Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye"
Critic: Ruth Rosenberg
Source: MELUS 21, no. 4 (winter 1987): 435-45.
Criticism about: Toni Morrison (1931-), also known as: Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison, Chloe Anthony Morrison, Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni (Chloe Anthony)
Morrison
Nationality: American
[(essay date winter 1987) In the following essay, Rosenberg discusses several
aspects of The Bluest Eye that differentiate Morrison's novel from earlier
fictional accounts of African American girlhood, including descriptions
of first menses and mother-daughter interactions, "colorism," and the emotional
precocity of pre-adolescent girls.]
Little black girls learned their lessons in self-authentication from autobiographies
of such artists as Mahalia Jackson, Maya Angelou, and Bessie Smith, which
explained how, in spite of immense obstacles, one might fashion a self.1
When Sherley Anne Williams was a troubled twelve-year-old in the fifties,
she searched, in vain, through the shelves of her junior high school library
for some fictionalized depiction of her own problems. Because she found
nothing there that would speak to her difficulties, she says, she "was
led, almost inevitably ... to the autobiographies of women entertainers--Eartha
Kitt, Katherine Dunham, Ethel Waters. The material circumstances of their
childhood were so much worse than mine; they too had had to cope with early
and forced sex and sexuality, with mothers who could not express love in
the terms that they so desperately needed. Yet they had risen above this,
turned their difference into something that was respected in the world
beyond their homes. I, in the free North, could do no less than endure"
(196).
Black girls did not exist as far as the publishers of school anthologies
were concerned. Barbara Dodds Stanford writes that "'Whites Only' could
have been stamped on almost every literature series for high school students
published before 1965" (3). Nancy Larrick, who studied 5,206 children's
books published between 1962 and 1964, claims that only 349 of those thousands
of books include even one black child either in the illustrations or the
text. Of that 6.7 percent which do show a black child, all but a small
fraction are "set outside the United States or before World War II. Quite
clearly, the books used in American schools were primarily by and about
white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class people" (84-85).
It was this absence of fictionalized characters with whom she could identify
that started Sherley Anne Williams "on the road to being a writer" (195).
At some point, in virtually every interview with a black woman writer,
comes a similar admission. The consistent response to the question of why
she became an author is that she could not find the books that she needed.
Alice Walker has said that she was forced "to write all the things I should
have read" ("Saving the Life That Is Your Own" 157).
Toni Morrison was a precocious reader as a child, but it was not until
she discovered the Russian novelists that she found herself spoken to.
Otherwise, she felt herself shunted to the sidelines. She mourned for "'
the people who in all literature were always peripheral--little black girls
who were props, background, those people were never center stage, and those
people were me'" (Strouse 54). Asked why she had written The Bluest Eye
(1970), she responded, "'I was interested in reading a kind of book that
I had never read before. I didn't know if such a book existed, but I had
just never read it in 1964 when I started writing The Bluest Eye'" (Parker
252).
Working out of her memory of what Lorain, Ohio, had been like in 1940,
she reconstructed her own childhood. Placed center stage are three little
girls: the book's narrator, Claudia Macteer, 9; her sister Frieda, 10;
and their friend Pecola Breedlove, 11. It is an initiation story so unlike
any other that had been done before that Toni Cade Bambara says her students
have difficulty dealing with it. Among other things they fail to appreciate
the traumatic aspects of the first menses because the onset of menstruation
is not something that is valued in our culture. As Bambara notes, "The
initiation or rites of passage of the young girl is not one of the darlings
of American literature. The coming of age for the young boy is certainly
much more the classic case. I wonder if it all means that we don't put
a value on our process of womanhood" (Guy-Sheftall 247).2
Morrison renders not only the terror and the mystery of that initial bleeding,
but also the older sister's competence in handling it. As Pecola stands
with the blood trickling down her legs, her eyes rimmed with fear, asking
if she's going to die, Frieda explains, "'That's ministratin''" (25), and
dispatches Claudia for some water to clean the steps. The younger sister'
s resentment at missing whatever important things are going on in the bushes
with a white rectangle of cotton is vented against the prying girl from
next door who then screams out that they are "'playing nasty'" (27). Mrs.
