We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.
All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. “ among all the beauty and waste of the world – which is what she herself was. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity and pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a human life.” Our only handicap was our size people gave us orders because they were bigger and stronger. Out limitations were not know to us-not then. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves.
QUOTE FROM THE BLUEST EYE CODE
“We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live-just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals.” No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. 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. “I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another: physical beauty.
QUOTE FROM THE BLUEST EYE FULL
“My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture.” “The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.” Why, although reviled by others, could this beauty not be taken for granted by the community? Why did it need wife public articulation to exit? These are not clever questions.” “Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim. Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye – Afterword “Until that moment I had seen pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word ‘beautiful,’ I had never experienced its shock – the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one else recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it.” Eilhue “Soaphead Church” Whitcomb – The Bluest Eye – 177
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure and thought recklessness was freedom. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious we believed authority was cruel to our inferiors, and education was being at school. In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. “We took as our own the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white master’s characteristics, which were, of course, their worst.
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