Due Today:
Week Two Vocabulary Practice Sheet is due TODAY
Having read through page 173 of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" \
Due Tomorrow: Mr. Monson's Final Vocabulary Quiz, be sure to study!
Homework: Make sure you have read up through page 192 and that you study for the vocabulary quiz tomorrow.
Today:
We're continuing with reading aloud today and in the traditional format. One of the most interesting, and despicable characters in the book, SoapHead church has and intimate moment with Pecola Breedlove shortly after her rape.Here's some good quality information about Mr. Whitcomb:
Misanthropic in his perversity, Soaphead is reviled by human contact. He is nauseated by the "humanness of people — their body odor, breath odor, blood, sweat, tears, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts — all of the body's survivalist protections.
Mixed blood and white ancestry were always important to Soaphead's family, the Whitcombs — more important, in fact, than how the family was actually treated by their white, reluctant relatives. To the Whitcombs, whites were always superior and therefore beautiful; as a result, they cherished their relationship with whites and sought to maintain their heritage of light skin.
Because the thought of being near a woman is abhorrent to Soaphead, he has begun to prefer the company of young girls. His effete and fastidious mannerisms detract from whatever masculinity he might have developed. Not surprisingly, his eccentricities alienate him from most people, which pleases him.
More information found here (http://thebluesteyetonimorrison.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/soaphead-church/)Comprehension check:
Who is Soaphead Church, what does he do for Pecola?
What new information or additional perspective to the novel’s themes does Soaphead Church provide?
How do you feel about Soaphead Church’s view of beauty?
THE BLUEST EYE PAGES 173-192
CLICK HERE FOR FULL PDF VERSION OF THE BOOK
Soaphead was reflecting once again on these thoughts
one late hot afternoon when he heard a tap on his door.
Opening it, he saw a little girl, quite unknown to him. She
was about twelve or so, he thought, and seemed to him pitifully
unattractive. When he asked her what she wanted, she
did not answer, but held out to him one of his cards advertising
his gifts and services: “If you are overcome with trouble
and conditions that are not natural, I can remove them;
Overcome Spells, Bad Luck, and Evil Influences. Remember,
I am a true Spiritualist and Psychic Reader, born with power,
and I will help you. Satisfaction in one visit. During many
years of practice I have brought together many in marriage
and reunited many who were separated. If you are unhappy,
discouraged, or in distress, I can help you. Does bad luck
seem to follow you? Has the one you love changed? I can tell
you why. I will tell you who your enemies and friends are,
and if the one you love is true or false. If you are sick, I can
show you the way to health. I locate lost and stolen articles.
Satisfaction guaranteed.”
Soaphead Church told her to come in.
“What can I do for you, my child?”
She stood there, her hands folded across her stomach, a
little protruding pot of tummy. “Maybe. Maybe you can do
it for me.”
“Do what for you?”
[PAGE 174]
“I can’t go to school no more. And I thought maybe you
could help me.”
“Help you how? Tell me. Don’t be frightened.”
“My eyes.”
“What about your eyes?”
“I want them blue.”
Soaphead pursed his lips, and let his tongue stroke a gold
inlay. He thought it was at once the most fantastic and the
most logical petition he had ever received. Here was an ugly
little girl asking for beauty. A surge of love and understanding
swept through him, but was quickly replaced by anger.
Anger that he was powerless to help her. Of all the wishes
people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this
seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving
of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up
out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue
eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time
he honestly wished he could work miracles. Never before
had he really wanted the true and holy power—only the
power to make others believe he had it. It seemed so sad, so
frivolous, that mere mortality, not judgment, kept him from
it. Or did it?
With a trembling hand he made the sign of the cross over
her. His flesh crawled; in that hot, dim little room of worn
things, he was chilled.
“I can do nothing for you, my child. I am not a magician.
I work only through the Lord. He sometimes uses me to help
people. All I can do is offer myself to Him as the instrument
through which he works. If He wants your wish granted, He
will do it.”
Soaphead walked to the window, his back to the girl. His
mind raced, stumbled, and raced again. How to frame the
[PAGE 175]
next sentence? How to hang on to the feeling of power. His
eye fell on old Bob sleeping on the porch.
“We must make, ah, some offering, that is, some contact
with nature. Perhaps some simple creature might be the
vehicle through which He will speak. Let us see.”
He knelt down at the window, and moved his lips. After
what seemed a suitable length of time, he rose and went to
the icebox that stood near the other window. From it he
removed a small packet wrapped in pinkish butcher paper.
