The Bluest Eye: Spring

“The little girl in pink started to cry. Mrs. Breedlove turned to her. ‘Hush, baby, hush. Come here. Oh, Lord, look at your dress. Don’t cry no more. Polly will change it.’ She went to the sink and turned tap water on a fresh towel. Over her shoulder she spit out words to us like rotten pieces of apple. ‘Pick up that wash and get on out of here, so I can get this mess cleaned up.’

Pecola picked up the laundry bag, heavy with wet clothes, and we stepped hurriedly out the door. As Pecola put the laundry bag in the wagon, we could hear Mrs. Breedlove hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl.

‘Who were they, Polly?’

‘Don’t worry none, baby.’” (109)

This section (and parts before and after it) further reinforces the “white is beautiful, black is ugly” stereotype. Mrs. Breedlove has a world she’s created in her employer’s home, a world that is all white and clean and perfect. She ignores her other life, her home and her family, which she lets fall into disrepair. She wants to lose who she is, and at her job she can do that, only accepting the best food and products for her white employers, who she receives much praise from, and even a new name, or nickname at least.

When the three girls enter the house she works in, enter her clean white world, it’s an annoyance to her, and when Pecola knocks a pie onto the floor, “splattering blackish blueberries everywhere” (which I think highlights a connection between blackness and mess) she doesn’t care that her own daughter may have been badly burned, even pushes her into the spilled juice. She also speaks about it being “her floor” that is now messed up, she wants that house and life to be her real life.

Every time Mrs. Breedlove talks to the black girls, her voice is described as rotten and dark, whereas when she talks to the blonde white girl, her voice is soothing and full of honey. She seems to have replaced Pecola with the little white girl, who she thinks of as the beautiful daughter she wanted. When the white girl asks about Pecola and the others, Polly avoids the question, again showing that she wants to forget about her real family.

--John Schaefer