The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Page A

you, sweetnin’. To tell it true, I was the only one could handle him. He’d go out and rob a bank or kill some people, and I’d say to him, soft-like, ‘Johnny, you shouldn’t do that.’ And he’d say he just had to bring me pretty things. Lacy drawers and all. And every Saturday we’d get a case of beer and fry up some fish. We’d fry it in meal and egg batter, you know, and when it was all brown and crisp—not hard, though—we’d break open that cold beer….” Marie’s eyes went soft as the memory of just such a meal sometime, somewhere transfixed her. All her stories were subject to breaking down at descriptions of food. Pecola saw Marie’s teeth settling down into the back of crisp sea bass; saw the fat fingers putting back into her mouth tiny flakes of white, hot meat that had escaped from her lips; she heard the “pop” of the beer-bottle cap; smelled the acridness of the first stream of vapor; felt the cold beeriness hit the tongue. She ended the daydream long before Marie.
    “But what about the money?” she asked.
    China hooted. “She’s makin’ like she’s the Lady in Red that told on Dillinger. Dillinger wouldn’t have come near you lessen he was going hunting in Africa and shoot you for a hippo.”
    “Well, this hippo had a ball back in Chicago. Whoa Jesus, ninety-nine!”
    “How come you always say ‘Whoa Jesus’ and a number?” Pecola had long wanted to know.
    “Because my mama taught me never to cuss.”
    “Did she teach you not to drop your drawers?” China asked.
    “Didn’t have none,” said Marie. “Never saw a pair of drawers till I was fifteen, when I left Jackson and was doing day work in Cincinnati. My white lady gave me some old ones of hers. I thought they was some kind of stocking cap. I put it on my head when I dusted. When she saw me, she liked to fell out.”
    “You must have been one dumb somebody.” China lit a cigarette and cooled her irons.
    “How’d I know?” Marie paused. “And what’s the use of putting on something you got to keep taking off all the time? Dewey never let me keep them on long enough to get used to them.”
    “Dewey who?” This was a somebody new to Pecola.
    “Dewey who? Chicken! You never heard me tell of
Dewey?
” Marie was shocked by her negligence.
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Oh, honey, you’ve missed half your life. Whoa Jesus, one-nine-five. You talkin’ ’bout smooth! I met him when I was fourteen. We ran away and lived together like married for three years. You know all those klinker-tops you see runnin’ up here? Fifty of ’em in a bowl wouldn’t make a Dewey Prince ankle bone. Oh, Lord. How that man loved me!”
    China arranged a fingerful of hair into a bang effect. “Then why he left you to sell tail?”
    “Girl, when I found out I could sell it—that somebody would pay cold cash for it, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”
    Poland began to laugh. Soundlessly. “Me too. My auntie whipped me good that first time when I told her I didn’t get no money. I said ‘Money? For what? He didn’t owe me nothin’.’ She said, ‘The hell he didn’t!’”
    They all dissolved in laughter.
    Three merry gargoyles. Three merry harridans. Amused by a long-ago time of ignorance. They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels, with great and generous hearts, dedicated, because of the horror of circumstance, to ameliorating the luckless, barren life of men, taking money incidentally and humbly for their “understanding.” Nor were they from that sensitive breed of young girl, gone wrong at the hands of fate, forced to cultivate an outward brittleness in order to protect her springtime from further shock, but knowing full well she was cut out for better things, and could make the right man happy. Neither were they the sloppy, inadequate whores who, unable to make a living at it alone, turn to drug consumption and traffic or pimps to help complete their scheme of self-destruction,