The Unanswerable Why? 
 As so often with Toni Morrison, I found myself reading in wonder, yet not fully knowing what I was reading. Influenced, I am sure, by Faulkner, she tells her stories in fragments, jumping around in time and from one voice to another, creating something that can perhaps only be understood as music: jazz, the blues, or something more dangerous still: 
 The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life. Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final pervading ache of freedom. 
 I find myself wanting to go on quoting, since Morrison's language is so superb, but the story she tells is one of squalor and tragedy. Cholly Breedlove's freedom is that of a man who has nothing. Taken from his mother, rejected by his father, he rattles around for a few years, marries a woman called Pauline, and fathers two children. But marriage does not suit him, he takes to drink, and the Breedloves settle into a relationship of abusive codependency: 
 If Cholly has stopped drinking, she would never have forgiven Jesus. She needed Cholly's sins desperately. The lower he sank, the wilder and more irresponsible he became, the more splendid she and her task became. In the name of Jesus. 
 The almost-mute central character of the book, however, is the Breedloves' daughter, Pecola, a charmless child who gets teased at school and is the butt of everybody's jokes. She is convinced that everything would be better if only she had blue eyes like the white girls in her reading primer (the book begins with a stunning deconstruction of a passage from Dick and Jane). The closest she comes to having friends are the whores that live upstairs and the two girls of the MacTeer family, who take her into foster care after Cholly has burned down their apartment. Chloe, the younger of the two, alternates as narrator with Morrison's own omniscient voice. Although also black and poor, she is there as the touchstone of a normal childhood, going to church and school, getting into scrapes, selling marigold seeds to save for a second-hand bicycle. But hers is a curious voice, looking back across a thirty-year gap, the rawness of childhood jostling against the experience of a mature woman, nowhere more startlingly than in her opening lines: 
 Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eye and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. 
 Not quite her opening lines, actually. There is a short prelude in which she already reveals the denouement: Pecola became pregnant with her father's child, losing it when it is born too soon. 
 Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. [...] There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since Why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in How. 
 And so the story begins, a jazz riff of jangling voices, but not without beauty: beauty in the normal childhood of Chloe and Frieda, even the young love of Pauline and Cholly. Yet hope turns to tragedy. Slipping sideways into her story, Morrison indeed shows us How; the Why we must answer for ourselves.