However, Black children aren’t often granted the luxury of good soil. This should be the standard for all children coming of age in this world. This kind of supportive narrative shouldn’t feel exceptional to me. The girl’s flowers were planted in good soil, in a loving community where people wanted to see her thrive. The community becomes so invested in her project they cheer when the flowers bloom, lament when they die, and paint a mural honoring her efforts.

The Bluest Eye earned four commendations, the first national awards for a Department of Theatre and Dance production. Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia, the novel's youngest. The novel depicts several phases of a woman's development into womanhood. The novel's women not only suffer the horrors of racial oppression, but also the tyranny and violation brought upon them by the men in their lives. Of their friendship, Claudia and her 11-year-old sister, Frieda, enjoy playing with Pecola.At its core, The Bluest Eye is a story about the oppression of women. This disparity makes returning to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which turns 50 this year, more critical right now than ever.The Bluest Eye (1970), the first novel by Toni Morrison.

The police who murdered Breonna Taylor during a botched raid, while she was sleeping in bed, have still not been arrested as of the time of this writing. While I am inspired by the rebellion taking place, I remain disheartened by how Black women and girls, who are also victims of state violence, often enter the conversation as afterthoughts. People are rightly enraged by the senseless murders of Black men, and this preponderance has driven large swaths of people out of their homes during a global pandemic and into the streets for protests. The onslaught of Black death at the hands of police continues unabated.

Through Pecola’s story, Morrison takes up the effects of intersectional oppression, where if you are a Black girl or woman, racism and sexism converge on your person in devastating ways. She ultimately descends into madness after losing the child she was carrying, a product of rape at the hands of her own father. Pecola endures violence at the hands of a community that rejects her because she possesses qualities that are loathed when viewed through a white supremacist lens — her dark skin, her abject poverty, and her kinky hair. Pecola’s story is narrated from the lens of her childhood friend Claudia MacTeer, who reflects on Pecola’s brief stay at her home due to domestic instability and the bond she and her sister Frieda shared with Pecola relating to their feelings of devaluation as Black girls coming of age in the 1940s. The novel certainly belongs at the top of any must-read list, but given the ways Black women and girls remain uniquely imperiled and receive limited advocacy when they are harmed, I do wonder if people are overlooking Morrison’s central focus, opting instead for a less complex engagement with the work.The Bluest Eye tells the story of an 11-year-old Black girl named Pecola Breedlove who desires blue eyes so that she can feel loved and accepted.

We are validating the idea that Black lives matter, unless those lives belong to women and girls.When we glorify the image of the Black girl, who is no more than seven years old, marching through the streets declaring, “No justice, no peace,” we acquiesce to that violence once more. 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.” American soil has long proven to be unfit for the growth of Black girls, and too often we turn away with indifference each time a budding sprout is ripped up.Each time we leave Breonna Taylor’s name (and Atatiana Jefferson’s and Sandra Bland’s and more) out of the discussion on police violence, each time we fail to #SayHerName, we are acquiescing to violence. At the novel’s end, Claudia distills this in her reflection on the tragedy of Pecola’s life, lamenting, “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. From the time of its initial publication to now, the novel reckons with the marginalizing of Black girls and women and advances key ideas central to Black feminist discourse that remain incredibly relevant today.Most consequentially, The Bluest Eye still speaks to the ongoing need to attend and care for Black women and girls who experience the effects of white supremacy, from its quotidian expressions to its most violent ones in unique and underexamined ways. In a 1971 essay entitled “What the Black Woman Thinks of Women’s Lib,” Morrison presented her own take on these intra- and intercommunal struggles, which reinforces the critical work that The Bluest Eye performs.

She is the author of the book Staging Black Fugitivity (The Ohio State University Press) and is currently co-editing a special issue on Toni Morrison for the journal College Literature. I hope against hope that someone beyond me and her immediate loved ones is out there doing the same for her, and for Black girls everywhere.Stacie McCormick is an associate professor of English at Texas Christian University. In this novel, Morrison is pointedly asking us to care for Black girls and women, to risk our lives for them, and to create hospitable soil for them to grow.I think about my own daughter as she watches over her sunflowers, trying to keep them alive in what is already becoming sweltering Texas heat. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye can certainly advance these efforts but only if we focus on the Black girl at its center. This morphs over time into the “strong Black woman” trope, which becomes a tool of dismissing our vulnerability and pain.This moment calls for a radical reeducation regarding the need to recognize the insidious workings of anti-Black racism and white supremacy not just in policing and prisons, but in all sectors of public and private life.

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