Seeds in Hard Ground

Seeds in Hard Ground

In Seeds in Hard Ground: Black girlhood in The Bluest Eye, author Ruth Rosenberg, discusses the how young African American girls develop a sense of self, how the literature they read while growing up effects the how they see themselves. Rosenberg cites Nancy Larrick, author of “The All-White World of Children’s books” on page 436, stating that Nancy Larrick “studied 5,206 children’s books published between 1962 and 1964, claims that only 349 of those thousands of books include even one black child either in the illustrations or the text.”
Rosenberg goes on the discuss how in many novels, like the Bluest Eye, the main characters, young African American girls, are deprived of sufficient role models in the media they are bombarded with. What they experience is the sense that if they are dark skinned they are less attractive, less worthy of happiness, than those characters who have lighter skin, like the minor character Maureen Peal in the Bluest Eye. Rosenberg feels that the only way to resolve these feeling of inadequacy, not only for the characters in the novels, but for the authors who wrote them. These feelings of inadequacy leave these young girls wishing and praying that they will one day wake up to find that they have become white. Maya Angelou expedited this dream and talks about it in her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the character of Pecola in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. While Angelou has other African American women to fill as role model, allowing her to leave the dream of whiteness behind, the character of Pecola has no really strong woman to look up to and becomes obsessed with the becoming more like the Caucasian faces that defines beauty.
Rosenberg, Ruth. Black American Literature Forum, Volume 21, Number 4 (Winter 1987)
O 1987 Indiana State University