ABSTRACT
I’m not an expert mother, for example, as my children will tell you.
—Toni Morrison (Bonetti, 1983) Nobel Prize in Literature author Toni Morrison (1993) is an advocate for children. Even as she writes about complicated black and white race relations, male and female relations, the intricate intersections of past and present in everyone’s life, the culturally specic dynamics of slave mothering, the arbitrariness of race as a psychologically devastating social construct, she also presents for adult readers complex children’s perspectives. Before coauthoring with her son Slade The Big Box (1999) and The Book of Mean People (2002), Morrison presented Claudia’s child perspective on Pecola and Pecola’s family’s futile existence in her rst novel The Bluest Eye (1970). So much of what we experience in that novel is based on the self-hatred of adults, on adults’ failure or unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy and depth of children’s innocence and wisdom in the adult world. One such instance in the novel is Claudia’s account of Mr. Henry’s arrival as a boarder in the McTeer home. Mrs. McTeer introduces Claudia and her younger sister Frieda as though they are family possessions or part of the physical frame of the house:
We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their [gossiping adults’] words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre. … So when Mr. Henry arrived on a Saturday night, … [h]e smiled a lot. … Frieda and I were not introduced to him-merely pointed out. Like, here is the bathroom; the clothes closet is here; and these are my kids, Frieda and Claudia; watch out for this window; it don’t open all the way. (16)
Even here, Morrison notes that what adults say and mean are not always clear to children. While there is no sense that adults do not “love” the children in the book-the notion of love is emphatically ambiguous throughout the novel in terms of the parent-child and adult-child relationships-children’s perspectives are not always recognized and given legitimacy in the adult world of seemingly absolute authority.
