Gwendolyn Wallace on Unlocking Emotional Truths Through History

Article by Gwendolyn Wallace

“At three years old, I received my first timeout from my friend’s mom for “asking too many questions.” When I got home and told my mother what had happened, she told me that I should never apologize for being curious. But the damage was done. As I went through the next few years in my small, mostly white independent school, I made myself as small as possible. But in eighth grade, I found a copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in my school library. I read it and then immediately read it again. I believe that the book came to me at the perfect time in my life.

While I was thinking about how to frame this piece, a scene from the book came back to me. Near the middle of the book, Claudia, a nine-year-old dark-skinned Black girl, and the narrator of most of the story, describes Maureen Peal, a new classmate who is light-skinned. She comments, “Jealousy we understood and thought natural.... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us…”’

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