One of the first lessons of school: you are not one of the cool kids. You aren’t as beautiful or as charming as those other kids. People like those other kids; they don’t really like you.
The Beautiful Kids grow up to be the beautiful teenagers. And you learn that lesson all over again in high school. You just aren’t that beautiful. You really are not all that popular.
Sure, you watch endless movies where the kids like you end up being popular. Yes, you see the stories where the ugly kid puts on some new clothes or does some moderately good thing and suddenly the most popular guy or girl in school falls madly in love with the protagonist.
But, you always knew those stories weren’t really true. You knew the most popular kid in school was never going to fall in love with you.
Toni Morrison wrote a novel about you. The Bluest Eye. Blue eyes are all the rage; everyone loves blue eyes. You will never have the Bluest eyes. You will never be the popular kid.
Now obviously there are a few people out there for whom none of the above is accurate. But very few. Even among the relatively popular kids, there is still that sense of being not quite popular enough. But, those relatively popular kids do alright. After all, they are at least not those really ugly kids.
School, for all its virtues (and there are obvious virtues) is a brutal place for most kids. It is the place where you realize just how much you are not like those other kids. School is where most of us learn our place in society. It is where you learn not only that your eyes are not the bluest, they aren’t even blue.
After such knowledge…what? How do we cope? That is the question which Morrison wants to explore.
This is a novel about the ugly people. The Beautiful People hang around the fringes of the novel as the malevolent forces which drive the characters in the story to despair. Then we watch how assorted people try to make their way in the world.
Here we find the American Dreamers. They aren’t rich or beautiful. They were not born to good families. But, they will do everything they can to fit into the world of the rich and the beautiful. They strive to mask their origins, find work in the homes of the rich and beautiful, constantly strive to impress. Externally, it works. But, at night, they still go back to their own homes and their own despair.
We also find the American Hustlers. They are on the lookout for an angle, constantly trying to figure out a way to make this day just a little bit better. Their dreams are bigger than realistic possibilities. They are doomed to failure. When they fail, what then?
Then there are the Loners. They retreat into themselves, crafting a world divorced from the one in which the rest of humanity lives. They lead secret lives, filled with illicit desires and impotent rage.
All of the above are the success stories in this novel. Morrison deftly creates these characters to draw attention to the last set. The ones who lose.
The child who slowly descends into madness. Impregnated by her drunken father, abandoned by her family, shunned by the world. She was an ugly kid made even uglier by the society around her. She never descends into evil, just more and more ugliness.
Morrison is marvelously relentless. You want to pity this poor kid. But pity is so cheap and condescending.
There really is only one choice here. You have to decide. Is this kid a child of God worthy of being loved or not? If you want to love her, you’ll have to love her not for anything she presents to the world. You just have to love her because she is who she is. You have to love her with the perfect love of God, not with your weak, violent, wicked, stupid or selfish love which really just rebounds onto yourself.
Oh, by the way, there is a cute blue eyed girl standing next to her.
Now be honest with yourself. Which kid do you notice?
That is our plight. As much as we would like to say that we love everyone, as much as we want to say that we care about the downtrodden and the ugly, we notice the blonde, blue eyed girls. They even make the cover of TIME.
In our self-righteous moments, we pride ourselves for noticing the miscreants, the depraved, the violent. We notice the hard-working poor and the indignant poor. We notice the victims.
But we do not notice those people over there about whom there is nothing particularly noticeable. They aren’t vocal, they aren’t in trouble, they don’t raise a fuss. They are just lonely and scared and ugly.
And the world just passes them by. So do you. So do we all.
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