The excerpt from the first-grade primer talks about Mother and Father, Dick and Jane; the happy white family living in their green and white house. The narrator then introduces the Breedlove family—poor, black, unhappy, and convinced of their ugliness. Father Cholly, a habitual drunk, and Mother Pauline are locked into a violent marriage, while the children, Pecola and Sammy, daily brace themselves to endure their parents’ fighting. In this dark world, Pecola prays fervently for blue eyes, believing that if she were pretty and had blue eyes, ugly things wouldn’t happen. However, what Pecola doesn’t realize is that there are two kinds of ugliness here—real and imagined. The real ugliness of one character’s words and deeds is juxtaposed to another character’s imagined ugliness; for example, Maureen’s behavior toward Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda could truly be described as “ugly”; on the other hand, Pecola no doubt imagines herself far more uglier than she actually is.
Pecola imagines that she is ugly because of the actions and remarks of people like Mr. Yacobowski, who owns the neighborhood candy store. His unwillingness to touch Pecola’s hand is reminiscent of the black dirt metaphor used earlier to describe her. The tension between the two people is taut. Pecola’s palms perspire, and for the first time she is aware that she and her body are repulsive to another human being. Morrison emphasizes that the storekeeper does not touch her. Only his nails graze her damp palm, like disembodied claws scratching symbolically at the soft underbelly of a vulnerable target—a little girl’s outstretched palm. Once outside the store, utterly convinced of her ugliness, Pecola insatiably consumes Mary Jane candies, staring at the perfect and pretty, blond, blue-eyed girl on the pale wrapper.
Not only Pecola but everyone in the Breedlove family imagines that they are ugly because they are black; they have accepted the slave master’s dictum: “You are ugly people.” Everything they are familiar with confirms it. Morrison’s description has biblical overtones: “And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.”
All of the Breedloves cope with their “ugliness” differently. Cholly and Sammy act ugly, while Pauline escapes into the fantasy world of the movies and her white employer’s household. Pecola dreams of blue eyes, a gift that she thinks will suddenly transform her into a thing of beauty; to comfort herself, she snuggles in the warmth of memories and music of the three prostitutes. The phrases “Morning-glory-blue-eyes” and “Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes” comfort her. Later, she will descend into madness in order to rid herself of the ugliness she feels is indelible, and she will embrace a new, imaginary, blue-eyed beautiful self.
