Who're you, outsider? Ask me who am I.

-Langston Hughes, "Visitors to the Black Belt"

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Tar Baby explore different types of communities. Such communities differ in race, class and gender respectively. They also include different learned biases and prejudices. In each, one or more of Morrison's characters struggle with the sense of there own identity within the community. Throughout this paper I will explore the different types of communities and take a closer look at the characters in which cannot identify with themselves or others within them.

In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of the most prevalent themes explored was that of one's dependency on society for identification, self value, and feelings of self worth. In an interview, Morrison indicated that her plan was to take love and the effects of its scarcity in the world as her major themes, concentrating on the individual loves of her characters, especially those of an enclosed community. (Kantz, 426) By constructing the chain of events that answered the question of how Pecola Breedlove was cast as the social outcast in her community, T

Sula determined that her sexual desires were not restricted by marriage or monogamy, and she concluded that sleeping with Jude represented "moral" behavior. When Nel chided Sula for betraying her trust, the narrator conveyed Sula's rationale honestly: "They have always shared the affection of other people: compared how a boy kissed: what line he used with one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all of that" (Morrison, 119). Sula's thoughts displayed utter disregard for marriage, but Morrison supported her contentions because "she [Sula] was ill-prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt the closest to" (Morrison, 119). With Sula, Morrison questioned the patriarchal controls that dictate a woman's behavior.

For example, the section marked Autumn, which was characteristic of harvesting and reaping the results of spring planting, was the section of the novel where the reader was introduced to the Breedlove family reaping a "harvest" from the "seeds" of racism, poverty, anger, etc. described in Spring.

Seemingly, as an example of the ways in which the transgressions of the fathers revisited the sons, the narrator gave an extensive account of Soaphead Church's family history, constantly citing instances in which traits of the fathers (or effects of their traits) followed the sons for generations. Of his family the author said, "They transferred this Anglophilia to their six children and sixteen grandchildren" and the family was described as one entity. The accomplishments and convictions of the sons were the same as the fathers. Soaphead Church, or more formally, Elihue Micah Whitcomb, inherited a prejudice for ascribing selectively to truth and tendencies to ascribe to lies about their ethnicity and superiority. He inherited his bitterness and pedophilia from his ancestors' practices and his religious fanaticism from his own father's secret denomination.

A pattern of precedence was pieced together in the story, showing the seeds of Pecola's present barrenness to have been planted in the lives of preceding generations. By profiling the lives of Soaphead Church and Pauline Breedlove, Morrison made a case for the validity of generational curses. Their narratives were appropriately placed in the Spring division of the novel as an indication of the characters sowing the seeds that would be reaped by Pecola.

At the beginning of Sula, Morrison focused on the Bottom's history to present racism's latent effects. For example, she explained the outcome of a freed slave's business deal with his master: "The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking ... and where the wind lingered all through the winter" (Morrison, 3). Because the master duped his slave, the Bottom becomes "a nigger joke," leaving the residents with only the satisfaction of knowing that "they could literally look down on the white folks." (Morrison, 5)

In "1965," Nel returned to Medallion, discovering that "They were so different, these young people. So different from the way she remembered them" (Morrison, 163). But one aspect of community life prevailed, the emphasis on unity. The narrator noted, "White people didn't fret about putting their old one's away. It took a lot of black people to let them go" (164). The narrator's commentary provided one of the few instances in Sula where the tone shifted overtly in favor of black life. Because the narrator assessed the white and black community with an either / or conclusion, it appeared that Western rhetoric continued to influence the residents.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Sula Morrison, Sula Betty, Tar Baby, Pauline Breedlove's, Soaphead Church, Suicide Day, Claudia Morrison, Negro Morrison, Nel's Sula's, Tarzan Son, bluest eye, black people, community values, value system, tar baby, sydney ondine, black community, toni morrison, throughout novel, night women, medallion's value system, people house black, sula tar baby, black people house, eye sula tar,
Approximate Word count = 6356
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page double spaced)