Abuse In Alex Haley's The Bluest Eye

Alex Haley began the story of slavery in Roots with Kunta Kinte who was sent to Alex Annapolis in the British colony of Maryland in 1767 and sold in an auction in Virginia. Since then, the story of the African Americans has crossed many hurdles: from the 13th amendment act, prohibiting slavery; reconstruction; coping with the Ku Klux Klan; the 15th amendment act of the constitution that gave blacks the right to vote; and Jim Crow’s segregation act in the South. The stock market crash in 1929 brought about The Great Depression of 1929-1941, and the lives of the already poor. African Americans were made much worse. Overt racism was rampant and black workers were normally the first to lose jobs at a business or on a farm and often denied public

It is written as a fragmented narrative from multiple perspectives so that we can interpret the text through voices of Claudia, Frieda, Pecola, third person omniscient narrator, the authors’ voice herself and Soaphead Church. However, the focus of the research on different forms of abuse will be interpreted through the eyes of the young children in the novel. The story centers around two black African families, McTeer family and the Breedlove family with different ethics and values in life and both living in the hideous conditions. Mr. and Mrs. McTeer have two daughters Claudia who is ten and Frieda who is nine. Their house is “Old, cold and green at night a kerosene lamp lights one large room” (Morrison 5). The McTeer family rented out a room to a border Henry Washington. On the other hand we have the Breedlove family where love is not bred. Cholly and Pauline Breedlove ironically had little love to Pecola and their son Sammy. The Breedlove’s lived in extreme poverty as well with just the bare needs of survival. “The bedroom had three beds: a narrow iron bed for Sammy, fourteen years old, another for Pecola, eleven years old, and a double bed for Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove. In the center of the bedroom, for the even distribution of heat, stood a coal stove . . . There were no bath facilities. Morrison informs us: Only a toilet bowl, inaccessible to the eye, if not the ear, of the tenants (25). The sofa had been split straight across the back before it was delivered. They lived in the store front “They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly,” (28), and their ugliness was “unique”