Macteer runs out, pulling a switch from the bush and whipping Frieda with
four stinging cuts on the leg. About to punish Pecola, too, she notices
"the white tail" and the "little-girl-gone-to-woman pants" (28) and hugs
them both. That Claudia still does not comprehend what is happening becomes
evident in her panic as she listens outside the bathroom and hears the
water gushing into the tub. When she asks if Pecola is being drowned, Frieda
answers, "'Oh, Claudia. You so dumb. She's just going to wash her clothes
and all'" (28). Later that night as they sleep together, they "were full
of awe and respect for Pecola. Lying next to a real person who was really
ministratin' was somehow sacred" (28). Claudia needs her sister to interpret
her experience for her. The children are forced to rely on each other for
information, since adults make themselves so inaccessible.
The child's intense curiosity is not responded to verbally. Adults demand
deference and fend off questions. They maintain a social distance between
themselves and their children through non-reciprocal conversations. Claudia
says, "Adults do not talk to us--they give us directions. They issue orders
without providing information" (12). Communication is a hierarchically
structured, one-way transmission. Claudia observes that "we didn't initiate
talk with grown-ups; we answered their questions" (22). Another strictly
enforced rule, in the forties at least, was the insistence upon terms of
respect. A child had to address her mother as "Ma'am."
A new boarder's arrival in the Macteer household provides another occasion
to instruct the children about their place. Their status, it is impressed
upon them, is a little lower than that of the furniture: "Frieda and I
were not introduced to him--merely pointed out. Like, here is the bathroom;
the clothes closet is here; and these are my kids" (16).
Parents express their concern through the strict annihilation of any vestige
of impropriety, through lashing out. Each season brings a change in whipping
style for the Macteer girls: "They beat us differently in the spring. Instead
of the dull pain of a winter strap, there were these new green switches
that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous
meanness in these long twigs that made us long for the steady stroke of
a strap or the firm but honest slap of a hairbrush" (78).
Since parental concern manifests itself in this way, an act of translation
is required to read the love latent in it. Claudia shows her ability to
realize that she is loved during an illness--the vehicle of her understanding
being the pair of rough hands that smear salve on her chest. In an interview
with Robert Stepto, Morrison confirms this belated realization, so beautifully
inscribed in her first novel: "'And when they punished us or hollered at
us, it was, at the time, we thought, so inhibiting and so cruel, and it'
s only much later that you realize that they were interested in you,'"
that "'they cared'" (214). Claudia's recognition that she is loved must
come through her other senses because it is never told to her. Expressions
of maternal concern are seldom verbalized in The Bluest Eye; rather, they
are beaten into the child, inscribed on her skin. It was this maternal
attitude that Sherley Anne Williams had, as a girl, hoped to find expressed
in fiction by black women and whose absence fixed her determination to
write about the issue. Only in black women's autobiographies did she find
how others coped "with mothers who could not express love in the terms
... [children] so desperately needed."3
Certainly nine-year-old Claudia does not feel coddled, and her claims
for attention are never overtly acknowledged: "... if we cut or bruise
ourselves, they ask us are we crazy. When we catch colds, they shake their
heads in disgust at our lack of consideration" (12-13). Put to bed with
a cough, Claudia is scolded and begins to cry because "my mother's anger
humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks" (14). She is not reassured verbally:
"No one speaks to me or asks how I feel" (13). Only later does she realize
that the rough hands that rub salve on her chest are expressing concern;
that love, even when it cannot be heard, can be smelled and tasted. Having
made that recognition, she learns to inhale the love that coats her chest,
along with the salve (14).
