no way of knowing, then of Pecola’s father.

One of the facts of sexual abuse, especially a situation so tragic as a father having sex with his daughter, is that there is enormous sympathy for the victim, almost none for the perpetrator, despite the fact that, not only is it overwhelmingly likely that the abuser was himself abused, it’s also true that, to do such a thing, a person must be living in hell. I won’t try to excuse what Pecola’s father Cholly does in this novel, and Morrison doesn’t either. Somehow, though, she sees the situation from a wide—I would almost say God’s—perspective (the second section of her recently published collection of essays is “God’s Language”). When we finish The Bluest Eye, we see why and how it all happened. We’re horrified, but we see it.

Sula, which I actually read first, despite my determination to read chronologically[2], is more a story of women, almost the portrait of a matriarchy. It is based on the friendship of two girls, Nel and Sula, but we also see Nel’s female progenitors on a trip she takes to New Orleans, and the novel is centered in Sula’s female-dominated world, including her mother and grandmother. They live in a town called Medallion, Ohio, but we seem to have moved some distance from Lorain. If The Bluest Eye takes place in a recognizable middle class Ohio, despite what happens there, Medallion more gothic and strange. It is in this novel that you see Morrison “improvising, signifying, playing the dozens and tap-dancing on [Faulkner’s] Yoknapatawpha head.” We’re not in Kansas anymore, and I’m not sure we’re in Ohio either.

Sula’s grandmother is a one-legged woman named Eva, who gets around by sitting in a child’s wagon and keeps a rooming house to which she keeps adding rooms and keeps letting in more and more strays, including three boys, all of whom she names Dewey (“Send me a Dewey,” she’ll say, when she wants something done). Sula’s mother Hannah was Eva’s middle child, a woman who never herself married but who specialized in taking men from other women. “She could break up a marriage before it had even become one—she would make love to the new groom and wash his wife’s dishes all in an afternoon. What she wanted, after [her husband] Rekus died, and what she succeeded in having more often than not, was some touching every day.” Sula herself is a girl who, when she and Nel are attacked by a group of boys, threatens them by cutting her own finger with a knife. “If I can do that to myself,” she says, “what do you suppose I’ll do to you?”

As the Morrison documentary states, Sula is a novel which many woman don’t want to read because it is about a friend who wrecks her best friend’s marriage; Sula takes Nel’s husband away, not because she really wants him; she just feels like having him in the moment. Nel catches them in the act, and it’s as if Sula wanted that, or at least didn’t mind. Sula doesn’t seem to understand the problem, or why her friend is upset. In that way she seems very much Hannah’s child, also the grandchild of Eva, who lived exactly as she wished (at one point she left her children with a neighbor, saying she’d be back the next day, and didn’t return for eighteen months). The word amoral comes to mind, though I’m not sure it’s fair, or accurate. She may just occupy a different moral universe from mine.

I don’t understand Sula as a human being any more than I understand Cholly. I don’t see what makes her tick. But I find her short life fascinating, even as she moves beyond her friendship with Nel and all relations with her family. This is a woman who watches her mother burn to death without even moving to help her. I’m not sure where she comes from in Morrison’s psyche, or why Morrison wanted to write about her. But I won’t soon forget her.

[1] My memory is that I was watching in my house in Pittsburgh, and if that was true she must have been talking about The Bluest Eye. Unfortunately, my memory is that she was talking about Song of Solomon, which wasn’t published until I’d been out of that house for seven years. Something in my memory is askew. No big surprise there.

[2] The bookstore didn’t have The Bluest Eye. I could have waited until they got it, but I was so determined to read Morrison that I began with the second novel instead of the first.