"Pecola and the Unyielding Earth"Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized Dispossession in The Bluest Eye Christine Battista (bio) and Melissa R. Sande (bio) Toni Morrison's 1970 novel The Bluest Eye opens with the black body and the land as a couplet, aligning the object ontology of barren soil with Pecola's plight, itself an incursion on the body of her being from which no issue comes: Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow. . . . We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seed shriveled and died; her baby too.1 We might ask, then, what compels Morrison to so explicitly overlay the personal and the environmental.2 Instances of dispossession and imposition cohere within and around the poor black disabled girl, Pecola, who is the most disenfranchised of the characters in her community. She becomes a nexus of experience where internalities and externalities of dominance and despair become confused, as in the assumption on the part of the community that the marigolds didn't grow because Pecola was having her father's child, due to their being connected parts of a larger idea that William Spanos defines as the calling that the United States (and its empire) was founded on: [End Page 61] To put it provisionally and all too summarily, the dominant—the "chosen"—culture in the United States—from the inaugural "errand in the [New World] wilderness" of the founding Puritans (God's "chosen people"); through the era of westward expansion, which secularized the Puritans' Word and its providential history as "Manifest Destiny"; to the Vietnam War and post-9/11, which has borne witness to America's extension of its divine- or history-ordained "errand in the wilderness" to include the wilderness of the world at large—has re-presented the awesome immensity, the vastness, the majesty, the mystery of the world's wilderness in terms of a twofold ideological strategy directed inwardly toward the covenantal community and outwardly toward its threatening enemy.3 The frontier, then, is simultaneously psychic and literal, individual and environmental or, as Spanos has it, inward and outward. In either mode, the imperative for coercion occurs at the point of departure, beyond which lies "an Other—an alien/inferior entity on the other side of the always moving dividing line between good and evil, settlement and wilderness, civilization and savagery, that threatens the divinely ordained errand and must, therefore, according to the imperatives of this exceptionalist logic, be eradicated by violence in behalf of the errand."4 What is held out and acted on, violently, in both cases, in the racial razing of the social body politic and in the mechanistic razing of the physical landscape, is the body. It is the preexisting physis that threatens and continually initiates a hegemonic reordering through which black bodies and the land are to be made wild and then made unfree. In the opening passage of The Bluest Eye, Morrison charts the muteness of a miscarriage in the midst of larger communal pain or the blankness of a field that falls fallow after seeding as eradicative output within the singular "productive" function of white patriarchal endeavor. Destructive failure presents as a sort of ironic residue left by the fading particulars of inexorable progress—a haunting. In this way, human and environmental bodies share a solidarity as venues for the will to power and as arenas both vast and small that may serve as a forensic record. In Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Actions, Noel Sturgeon speaks aptly to this unity as it is observed through an ecofeminist lens that "makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms" and...