In fact, the community is marked by sharp social stratification, fragmentation, and radical instability for its most marginal members. Yet the 'integration' of this Midwestern community does not result in the cultural mixing implied by the metaphor of a 'melting pot.' The term 'melting pot,' like so many names and labels in Morrison's work, ironically belies the characters' experience. Black and white children attend the same school, frequent the same stores, and even live next door to each other.

While segregation is still legal, blacks are not allowed in Lake Shore Park, much of the community is integrated. The population of Lorain is described as ethnically disparate and fluid. The narrator's question, 'what could go wrong?', is both rhetorical and ironic. Neither the rural south, nor a large northern ghetto, Lorain, Ohio affords an intimate microcosm of caste and class, both within and without the black community.

Set in a small, industrialized, Midwestern town on the eve of World War I, The Bluest Eye explores the relationship of a variety of black families and individuals to each other as well as to the larger white community from which they are marginalized by racism.

In that young and growing Ohio town whose side streets, even, were paved with concrete, which sat on the edge of a calm blue lake, which boasted an affinity with Oberlin, the underground railroad station, just thirteen miles away, this melting pot on the lip of America facing the cold but receptive Canada-What could go wrong?( The Bluest Eye, 93)

Maureen peal the bluest eye