From a shelf he took a small brown bottle and sprinkled
some of its contents on the substance inside the paper. He
put the packet, partly opened, on the table.
“Take this food and give it to the creature sleeping on the
porch. Make sure he eats it. And mark well how he behaves.
If nothing happens, you will know that God has refused
you. If the animal behaves strangely, your wish will be
granted on the day following this one.”
The girl picked up the packet; the odor of the dark,
sticky meat made her want to vomit. She put a hand on
her stomach.
“Courage. Courage, my child. These things are not
granted to faint hearts.”
She nodded and swallowed visibly, holding down the
vomit. Soaphead opened the door, and she stepped over the
threshold.
“Good-bye, God bless,” he said and quickly shut the
door. At the window he stood watching her, his eyebrows
pulled together into waves of compassion, his tongue fondling
the worn gold in his upper jaw. He saw the girl bending
down to the sleeping dog, who, at her touch, opened one
liquid eye, matted in the corners with what looked like green
glue. She reached out and touched the dog’s head, stroking
[PAGE 176]
him gently. She placed the meat on the floor of the porch,
near his nose. The odor roused him; he lifted his head, and
got up to smell it better. He ate it in three or four gulps. The
girl stroked his head again, and the dog looked up at her
with soft triangle eyes. Suddenly he coughed, the cough of a
phlegmy old man—and got to his feet. The girl jumped. The
dog gagged, his mouth chomping the air, and promptly fell
down. He tried to raise himself, could not, tried again and
half-fell down the steps. Choking, stumbling, he moved like
a broken toy around the yard. The girl’s mouth was open, a
little petal of tongue showing. She made a wild, pointless
gesture with one hand and then covered her mouth with
both hands. She was trying not to vomit. The dog fell again,
a spasm jerking his body. Then he was quiet. The girl’s hands
covering her mouth, she backed away a few feet, then
turned, ran out of the yard and down the walk.
Soaphead Church went to the table. He sat down, with
folded hands balancing his forehead on the balls of his
thumbs. Then he rose and went to a tiny night table with a
drawer, from which he took paper and a fountain pen. A
bottle of ink was on the same shelf that held the poison.
With these things he sat again at the table. Slowly, carefully,
relishing his penmanship, he wrote the following letter:
Att: TO HE WHO GREATLY ENNOBLED HUMAN NATURE BY CREATING IT
Dear God:
The Purpose of this letter is to familiarize you with
facts which either have escaped your notice, or which
you have chosen to ignore.
Once upon a time I lived greenly and youngish on
one of your islands. An island of the archipelago in the
[PAGE 178]
South Atlantic between North and South America, enclosing
the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico:
divided into the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles,
and the Bahama Islands. Not the Windward or Leeward
Island colonies, mark you, but within, of course,
the Greater of the two Antilles (while the precision of
my prose may be, at times, laborious, it is necessary
that I identify myself to you clearly).
Now.
We in this colony took as our own the most dramatic,
and the most obvious, of our white masters’
characteristics, which were, of course, their worst. In
retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those
characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome
to maintain. Consequently we were not royal
but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we
believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and
education was being at school. We mistook violence
for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness
was freedom. We raised our children and reared
our crops; we let infants grow, and property develop.
Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womanhood
by acquiescence. And the smell of your fruit
and the labor of your days we abhorred.
This morning, before the little black girl came, I
cried—for Velma. Oh, not aloud. There is no wind to
carry, bear, or even refuse to bear, a sound so heavy
with regret. But in my silent own lone way, I cried—for
Velma. You need to know about Velma to understand
what I did today.
She (Velma) left me the way people leave a hotel
room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing
[PAGE 178]
something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s
major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience
is limited to the time you need it while you are
in that particular town on that particular business; you
hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be
anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.
When you no longer need it, you pay a little something
for its use; say, “Thank you, sir,” and when your
business in that town is over, you go away from that
room. Does anybody regret leaving a hotel room? Does
anybody, who has a home, a real home somewhere,
want to stay there? Does anybody look back with affection,
or even disgust, at a hotel room when they
leave it? You can only love or despise whatever living
was done in that room. But the room itself? But you
take a souvenir. Not, oh, not, to remember the room.
To remember, rather, the time and the place of your
business, your adventure. What can anyone feel for a
hotel room? One doesn’t any more feel for a hotel room
than one expects a hotel room to feel for its occupant.