How important a service Toni Morrison rendered in this depiction becomes
evident when one contrasts it with Richard Wright's fictionalization of
the mother-child interaction in Black Boy. As Ralph Ellison has explained,
Wright mistook "gestures of protection" for "blows of oppression." He failed
retroactively to interpret his mother's whippings as does the girl who
narrates Morrison's novel. "One of the Southern Negro family's methods
of protecting the child," writes Ellison, "is the severe beating--a homeopathic
dose of the violence generated by black and white relationships. Such beatings
as Wright's were administered for the child's own good ... by the mother.
... the cruelty is also an expression of concern, of love" (85-86, 91).
Wright's Richard needed Ellison to reinterpret what might be construed
as "maternal sadism" as "an expression of concern." Morrison's Claudia
is able to effect this translation for herself because she internalizes
an image of what it means to be a mother. As Alice Walker has argued metaphorically
in another context, black women need to know both history and "herstory,"
because "to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names"
(In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 276).
Another aspect of The Bluest Eye that differentiates it from earlier fictional
representations of little black girls is the novel's radical repudiation
of "colorism."4 Afro-American fiction is rife with light-skinned heroines.
The protagonist of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), for example, is
a mulatto. William Wells Brown's Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine (1867)
is about a quadroon whose appearance gives no evidence "that a drop of
African blood coursed through her veins." Emma Dunham Kelly's Megda (1891)
has a white-skinned Afro-American heroine, as does Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper's Iola LeRoy, or Shadows Uplifted (1893). Even Janie, in Zora Neale
Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is described as having light
skin.
Nothing was more damaging to a dark-skinned girl than such valorization
of what she could never be. Among the devastating passages in Afro-American
autobiographies that testify to the irreparable damage done is Maya Angelou'
s recollection in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) of a persistent
childhood fantasy that she might one day wake up blonde and blue-eyed,
not ugly and black. Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from Part One (1972) tells
how she came to feel that she was of less worth than a "high-yellow" child,
a theme that Brooks had presented earlier in her novel Maud Martha (1951).
Because being dark meant never being considered beautiful, being other
became a canonical part of black women's literature. "In almost every novel
or autobiography written by a black woman," writes Mary Helen Washington,
"there is at least one incident in which the dark-skinned girl wishes to
be either white or light-skinned with good hair" (xv). So inherent is this
"colorism" that one critic of children's literature has asserted that differentiations
of skin color are what distinguish "culturally conscious" books from "inauthentic"
ones: "Gradations in skin color," observes Rudine Sims, "are almost automatically
part of an Afro-American's description of another Afro-American" (70).5
Thematically, The Bluest Eye consists of a stipulative definition which
radically redefines beauty. The Macteer sisters hate Maureen, a new girl
in school to whom everyone else defers reverentially. Claudia wants "to
kick her" and plots "accidental slammings of locker doors on her hand"
(54). Described by Morrison as "a high-yellow dream child with long brown
hair braided into two lynch ropes" (52), Maureen has a hair style which
underscores the "sinister quality of such beauty, at the same time acknowledging
the white ancestor responsible for those ropes" (de Weever 406).
Claudia's ability to survive intact and to consolidate an identity derives
from her vigorous opposition to the colorist attitudes of her community.
She fights "to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley
Temples, and Maureen Peals" (148). In marked contrast to Pecola Breedlove'
s surrender to Western values, Claudia refuses to be tamed into conventional
behavior and smashes the Shirley Temple doll that is imposed on her at
Christmas. Allowing Pecola's submission to the messages transmitted by
her culture to be presented from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old who energetically
resents them permits Morrison to expose their insidiousness. The socialization
patterns thoughtlessly transmitted from mother to daughter, from Pauline
Breedlove to Pecola, are fatal to that child's self-esteem, but Claudia,
who is bent on self-definition, will mature into someone who has control
of her destiny.6
The process of bequeathing self-hatred is symbolized in the name Mrs.
