#  "Nobody Knows The Bluest Eye" by Namwali Serpell  

 





February 06, 2026

 

 

Banned as it’s been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn’t care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”  
  
The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” But these are in fact the book’s shocking revelations: incest, rape, child pregnancy. And as yet more spoilers in these early pages go on to tell us—“Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too”—stillbirth and death are coming, too. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”  
  
Read more [here](https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/namwali-serpell-on-morrison-excerpt/).



 

 

 



 

 

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