That, heavenly, heavenly Father, was how she left
me; or rather, she never left me, because she was never
ever there.
You remember, do you, how and of what we are
made? Let me tell you now about the breasts of little
girls. I apologize for the inappropriateness (is that it?),
the imbalance of loving them at awkward times of day,
and in awkward places, and the tastelessness of loving
those which belonged to members of my family. Do I
have to apologize for loving strangers?
But you too are amiss here, Lord. How, why, did you
allow it to happen? How is it I could lift my eyes from
[PAGE 179]
the contemplation of Your Body and fall deeply into
the contemplation of theirs? The buds. The buds on
some of these saplings. They were mean, you know,
mean and tender. Mean little buds resisting the touch,
springing like rubber. But aggressive. Daring me to
touch. Commanding me to touch. Not a bit shy, as
you’d suppose. They stuck out at me, oh yes, at me.
Slender-chested, finger-chested lassies. Have you ever
seen them, Lord? I mean, really seen them? One could
not see them and not love them. You who made them
must have considered them lovely even as an idea—
how much more lovely is the manifestation of that
idea. I couldn’t, as you must recall, keep my hands, my
mouth, off them. Salt-sweet. Like not quite ripe strawberries
covered with the light salt sweat of running
days and hopping, skipping, jumping hours.
The love of them—the touch, taste, and feel of
them—was not just an easy luxurious human vice;
they were, for me, A Thing To Do Instead. Instead of
Papa, instead of the Cloth, instead of Velma, and I
chose not to do without them. But I didn’t go into the
church. At least I didn’t do that. As to what I did do?
I told people I knew all about You. That I had received
Your Powers. It was not a complete lie; but it
was a complete lie. I should never have, I admit, I
should never have taken their money in exchange for
well-phrased, well-placed, well-faced lies. But, mark
you, I hated it. Not for a moment did I love the lies
or the money.
But consider: The woman who left the hotel room.
Consider: The greentime, the noontime of the
archipelago.
[PAGE 180]
Consider: Their hopeful eyes that were outdone only
by their hoping breasts.
Consider: How I needed a comfortable evil to prevent
my knowing what I could not bear to know.
Consider: How I hated and despised the money.
And now, consider: Not according to my just deserts,
but according to my mercy, the little black girl
that came a-looning at me today. Tell me, Lord, how
could you leave a lass so long so lone that she could find
her way to me? How could you? I weep for you, Lord.
And it is because I weep for You that I had to do your
work for You.
Do you know what she came for? Blue eyes. New,
blue eyes, she said. Like she was buying shoes. “I’d like
a pair of new blue eyes.” She must have asked you for
them for a very long time, and you hadn’t replied. (A
habit, I could have told her, a long-ago habit broken
for Job—but no more.) She came to me for them. She
had one of my cards. (Card enclosed.) By the way, I
added the Micah—Elihue Micah Whitcomb. But I am
called Soaphead Church. I cannot remember how or
why I got the name. What makes one name more a
person than another? Is the name the real thing, then?
And the person only what his name says? Is that why
to the simplest and friendliest of questions: “What is
your name?” put to you by Moses, You would not say,
and said instead “I am who I am.” Like Popeye? I Yam
What I Yam? Afraid you were, weren’t you, to give out
your name? Afraid they would know the name and
then know you? Then they wouldn’t fear you? It’s quite
all right. Don’t be vexed. I mean no offense. I understand.
I have been a bad man too, and an unhappy man
[PAGE 181]
too. But someday I will die. I was always so kind. Why
do I have to die? The little girls. The little girls are the
only things I’ll miss. Do you know that when I touched
their sturdy little tits and bit them—just a little—I felt
I was being friendly? I didn’t want to kiss their mouths
or sleep in the bed with them or take a child bride for
my own. Playful, I felt, and friendly. Not like the newspapers
said. Not like the people whispered. And they
didn’t mind at all. Not at all. Remember how so many
of them came back? No one would even try to understand
that. If I’d been hurting them, would they have
come back? Two of them, Doreen and Sugar Babe,
they’d come together. I gave them mints, money, and
they’d eat ice cream with their legs open while I played
with them. It was like a party. And there wasn’t nastiness,
and there wasn’t any filth, and there wasn’t any
odor, and there wasn’t any groaning—just the light
white laughter of little girls and me. And there wasn’t
any look—any long funny look—any long funny
Velma look afterward. No look that makes you feel
dirty afterward. That makes you want to die. With
little girls it is all clean and good and friendly.
