"A Winged but Grounded Bird"

     "The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach- could not even see- but which filled the valleys of the mind." (Morrison 204)
     The passage starts out with irony- Pecola's "tendril, sap green days", which should be supple, unbreakable, with "delicate, showy hopefulness"(97) and wrought with life, are instead filled with the broken spirit of a girl who has lost her sanity. Her insanity is further described as she jerks her head "to the beat of a drummer" that wasn't actually there. Then, Pecola begins to exhibit birdlike qualities, representing her "futile" longing for blue eyes, for beauty in the eyes of white people, and therefore herself. The beauty of this passage lies in the vivid description of a young girl's insanity at the cost of her achieving the beauty she had yearned for, in the use of the purity of nature to portray Pecola's complete loss of innocence, and in the image of the rebirth of summer to show the falling apart of a child, cast out by not only society, but her own family. By using this imagery to portray something as ugly and horrible as the psychological destruction of a young child, Morrison is able to yet again provide contrast. There is something beautiful to be found in the metaphorical representation of Pecola as a flightless bird, still trying to reach "the blue void" that she could not even see.

This bird, like Pecola, is most often seen as ugly by society. It is also grounded, black, and has blue eyes.