The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

twisted around his face.
    Outside, the March wind blew into the rip in her dress. She held her head down against the cold. But she could not hold it low enough to avoid seeing the snowflakes falling and dying on the pavement.

Spring

             
    The first twigs are thin, green, and supple. They bend into a complete circle, but will not break. Their delicate, showy hopefulness shooting from forsythia and lilac bushes meant only a change in whipping style. They beat us differently in the spring. Instead of the dull pain of a winter strap, there were these new green switches that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous meanness in these long twigs that made us long for the steady stroke of a strap or the firm but honest slap of a hairbrush. Even now spring for me is shot through with the remembered ache of switchings, and forsythia holds no cheer.
    Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. I must have lain long in the grass, for the shadow that was in front of me when I left the house had disappeared when I went back. I entered the house, as the house was bursting with an uneasy quiet. Then I heard my mother singing something about trains and Arkansas. She came in the back door with some folded yellow curtains which she piled on the kitchen table. I sat down on the floor to listen to the song’s story, and noticed how strangely she was behaving. She still had her hat on, and her shoes were dusty, as though she had been walking in deep dirt. She put on some water to boil and then swept the porch; then she hauled out the curtain stretcher, but instead of putting the damp curtains on it, she swept the porch again. All the time singing about trains and Arkansas.
    When she finished, I went to look for Frieda. I found her upstairs lying on our bed, crying the tired, whimpering cry that follows the first wailings—mostly gasps and shudderings. I lay on the bed and looked at the tiny bunches of wild roses sprinkled over her dress. Many washings had faded their color and dimmed their outlines.
    “What happened, Frieda?”
    She lifted a swollen face from the crook of her arm. Shuddering still, she sat up, letting her thin legs dangle over the bedside. I knelt on the bed and picked up the hem of my dress to wipe her running nose. She never liked wiping noses on clothes, but this time she let me. It was the way Mama did with her apron.
    “Did you get a whipping?”
    She shook her head no.
    “Then why you crying?”
    “Because.”
    “Because what?”
    “Mr. Henry.”
    “What’d he do?”
    “Daddy beat him up.”
    “What for? The Maginot Line? Did he find out about the Maginot Line?”
    “No.”
    “Well, what, then? Come on, Frieda. How come I can’t know?”
    “He…
picked
at me.”
    “Picked at you? You mean like Soaphead Church?”
    “Sort of.”
    “He showed his privates at you?”
    “Noooo. He touched me.”
    “Where?”
    “Here and here.” She pointed to the tiny breasts that, like two fallen acorns, scattered a few faded rose leaves on her dress.
    “Really? How did it feel?”
    “Oh, Claudia.” She sounded put-out. I wasn’t asking the right questions.
    “It didn’t feel like anything.”
    “But wasn’t it supposed to? Feel good, I mean?” Frieda sucked her teeth. “What’d he do? Just walk up and pinch them?”
    She sighed. “First he said how pretty I was. Then he grabbed my arm and touched me.”
    “Where was Mama and Daddy?”
    “Over at the garden weeding.”
    “What’d you say when he did it?”
    “Nothing. I just ran out the kitchen and went to the garden.”
    “Mama said we was never to cross the tracks by ourselves.”
    “Well, what would you do? Set there and let him pinch you?”
    I looked at my chest. “I don’t have nothing to pinch. I’m never going to have nothing.”
    “Oh, Claudia, you’re