You have to understand that, Lord. You said, “Suffer
little children to come unto me, and harm them
not.” Did you forget? Did you forget about the children?
Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on
road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I’ve
seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You
forgot how and when to be God.
That’s why I changed the little black girl’s eyes for
her, and I didn’t touch her; not a finger did I lay on her.
But I gave her those blue eyes she wanted. Not for
[PAGE 182]
pleasure, and not for money. I did what You did not,
could not, would not do: I looked at that ugly little
black girl, and I loved her. I played You. And it was a
very good show!
I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave
her the blue, blue, two blue eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak
of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else
will see her blue eyes. But she will. And she will live
happily ever after. I, I have found it meet and right so
to do.
Now you are jealous. You are jealous of me.
You see? I, too, have created. Not aboriginally, like
you, but creation is a heady wine, more for the taster
than the brewer.
Having therefore imbibed, as it were, of the nectar,
I am not afraid of You, of Death, not even of Life, and
it’s all right about Velma; and it’s all right about Papa;
and it’s all right about the Greater and the Lesser Antilles.
Quite all right. Quite.
With kindest regards, I remain,
Your,
Elihue Micah Whitcomb
Soaphead Church folded the sheets of paper into three
equal parts and slipped them into an envelope. Although he
had no seal, he longed for sealing wax. He removed a cigar
box from under the bed and rummaged about in it. There
were some of his most precious things: a sliver of jade that
had dislodged from a cuff link at the Chicago hotel; a gold
pendant shaped like a Y with a piece of coral attached to it
that had belonged to the mother he never knew; four large
hairpins that Velma had left on the rim of the bathroom
[PAGE 183]
sink; a powder blue grosgrain ribbon from the head of a
little girl named Precious Jewel; a blackened faucet head
from the sink in a jail cell in Cincinnati; two marbles he had
found under a bench in Morningside Park on a very fine
spring day; an old Lucky Hart catalog that smelled still of
nut-brown and mocha face powder, and lemon vanishing
cream. Distracted by his things, he forgot what he had been
looking for. The effort to recall was too great; there was a
buzzing in his head, and a wash of fatigue overcame him. He
closed his box, eased himself out on the bed, and slipped
into an ivory sleep from which he could not hear the tiny
yelps of an old lady who had come out of her candy store
and found the still carcass of an old dog named Bob.
Summer
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry,
and I see summer—its dust and lowering skies. It remains
for me a season of storms. The parched days and sticky
nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the storms,
the violent sudden storms, both frightened and quenched
me. But my memory is uncertain; I recall a summer storm
in the town where we lived and imagine a summer my
mother knew in 1929. There was a tornado that year, she
said, that blew away half of south Lorain. I mix up her
summer with my own. Biting the strawberry, thinking of
storms, I see her. A slim young girl in a pink crepe dress.
One hand is on her hip; the other lolls about her thigh—
waiting. The wind swoops her up, high above the houses,
but she is still standing, hand on hip. Smiling. The
anticipation and promise in her lolling hand are not
altered by the holocaust. In the summer tornado of 1929,
my mother’s hand is unextinguished. She is strong,
smiling, and relaxed while the world falls down about
[PAGE 188]
her. So much for memory. Public fact becomes private
reality, and the seasons of a Midwestern town become
the Moirai of our small lives.
The summer was already thick when Frieda and I
received our seeds. We had waited since April for the
magic package containing the packets and packets of
seeds we were to sell for five cents each, which would
entitle us to a new bicycle. We believed it, and spent a
major part of every day trooping about the town selling
them. Although Mama had restricted us to the homes of
people she knew or the neighborhoods familiar to us, we
knocked on all doors, and floated in and out of every
house that opened to us: twelve-room houses that
sheltered half as many families, smelling of grease and
urine; tiny wooden four-room houses tucked into bushes
near the railroad tracks; the up-over places—apartments
up over fish markets, butcher shops, furniture stores,
saloons, restaurants; tidy brick houses with flowered
carpets and glass bowls with fluted edges.
During that summer of the seed selling we thought about
the money, thought about the seeds, and listened with only
half an ear to what people were saying. In the houses of
people who knew us we were asked to come in and sit,
given cold water or lemonade; and while we sat there being
refreshed, the people continued their conversations or went
about their chores. Little by little we began to piece a story
together, a secret, terrible, awful story. And it was only
after two or three such vaguely overheard conversations
that we realized that the story was about Pecola. Properly
placed, the fragments of talk ran like this:
“Did you hear about that girl?”
