The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Page B

imagined we were seeing what was to become of Frieda. The Maginot Line smiled at us.
    “You all looking for somebody?”
    I had to pull my tongue from the roof of my mouth to say, “Pecola—she live here?”
    “Uh-huh, but she ain’t here now. She gone to her mama’s work place to git the wash.”
    “Yes, ma’am. She coming back?”
    “Uh-huh. She got to hang up the clothes before the sun goes down.”
    “Oh.”
    “You can wait for her. Wanna come up here and wait?”
    We exchanged glances. I looked back up at the broad cinnamon roads that met in the shadow of her dress.
    Frieda said, “No, ma’am.”
    “Well,” the Maginot Line seemed interested in our problem. “You can go to her mama’s work place, but it’s way over by the lake.”
    “Where by the lake?”
    “That big white house with the wheelbarrow full of flowers.”
    It was a house that we knew, having admired the large white wheelbarrow tilted down on spoked wheels and planted with seasonal flowers.
    “Ain’t that too far for you all to go walking?”
    Frieda scratched her knee.
    “Why don’t you wait for her? You can come up here. Want some pop?” Those rain-soaked eyes lit up, and her smile was full, not like the pinched and holding-back smile of other grown-ups.
    I moved to go up the stairs, but Frieda said, “No, ma’am, we ain’t allowed.”
    I was amazed at her courage, and frightened of her sassiness. The smile of the Maginot Line slipped. “Ain’t ’llowed?”
    “No’m.”
    “Ain’t ’llowed to what?”
    “Go in your house.”
    “Is that right?” The waterfalls were still. “How come?”
    “My mama said so. My mama said you ruined.”
    The waterfalls began to run again. She put the root-beer bottle to her lips and drank it empty. With a graceful movement of the wrist, a gesture so quick and small we never really saw it, only remembered it afterward, she tossed the bottle over the rail at us. It split at our feet, and shards of brown glass dappled our legs before we could jump back. The Maginot Line put a fat hand on one of the folds of her stomach and laughed. At first just a deep humming with her mouth closed, then a larger, warmer sound. Laughter at once beautiful and frightening. She let her head tilt sideways, closed her eyes, and shook her massive trunk, letting the laughter fall like a wash of red leaves all around us. Scraps and curls of the laughter followed us as we ran. Our breath gave out at the same time our legs did. After we rested against a tree, our heads on crossed forearms, I said, “Let’s go home.”
    Frieda was still angry—fighting, she believed, for her life. “No, we got to get it now.”
    “We can’t go all the way to the lake.”
    “Yes we can. Come on.”
    “Mama gone get us.”
    “No she ain’t. Besides, she can’t do nothing but whip us.”
    That was true. She wouldn’t kill us, or laugh a terrible laugh at us, or throw a bottle at us.
    We walked down tree-lined streets of soft gray houses leaning like tired ladies…. The streets changed; houses looked more sturdy, their paint was newer, porch posts straighter, yards deeper. Then came brick houses set well back from the street, fronted by yards edged in shrubbery clipped into smooth cones and balls of velvet green.
    The lakefront houses were the loveliest. Garden furniture, ornaments, windows like shiny eyeglasses, and no sign of life. The backyards of these houses fell away in green slopes down to a strip of sand, and then the blue Lake Erie, lapping all the way to Canada. The orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section never reached this part of town. This sky was always blue.
    We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half-stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the