Claudia feels her and Frieda’s sorrow for Pecola’s predicament “was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it.” The children were upset that no one seemed to sympathize with the poor girl’s plight. Why do you think others in the town were less than sympathetic to her? Why did no one offer to help?
The lack of sympathy and support from the community for Pecola stems from deep internalized racism, society’s neglect, beauty standards, and the social hierarchy in the Black community. Pecola is dark-skinned, thus unattractive. She is from a poor, dysfunctional, violent family, therefore doomed, an inevitable outcome. She is at the bottom of the social order, so others protect their own self-worth by elevating themselves. People turn a blind eye out of self-preservation. Pregnancy by a father is just too shameful to address openly. The town’s indifference is a communal failure, not a personal tragedy.
This community did not invest in each other, try to help each other. Living standards, skin-color, better opportunities played a role in how they viewed each other. Indifference …yes, all out for their family status…yes. They saw the bullying as just a part of living everyday life.
I agree with the above comments. I also think there are two other reasons that heads are turned when situations like these occur. The observers are afraid to speak up because they might be wrong and then there are people just plain don’t want to get involved or be bothered.
When I was a young child growing up in a very small, very rural farming community we had a family that moved to the community and whose father was a hired hand for a wealthy farmer. There were 3 girls and a son along with mom and dad and they lived in a literal one bedroom shack provided by the farmer; no running water, woodstove for cooking and heating, outhouse, etc. They rode the same school bus I did and I remember a dead goat laid in front of the house for weeks. The kids were dirty, smelly, and unkempt. No adult in the community; not one person, including the farmer, the teachers, the town marshal, and county law enforcement, made any attempt to help these children. I can remember that as a little kid I thought the 13 year old girl was getting fat when she got on the bus. One morning our school bus pulled up to pick up the kids and no one came out. The entire family had lit out during the night. Afterward I heard one of the kids in my class say he had heard his parents saying that the girl’s father had “knocked her up.” Growing up on a farm I definitely knew what that meant.
All of this occurred in the early 1960s. I have thought about it many times over the years and it makes me sick and sad to think that those kids had no one who would help them. I have wondered why my parents didn’t do anything and believe it was because they had no idea of what they could do. There were no safety nets at that time for these situations; there were no mandatory reporting requirements, there were no organized systems of dealing with it. Thank goodness progress has been made in dealing with the type situations. There are many, many kids who still fall through the cracks, but at least there has been some improvement.
1 Like
How intense, @Lana_Maskus. That’s a lot for a little kid to observe and it obviously made quite an impression on you. Thanks for sharing this!
It did make an impression on me, but I was a pretty resilient kid. I knew that my parents loved my sister and me, gave us a good and safe home, only wanted the best for us, and that was enough. Obviously, it did change that 13 year old girl’s life and I’ve always wondered what happened to her. I can’t imagine that the outcome was anything but dismal.