. . . [I]f those eyes of hers were different,
that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
The narrator announces that the Breedloves live in the
storefront because they are black and poor, and because they believe
they are ugly. They are not objectively ugly. Though they have small,
closely set eyes and heavy eyebrows, they also have high cheekbones
and shapely lips. They are ugly because they believe they are ugly.
The action that now unfolds takes place on a Saturday morning in
October. Mrs. Breedlove wakes first and begins banging around in
the kitchen. Pecola is awake in bed and knows that her mother will
pick a fight with her father, who came home drunk the previous night. Each
of Cholly’s drunken episodes ends with a fight with his wife. Mrs.
Breedlove comes in and attempts to wake Cholly to bring her some
coal for the stove. He refuses, and she says that if she sneezes just
once from fetching the coal outside, he is in trouble.
The narrator comments that Mrs. Breedlove and Cholly
need each other—she needs him to reinforce her identity as a martyr
and to give shape to an otherwise dreary life, and he needs to take
out a lifetime of hurt upon her. When Cholly was young, two white
men once caught having sex with a girl. They forced him to continue while
they watched. Instead of hating the white men, Cholly hated the
girl. Because of this and other humiliations, Cholly is a violent and
cruel man. The fights between him and Mrs. Breedlove follow a predictable
pattern, and the two have an unstated agreement not to kill each
other. Sammy usually either runs away from home or joins the fight.
Pecola tries to find ways to endure the pain.
Predictably, Mrs. Breedlove sneezes, and the fight begins.
She douses Cholly with cold water and he begins to beat her. She
hits him with the dishpan and then a stove lid. Sammy helps by hitting his
father on the head. Once Cholly is knocked out, Sammy urges his mother
to kill him, and she quiets him. Pecola, still in bed, feels nauseated.
As she often does, she wills herself to disappear. She can imagine
each body part dissolving except for her eyes. She hates her ugliness,
which makes teachers and classmates ignore her. For a long time,
she has hoped and prayed for blue eyes, which will make her beautiful
and change all the evil in her life to good.
Pecola walks to the grocery store to buy candy. She wonders
why people consider dandelions ugly. She decides to buy Mary Janes,
but she has difficulty communicating with Mr. Yacobowski, the store owner,
who seems to look right through her. He does not understand what
she is pointing at and speaks harshly to her. He does not want to
touch her hand when she passes over her money. Walking home, Pecola
is angry but most of all ashamed. She decides dandelions are ugly,
whereas blonde, blue-eyed Mary Jane, pictured on the candy wrapper,
is beautiful.
Pecola goes to visit the whores who live in the apartment
above hers, China, Poland, and Miss Marie. They are good-natured
and affectionate with her, and they tell her about their “boyfriends” (Pecola’s
term for their clients). Miss Marie tells stories about turning
one of her boyfriends over to the FBI and about Dewey Prince, the
one man she truly loved. The narrator tells us that these are not hookers
with hearts of gold or women whose innocence has been betrayed.
Quite simply, these women cheerfully and unsentimentally hate men.
They feel neither ashamed of nor victimized by their profession.
Pecola wonders what love is like. She wonders if it is like her
parents’ lovemaking, during which her father sounds as if he is in
pain and her mother is dead silent.
Analysis
This chapter portrays victimhood as a complex phenomenon
rather than a simple, direct relationship between oppressor and
oppressed. The Breedloves’ ugliness is one of the central mysteries
of the novel. It cannot be attributed to their literal appearance
(we are told that their ugliness “did not belong to them”), nor
simply to the cultural images that indicate that only whiteness
is beautiful. Instead, the narrator suggests, it seems