Breedlove has given her daughter. As Maureen Peal explains to Pecola, it
came, like Mrs. Breedlove's "education in self-contempt" (97), from the
movies:
"Pecola? Wasn't that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?"
"I don't know. What is that?"
"The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother
'cause she is black and ugly."
(57)
The point being made in this onomastic interplay is that Mrs. Breedlove
learned to devalue herself through commercialized fantasies and is teaching
her daughter a similar sense of unworthiness. Alice Walker quotes an article
from The Black Scholar which calls this "psychic annihilation," letting
"whites turn blacks on themselves."7
Ineluctably, the implications of Pecola's name work themselves out in
her stunted imitation of a life. Acting on her conviction that her teachers
ignore her, her schoolmates despise her, and her parents quarrel because
she is ugly, she decides to transform herself. "Each night, without fail,
she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed" (40). She
ingests penny candy to become the picture on the wrapper, the smiling white
face with its "blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort.
... To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary
Jane. Be Mary Jane" (43). She consumes the blue eyes on the Shirley Temple
mug with her gaze, drinking in three quarts of milk to swallow its whiteness.
Pecola's mother impresses on her daughter the fact that she prefers the
pink-and-white, blue-eyed Fisher girl to her own child. Determined to change
her eyes so that she too will be lovable, Pecola finds a faithhealer, Soaphead
Church, who promises them to her because he is "wholly convinced that if
black people were more like white people they would be better off."8 The
price she pays for them is her own sanity: She wanders through the town
dump, babbling about how blue the eyes are that no one else can see.
Pecola's childhood is cancelled one Saturday afternoon when, at the age
of twelve, she is raped by her father and left unconscious on the kitchen
floor. Such things were not much mentioned in the fifties, when Sherley
Anne Williams had looked in vain for a book about "forced sex" and had
been too embarrassed to ask the librarian,9 but Toni Morrison portrays
the pedophiles that prey on little girls: Henry Washington, the boarder
who is thrown out of the Macteers' house for "fingering" Frieda, and Soaphead
Church, who is notorious for his sexual molestations. While Pecola retreats
into delusion, those with the toughness and resiliency to defend themselves
develop the inner strength needed to survive. As Claudia says, "We had
defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody" (149).
Frieda's coping skills are demonstrated when she disperses the gang of
boys taunting Pecola in the schoolyard. She threatens Woodrow Cain with
some information she has stored up from overheard adult conversations,
and he slinks away, not wanting to be exposed as a bed wetter. This success
in rescuing their friend emboldens the Macteer girls to try another strategy
to save Pecola's unborn baby--"We did not think of the fact that Pecola
was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not married. And we
did not dwell on the fact that the baby's father was Pecola's father too;
the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us--at
least she knew her father. We thought only of this overwhelming hatred
for the unborn baby" (148). But the marigold seeds they plant on behalf
of Pecola's baby fail to sprout, and because they fail to save the baby'
s life, they avoid Pecola.
The girls' guilty self-recriminations form the prologue and the epilogue,
for it has not occurred to them that the earth itself might have been "unyielding."
It is this "hard ground" that the novel explores--a world that permits
the foreclosure of childhood, that imposes a premature adulthood. The sociologist
Joyce A. Ladner calls the pubescent black girl "emotionally precocious"
because she has had either vicarious or personal experience of violence.
Having been either a victim or a witness of aggression, she learns strategies
of defending herself more vigorously than someone who has never been so
vulnerable. Although these preadolescents have encountered harshness and
cruelty, they "develop survival skills enabling them to cope with the world."10
In centering her story on an ordinary girl who is taught by her colorist
culture that she is ugly, Toni Morrison portrays the cruel ground which
forecloses Pecola's longing to be loved. The passage from the school primer
which opens The Bluest Eye represents the "all-white world of children'
s books" which the novel challenges. The little Macteer sisters, who tell
Pecola's story, raise their voices in defense of what is black. Their penetrating
vision sees, in Pecola's womb, "the baby that everybody wanted dead, and
s[ee] it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with
great O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black
eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk
of black skin" (148).
