Summary
Spring arrives, and Claudia associates this event with
being whipped with a switch instead of a strap. She lies in an empty
lot ruminating and then heads home. She finds her mother singing
and behaving strangely, absentmindedly doing the same chore twice. She
finds Frieda upstairs crying. It turns out that Henry touched Frieda’s
breasts. Frieda ran from the house to find her parents, who were
in the garden, and told them what had happened. She returned with
her parents to the house, but Henry was gone. When he returned,
Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer attacked him. A neighbor, Mr. Buford, arrived
and gave Mr. MacTeer a gun. He shot at Henry and Henry
ran away. Rosemary Villanucci came out and told Frieda that her
father would go to jail, and Frieda hit her. Then another neighbor,
Miss Dunion, came in and suggested that they take Frieda to the
doctor because she might be “ruined,” a fear that now makes Frieda
weep.
Frieda and Claudia are confused about what “ruined” means and
worry that Frieda will become fat like the Maginot Line. They understand
that China and Poland are “ruined” as well but think that they are
not fat because they drink whiskey. Frieda and Claudia decide to
ask Pecola to get whisky from her father in order to keep Frieda
from getting fat. They go to Pecola’s house, but no one is home.
The Maginot Line is upstairs on the porch drinking root beer, and
she tells the children that Pecola is helping her mother at her workplace.
She invites the girls upstairs for a soda, but Frieda tells her
that they are not allowed to visit her because she is “ruined.” The
Maginot Line throws the root-beer bottle at the girls in anger, but
then she laughs. Claudia and Frieda run away and decide that even
though Pecola’s mother works on the other side of town, Frieda’s
situation is dire enough that they should go find her.
Frieda and Claudia walk to the lakefront houses, in a
beautiful neighborhood with a park that is for white children only.
They find Pecola at the back of one of the prettiest houses. She
is surprised to see them, and they ask her why she is not afraid
of the Maginot Line. Pecola is confused and talks about how nice
Miss Marie (that is, the Maginot Line) and her friends are. Mrs.
Breedlove sticks her head out the door, is introduced to the girls,
and tells them they can wait with Pecola for the laundry and then
walk back to town with her. The inside of the house is beautiful,
and a small white girl comes in and asks for “Polly.” Claudia is
furious that the child calls Mrs. Breedlove by this name because
even Pecola calls her mother “Mrs. Breedlove.” From upstairs, the
little girl calls for Polly, and Pecola accidentally pulls a freshly
baked berry cobbler off the counter. The cobbler splatters on the
floor and burns her, and her mother comes in and beats her. Furious,
Mrs. Breedlove sends the girls away and comforts the little white
girl, who has begun to cry.
Analysis
This chapter emphasizes the ignorance and confusion that
accompany Frieda’s experience of becoming a sexual being. Frieda
is not given the chance to step gradually into her sexual identity;
instead, this identity is forced upon her by an adult. Frieda is
uncertain how to describe what has happened to her. She knows that
Henry’s actions are inappropriate, but she does not understand what
they mean. Claudia wonders, almost enviously, how being touched
in this way feels, but Frieda rejects this question—what is important
is not how she feels but what has been done to her and how her parents
react. She depends upon their interpretation of what has taken place
in order to understand it herself. But they still do not know what
“ruined” means, and not understanding what makes the prostitute
distasteful to their mother, they focus on what makes the prostitute
distasteful to them—her fatness. The Maginot Line’s nickname comes
from the bulky defensive fortifications built before World War II
to protect the border of France from Germany. The thinness of her
companions is then connected to whisky (again based on something
that they have heard their mother say, but which they misunderstood),
and so they undertake a quest to procure whisky for Frieda. In a
sense, the way the MacTeer girls read and misread the adult world
echoes the Dick-and-Jane reader at the beginning of the novel.
This logical but mistaken chain of reasoning adds a rare
note of humor to the story that is unfolding. Frieda’s experience
is frightening and confusing, but she is quickly defended by her
protective parents, and Henry is a foolish rather than a threatening
figure. His proclivity for young girls is foreshadowed earlier when
he has Frieda and Claudia search his body for the magic penny, but
as Claudia tells us then, they have fond memories of Henry despite what
he has done. Frieda is angered by her experience and ready to take
action rather than remain ashamed and defeated. Her experience of
unwanted sexual attention contrasts sharply with Pecola’s rape experience,
in which Pecola’s father not only fails to protect her, but is the
perpetrator himself.
The messages the girls hear about white superiority do
not come only from the white media or light-skinned blacks like
Geraldine. More scarring and memorable than any prior source in
the novel, Pecola’s own mother reinforces the message the girls
have been receiving about the superiority of whites. The white neighborhood in
which Mrs. Breedlove works is beautiful and well kept, demonstrating
the connection between race and class. The kitchen is spotless,
with white porcelain and white woodwork. The little white girl is
dressed in delicate pink and has yellow hair. In contrast, Pecola spills
“blackish blueberries” all over the floor, underlining the connection
between blackness and mess. Her mother reinforces this connection
as well. Instead of worrying that her own daughter has been burned
by the hot berries, she pushes Pecola down into the pie juice. She
then comforts the little white girl and begins to clean the black
stain off of her pink dress. When she speaks to Pecola and her friends,
her voice is like “rotten pieces of apple,” but when she speaks
to the white girl, her voice is like honey. Her desire to disavow
her daughter is proved when the white girl asks who the black children
were and Mrs. Breedlove avoids answering her. She has renounced
her own black family for the family of her white employer.
