This qualitative study highlights the interconnectedness of literature, literacy practices, identity, and social positioning within a framework of a common enactment of multicultural education: adding literature by and about people of color to the language arts curriculum. The study provides a window on the meaning-making of six 16-year-old Black girls as they studied "The Bluest Eye" (Morrison, 1994) in their high school English class. Drawing primarily on group and individual interview data, this research shows participants spending little time analyzing the literature per se. Instead, spurred by incidents in the novel, they used the text as a launching point from which they analyzed their own life experiences. Socially positioned as young Black women, participants have found that they are expected by people in their school, community, and outside their community to behave in particular ways as a reflection of their assumed values and ways of being in the world. They also have experienced the effects of a Eurocentric standard of beauty, so central to the novel, being applied in their own lives. As they read and discussed the text, participants represented and constructed identities as they validated, modified, or contested the ability of others' ascriptions of identity to act as boundaries in their lives. This research shows how ascribed identities serve as boundaries, how literacy practices enable negotiation of those boundaries, and how participants' co-constructed identities as young Black women mattered to them as they studied literature with which they were expected to "connect."