Summary
Winter arrives, which means boredom and the long wait
for spring. But this winter, the arrival of a new girl named Maureen
Peal breaks the monotony. She is a light-skinned, wealthy black
girl who enchants the whole school. Claudia and Frieda dislike her
and search for flaws. They are relieved to discover that she has
a dog tooth and stumps where her sixth fingers were removed. She
has a locker next to Claudia’s, and one day she suggests that she
walk part way home with Claudia and Frieda.
Soon the three girls come upon a circle of boys harassing
Pecola. Shouting a derogatory chant, they taunt her for her black
skin and because her father sleeps naked. Frieda comes to the rescue,
hitting one boy and threatening another. Claudia joins the fray,
and it looks as if the boys will beat up the MacTeer girls, but
then Maureen arrives on the scene. The boys do not want to fight
in front of Maureen and leave. Maureen takes Pecola’s arm and talks
to her about movies and gym class. She asks the girls if they want
some ice cream and treats Pecola. Claudia is embarrassed because
she thought Maureen would treat her as well. Instead, she goes without
ice cream. The girls talk about menstruation, and Maureen asks Pecola if
she has ever seen a naked man. Pecola says she has never seen her father
naked, and Maureen presses the issue. Claudia and Frieda tell Maureen
to cut it out, and Claudia remembers the shame and strange interest
of seeing her own father naked. The girls argue: Claudia accuses
Maureen of being boy-crazy, and Maureen tells the girls they are
black and ugly. Pecola is pained, and Claudia secretly worries that
what Maureen has said is true.
When the girls arrive home, only Henry is there. He gives
them money for ice cream, but they decide to buy candy instead because they
do not want to run into Maureen again. When they come home, they
see Henry entertaining the prostitutes China and the Maginot Line
(Miss Marie) in the living room. Claudia and Frieda are disturbed
because they know that their mother hates these women. The girls
come in after the women leave, and Frieda asks Henry about them.
He lies and says they are members of his Bible-study group. The
girls decide to keep his secret.
Analysis
The introduction of the light-skinned black girl Maureen
reinforces the novel’s earlier message of the Shirley Temple cup—whiteness
is beautiful and blackness is ugly. Maureen also reinforces the
connection between race and class—lighter-skinned than the other
black children, she is also wealthier. At first, Claudia responds
to Maureen with jealousy—she simply wants the pretty things Maureen
has. But this jealousy gives way to a more destructive envy, as
Claudia begins to suspect that in order to have the things that
Maureen has, she must look like Maureen. She remains puzzled, however,
by what Maureen has and what she lacks. She explains that, at this
point, she and her sister were still in love with themselves and
enjoyed their own bodies. They had not yet learned self-hatred. But
Maureen is the harbinger of the self-hatred that will come with
the onset of womanhood, when physical beauty becomes more important and
the body becomes easier to shame. Claudia is perceptive enough to
understand at this point that it is not Maureen she hates and fears,
but whatever it is that makes Maureen cute and the MacTeer girls
ugly.
As with the Shirley Temple cup in the first chapter,
the use of popular culture in this chapter provides commentary on
the mass media’s preference for whiteness—and the effect this preference
has on the lives of young girls. In a revealing moment, Maureen recounts
the plot of a movie she has seen in which the light-skinned daughter
of a white man rejects her black mother but then cries at her mother’s
funeral. It is clear that Maureen revels in the melodramatic, without
recognizing that it may be a reflection of her own assumption of
superiority and perhaps her own relationship with her mother (who
has seen the movie four times). Racist messages are so prevalent
that they are difficult to see. They are as commonplace as drinking
milk from a cup or enjoying a movie.
This chapter also gives a brief portrait of the cultural
pressures that black boys experience. We are told that their meanness
to Pecola is an expression of their own self-hatred. They can taunt
her for being black—“Black e mo Black e mo”—because they hate their own
blackness. This self-hatred, along with their “cultivated ignorance”
and “designed hopelessness,” is, like Pecola’s ugliness, a state
of being that is both forced upon them and chosen. At this point,
the boys are still vulnerable. Claudia and Frieda can stop them
in their tracks, and Frieda threatens to reveal that one of the boys
still wets his bed. But we can anticipate that the children’s even playing
field will not last when the boys become men and the girls become
women. All the players in this scene are experiencing their last
moments of childhood before sex changes everything.
