Young Mariah reads The Bluest Eye
Mariah Dillard (flashback) · Jamaica, 1980s
The Creator flashes back to Mariah in Jamaica in the 1980s, reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye by a pool. The Luke Cage Syllabus points out that colorism comes up in dialogue in the same episode. Morrison's first novel follows Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old who prays for blue eyes because she believes they would make her loved. The episode is about where Mariah's hardness came from, and the writers put in her hands the book about how that kind of damage gets made.
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The book
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison published her first novel in 1970, while she was an editor at Random House raising two sons on her own. It has landed on the American Library Association's list of most challenged books more than once. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993, and school boards are still arguing with the book that started it.
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Sleuthed by @shelfsleuth · 2026-10-17
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