Defiantly alone in their protective impulses toward the unborn baby, they
assume a maternal role toward it which is far beyond their capacities to
fulfill. Their touching efforts to make a miracle on its behalf and their
celebration of its blackness, which no one in their "unyielding" community
shares, enhance the book's poignancy.
The protagonist, Pecola, seen through the eyes of a fastidious, middle-class
neighbor, seems "dirty." The neighbor's gaze reveals the girl's
torn dress, the plaits sticking out on her head, hair matted where the
plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the wad of gum peeping out
from between the cheap soles, the soiled socks, one of which had been walked
down into the heel of the shoe. She saw the safety pin holding the hem
of the dress up. ... She had seen this little girl all her life. ... Hair
uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt.
(75)
Toni Morrison's gaze reveals to the reader that Pecola is a little girl
who has always been on the periphery. She presents us with Pecola's innocence
and tragedy. The authorial stance of The Bluest Eye is epitomized in the
disingenuous voices of its narrators: "We had dropped our seeds in our
own little plot of black dirt" (9).
Notes
1. To assess the importance of autobiography as a genre in Afro-American
letters, see Brignano. Stephen Butterfield explains how autobiography can
be "both an arsenal and a battleground": "... if you are never able to
take who you are for granted, and the social order around you seems deliberately
designed to rub you out, stuff your head with little cartoon symbols of
what it wants or fears you to be, and mock you with parodies of your highest
hopes, then discovering who you really are takes on the dimensions of an
epic battle with the social order" (284, emphasis added).
2. Bambara's own "The Girl's Story" also deals with this issue. "In almost
every household that I can think of when I was growing up," says Bambara,
"the onset of the menstrual period was mysterious and frightening, and
totally without information and totally without support from the immediate
household" (Guy-Sheftall 246).
3. Morrison would probe this painful problem again in her second novel,
Sula (1974). When Hannah Peace asks her mother Eva if she has ever loved
her, even the question is repudiated by the mother as "an evil wondering."
Critic Mary Helen Washington provides useful insights into this incident:
"Eva's plain, hostile answer is, 'No. I don't reckon I did. Not the way
you thinkin',' and she accuses Hannah of thinking evil for even asking
such a question. Later, she feels the need to explain that 'No,' but the
rest of her answer is so brutal that the love behind it is almost unrecognizable:
'... what you talkin'' bout did I love you girl. I stayed alive for you
can't you get that through your thick head or what is that between your
ears heifer? [sic]' This is the love of a woman who battled her way through
life in order to keep her kids from starving. ... She did not have anything
left over to play around with them or teach them games or be silly with
them and so her strength actually seems like a kind of cold indifference.
... Eva takes care of her children, but she does so without physical affection
or tenderness" (xxii).
4. "Colorism," according to Alice Walker, is a form of self-hatred, manifested
in celebrations over "the birth of a 'golden' child" or the urgings to
marry a "high-yellow" in order "to lighten up the race" (In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens 290, 311). "The structured colorism of the black middle
class ... is camouflaged by the promise of 'upward mobility,' i.e., proximity
to, imitation of, and eventual merger with (or, as Chestnutt wrote, 'absorption
into') the white middle class" (310).
5. Sims also notes that, in an effort to evoke positive associations,
these color descriptions are often presented in food-related imagery.
6. Some of the best contemporary criticism of Afro-American letters is
coming from Germany. Berndt Ostendorf says that the function of black art
is "to put people in control of their personal destinies. Black art is
a form of externalizing the wounds of historically conditioned socialization
patterns. These have to be objectified and isolated as art before they
can be successfully transcended" (32). That Alice Walker, for one, has
assumed this Blakean task is evident throughout her interview with Claudia
Tate, particularly in her remarks on the responsibilities of her black
readership.
