"Another door opened, and in walked a little girl, smaller and younger than all of us. She wore a pink sunback dress and pink fluffy bedroom slippers with two bunny ears pointed up from the tips. Her hair was corn yellow and bound in a thick ribbon... The familiar violence rose in me. Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove, seemed reason enough to scratch her" (108).
I think this scene exhibits the notion of white 'superiority' that many of the main characters are antagonized by at one point or another. The fact that a smaller and younger girl could call Pecola's mother "Polly" frustrated Claudia very much since none of them, not even Pecola, had the courage to even call her Pauline. But something else takes place here. Pecola, Frieda and Claudia witness how Pecola's mother accepts the little girl's 'audacity' of calling her "Polly." Between the little girl and Mrs. Breedlove there wasn't that sense of authority coming from the latter one. This was a 'first' for Pecola and the sisters and, I think, it definitely marked them deeply.
This scene helps the reader understand the circumstances of the story from the girls' level. It leaves the adults and the 'real world' aside and shows how powerless Pecola and the sisters are compared to a younger but different-colored girl. How is this new facet of Mrs. Breedlove going to affect Pecola's already-injured confidence? Won't this act as a reinforcer to the girls, suggesting again that whites can and blacks can't?
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