cola a type of black: "She had seen this little girl all of her life. Hanging out of windows over saloons in Mobile … sitting in bus station holding paper bags and crying to mothers who kept saying ‘Shet up!’ " (91). “This little girl” refers to a type of poor black, a type that the book goes on to describe in detail with “the dirty torn dress, the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles, the soiled socks, one of which had been walked down into the heel of the shoe” (91). This type of dirty, poorly dressed black is exactly what Geraldine despises most. While Geraldine sees Pecola as a black, she has not seen Pecola as an individual. She instead sees Pecola as an abstracted representative of a whole social class, a social class she hates, and consequently she was merciless and cruel to Pecola. While everyone continue to treat Pecola bad in every way, Pecola retreats further and further from the real world into madness. "Certain seeds it [the land] will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we say that the victim had no right to live" (206). Nature retains the right to dictate which seeds it will bear to fruition and those that it will reject. Pecola is that "certain seed" that never had a chance to grow and succeed because she lived in a hostile environment that rejected her, one that would not and could not nurture her. Works CitedMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993....