“What? Pregnant?”
[PAGE 189]
“Yas. But guess who?”
“Who? I don’t know all these little old boys.”
“That’s just it. Ain’t no little old boy. They say it’s Cholly.”
“Cholly? Her daddy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Lord. Have mercy. That dirty nigger.”
“’Member that time he tried to burn them up? I knew he was crazy for sure then.”
“What’s she gone do? The mama?”
“Keep on like she been, I reckon. He taken off.”
“County ain’t gone let her keep that baby, is they?”
“Don’t know.”
“None of them Breedloves seem right anyhow. That boy is off somewhere every minute, and the girl was always foolish.”
“Don’t nobody know nothing about them anyway. Where they come from or nothing. Don’t seem to have no people.”
“What you reckon make him do a thing like that?”
“Beats me. Just nasty.”
“Well, they ought to take her out of school.”
“Ought to. She carry some of the blame.”
“Oh, come on. She ain’t but twelve or so.”
“Yeah. But you never know. How come she didn’t fight him?”
“Maybe she did.”
“Yeah? You never know.”
“Well, it probably won’t live. They say the way her mama beat her she lucky to be alive herself.”
“She be lucky if it don’t live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking.”
[PAGE 190]
“Can’t help but be. Ought to be a law: two ugly
people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better
off in the ground.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry none. It be a miracle if it live.”
Our astonishment was short-lived, for it gave way to a
curious kind of defensive shame; we were embarrassed
for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we just felt sorry for
her. Our sorrow drove out all thoughts of the new
bicycle. And I believe our sorrow was the more intense
because nobody else seemed to share it. They were
disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by
the story. But we listened for the one who would say,
“Poor little girl,” or, “Poor baby,” but there was only
head-wagging where those words should have been. We
looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.
I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead,
and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its
head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face
holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared
nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of
black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over
marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth.
More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need
for someone to want the black baby to live—just to
counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley
Temples, and Maureen Peals. And Frieda must have felt
the same thing. We did not think of the fact that Pecola
was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not
married. And we did not dwell on the fact that the
baby’s father was Pecola’s father too; the process of
having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to
[PAGE 191]
us—at least she knew her father. We thought only of this
overwhelming hatred for the unborn baby. We
remembered Mrs. Breedlove knocking Pecola down and
soothing the pink tears of the frozen doll baby that
sounded like the door of our icebox. We remembered the
knuckled eyes of schoolchildren under the gaze of
Meringue Pie and the eyes of these same children when
they looked at Pecola. Or maybe we didn’t remember; we
just knew. We had defended ourselves since memory
against everything and everybody, considered all speech a
code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to
careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious and
arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very
good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not
known to us—not then. Our only handicap was our size;
people gave us orders because they were bigger and
stronger. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity
and pride, that we decided to change the course of events
and alter a human life.
“What we gone do, Frieda?”
“What can we do? Miss Johnson said it would be a
miracle if it lived.”
“So let’s make it a miracle.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“We could pray.”
“That’s not enough. Remember last time with the
bird?”
“That was different; it was half-dead when we found it.”
“I don’t care, I still think we have to do something
really strong this time.”
“Let’s ask Him to let Pecola’s baby live and promise to
be good for a whole month.”
[PAGE 192]
“O.K. But we better give up something so He’ll know
we really mean it this time.”
“Give up what? We ain’t got nothing. Nothing but the
seed money, two dollars.”
“We could give that. Or, you know what? We could
give up the bicycle. Bury the money and . . . plant the
seeds.”
“All of the money?”
“Claudia, do you want to do it or not?”
“O.K. I just thought . . . O.K.”
“We have to do it right, now. We’ll bury the money
over by her house so we can’t go back and dig it up, and
we’ll plant the seeds out back of our house so we can
watch over them. And when they come up, we’ll know
everything is all right. All right?”
“All right. Only let me sing this time. You say the
magic words.”
100 point bonus: if you are reading the blog, as you have been asked, here is your opportunity to earn 100 bonus points. What do you have to do? There is a tin on Mrs. Parker's desk. On a piece of scrap paper, write your name and the following words: Happy All Hallows Eve. When you come into class, put it in the tin. Do not mention this to anyone else.