7. "'... certainly every Afro-American is descended from a black black
woman. What then can be the destiny of a people that pampers and cherishes
the blood of the white slaveholder who maimed and degraded their female
ancestor? What can be the future of a class of descendants of slaves that
implicitly gives slaveholders greater honor than the African women they
enslaved?'" (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 295).
8. Toni Morrison told Robert Stepto that, "with Soaphead, I wanted, needed
someone to give the child her blue eyes. Now she was asking for something
that was just awful--she wanted to have blue eyes and she wanted to be
Shirley Temple, I mean, she wanted to do that white trip because of the
society in which she lived and, very importantly, because of the black
people who helped her want to be that. (The responsibilities are ours.
It's our responsibility for helping her believe, helping her come to the
point where she wanted that.) I had to have someone--her mother, of course,
made her want that in the first place--who would give her the blue eyes
... wholly convinced that if black people were more like white people they
would be better off" (223).
9. What, asks Williams, did the white writers whose works she encountered
in the library "know about being black, being on welfare, being solicited
for sex by older black men in the neighborhood ... ?" (195). Sonia Sanchez,
too, has observed that, when she was twelve or thirteen, she had "mostly
read white writers. No one gave me any literary work by black writers to
read. ... That's really a terrible commentary on education" (Tate interview
147). In the same interview, Sanchez recounts how she had to defend herself
against sexual molestation in the corner store in Harlem when she was nine
(138-39). Maya Angelou tells in Caged Bird of her rape at the age of eight.
Mary Burger calls black adolescents "Child-Women": "The Black woman's need
to grow up fast, bypassing a leisurely childhood, emanates from harsh environmental
conditions" (111).
10. Ladner 62, 65. "An eight-year-old girl has a good chance of being
exposed to rape and violence and her parents will be powerless to protect
her" (62).
Works Cited
Bambara, Toni Cade. "The Girl's Story." The Sea Birds are Still Alive.
New York: Random, 1977. 152-65.
Brignano, Russell C. Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography
of Autobiographies and Autobiographical Books Written since the Civil War.
Durham: Duke UP, 1974.
Burger, Mary. "Images of Self and Race in the Autobiographies of Black
Women." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed.
Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City:
Anchor, 1979. 107-22.
Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: U of Massachusetts
P, 1974.
de Weever, Jacqueline. "The Inverted World of Toni Morrison's The Bluest
Eye and Sula." CLA Journal 22 (1979): 402-14.
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks." Sturdy
Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell,
Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City: Anchor, 1979.
230-49.
Ladner, Joyce A. Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman. New York: Anchor,
1971.
Larrick, Nancy. "The All-White World of Children's Books." Saturday Review
11 Sept. 1965: 63-65, 84-85.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.
Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America: Studies in Contemporary
Literature and Culture. Totowa: Barnes, 1982.
Parker, Bettye J. "Complexity: Toni Morrison's Women--An Interview Essay."
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Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary
Children's Fiction. Urbana: NCTE, 1983.
Stanford, Barbara Dodds, and Karima Amin. Black Literature for High School
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Stepto, Robert B. "Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni
Morrison." Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art,
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of Illinois P, 1979. 213-29.
Strouse, Jean. "Toni Morrison's Black Magic." Newsweek 30 Mar. 1981: 52-57.
Tate, Claudia. "Alice Walker." Black Women Writers at Work. New York:
Continuum, 1983. 175-87.
------. "Sonia Sanchez." Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum,
1983. 132-48.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New
York: Harcourt, 1983.
------. "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in
the Artist's Life." The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyles.
Ed. Edith Blicksilver. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1979.
Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and
about Black Women. Garden City: Anchor, 1975.
Williams, Sherley Anne. "In Honor of Free Women." Midnight Birds: Stories
by Contemporary Black Women Writers. Ed. Mary Helen Washington. Garden
City: Anchor, 1980. 193-98.
Source: Ruth Rosenberg, "Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest
Eye." MELUS 21, no. 4 (winter 1987): 435-45.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center