Hello Everyone!
Due today: having read through page 153 of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
Due Thursday: vocabulary practice sheet
Due Friday: vocabulary quiz.
Due today: having read through page 153 of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
Due Thursday: vocabulary practice sheet
Due Friday: vocabulary quiz.
FOR HOMEWORK: you will be reading through 173 [ending
with ""It was in fact a pity that the Maker had not sought his counsel."]
 |
| All photos are from a stage production of The Bluest Eye by Phantom Projects http://www.phantomprojects.com/thebluesteye.html |
Today we see a new character, Soaphead Chruch. Although he's been on the sidelines for the entire book, this is our first real look at him.
Let's spend a little bit of what we've read so far this week...
Cholly Breedlove
By all rights, we should hate Cholly Breedlove, given that he rapes his daughter. But Morrison explains in her afterword that she did not want to dehumanize her characters, even those who dehumanize one another, and she succeeds in making Cholly a sympathetic figure. He has experienced genuine suffering, having been abandoned in a junk heap as a baby and having suffered humiliation at the hands of white men. He is also capable of pleasure and even joy, in the experience of eating a watermelon or touching a girl for the first time. He is capable of violence, but he is also vulnerable, as when two white men violate him by forcing him to perform sexually for their amusement and when he defecates in his pants after encountering his father. Cholly represents a negative form of freedom. He is not free to love and be loved or to enjoy full dignity, but he is free to have sex and fight and even kill; he is free to be indifferent to death. He falls apart when this freedom becomes a complete lack of interest in life, and he reaches for his daughter to remind himself that he is alive.
Pauline Breedlove
Like Cholly, Pauline inflicts a great deal of pain on her daughter but Morrison nevertheless renders her sympathetically. She experiences more subtle forms of humiliation than Cholly does—her lame foot convinces her that she is doomed to isolation, and the snobbery of the city women in Lorain condemns her to loneliness. In this state, she is especially vulnerable to the messages conveyed by white culture—that white beauty and possessions are the way to happiness. Once, at the movies, she fixes her hair like the white sex symbol Jean Harlow and loses her tooth while eating candy. Though her fantasy of being like Harlow is a failure, Pauline finds another fantasy world—the white household for which she cares. This fantasy world is more practical than her imitation of Hollywood actresses and is more socially sanctioned than the madness of Pecola’s fantasy world, but it is just as effective in separating her from the people—her family—she should love. In a sense, Pauline’s existence is just as haunted and delusional as her daughter’s.
The Bluest Eye from page 154 - 173
[Page 154]
At the end of the alley he could see men clustered like grapes.
One large whooping voice spiraled over the heads of the
bended forms. The kneeling forms, the leaning forms, all
intent on one ground spot. As he came closer, he inhaled a
rife and stimulating man smell. The men were gathered, just
as the man in the pool hall had said, for and about dice and
money. Each figure was decorated some way with the slight
pieces of green. Some of them had separated their money,
folded the bills around their fingers, clenched the fingers into
fists, so the neat ends of the money stuck out in a blend of
daintiness and violence. Others had stacked their bills,
creased them down the middle, and held the wad as though
they were about to deal cards. Still others had left their
money in loosely crumpled balls. One man had money sticking
out from under his cap. Another stroked his bills with a
thumb and forefinger. There was more money in those black
hands than Cholly had ever seen before. He shared their
excitement, and the dry-mouthed apprehension on meeting
his father gave way to the saliva flow of excitement. He
glanced at the faces, looking for the one who might be his
father. How would he know him? Would he look like a
larger version of himself? At that moment Cholly could not
remember what his own self looked like. He only knew he
was fourteen years old, black, and already six feet tall. He
searched the faces and saw only eyes, pleading eyes, cold
eyes, eyes gone flat with malice, others laced with fear—all
focused on the movement of a pair of dice that one man was
throwing, snatching up, and throwing again. Chanting a
kind of litany to which the others responded, rubbing the
dice as though they were two hot coals, he whispered to
them. Then with a whoop the cubes flew from his hand to a
chorus of amazements and disappointments. Then the
[page 155]
thrower scooped up money, and someone shouted, “Take it
and crawl, you water dog, you, the best I know.” There was
some laughter, and a noticeable release of tension, during
which some men exchanged money.
Cholly tapped an old white-haired man on the back.
“Can you tell me is Samson Fuller ’round here somewhere?”
“Fuller?” The name was familiar to the man’s tongue. “I
don’t know, he here somewhere. They he is. In the brown
jacket.” The man pointed.
A man in a light-brown jacket stood at the far end of the
group. He was gesturing in a quarrelsome, agitated manner
with another man. Both of them had folded their faces in
anger. Cholly edged around to where they stood, hardly
believing he was at the end of his journey. There was his
father, a man like any other man, but there indeed were his
eyes, his mouth, his whole head. His shoulders lurked
beneath that jacket, his voice, his hands—all real. They
existed, really existed, somewhere. Right here. Cholly had
always thought of his father as a giant of a man, so when he
was very close it was with a shock that he discovered that he
was taller than his father. In fact, he was staring at a balding
spot on his father’s head, which he suddenly wanted to
stroke. While thus fascinated by the pitiable clean space
hedged around by neglected tufts of wool, the man turned a
hard, belligerent face to him.
“What you want, boy?”
“Uh. I mean . . . is you Samson Fuller?”
“Who sent you?”
“Huh?”
“You Melba’s boy?”
“No, sir, I’m . . . ” Cholly blinked. He could not remember
[Page 156]
his mother’s name. Had he ever known it? What could
he say? Whose boy was he? He couldn’t say, “I’m your boy.”
That sounded disrespectful.
The man was impatient. “Something wrong with your
head? Who told you to come after me?”
“Nobody.” Cholly’s hands were sweating. The man’s
eyes frightened him. “I just thought . . . I mean, I was just
wandering around, and, uh, my name is Cholly . . . .”
But Fuller had turned back to the game that was about to
begin anew. He bent down to toss a bill on the ground, and
waited for a throw. When it was gone, he stood up and in a
vexed and whiny voice shouted at Cholly, “Tell that bitch
she get her money. Now, get the fuck outta my face!”
Cholly was a long time picking his foot up from the
ground. He was trying to back up and walk away. Only
with extreme effort could he get the first muscle to cooperate.
When it did, he walked back up the alley, out of its
shade, toward the blazing light of the street. As he emerged
into the sun, he felt something in his legs give way. An
orange crate with a picture of clasping hands pasted on its
side was upended on the sidewalk. Cholly sat down on it.
The sunshine dropped like honey on his head. A horsedrawn
fruit wagon went by, its driver singing: “Fresh from
the vine, sweet as sugar, red as wine.”
Noises seemed to increase in volume. The clic-cloc of the
women’s heels, the laughter of idling men in doorways.
There was a streetcar somewhere. Cholly sat. He knew if he
was very still he would be all right. But then the trace of pain
edged his eyes, and he had to use everything to send it away.
If he was very still, he thought, and kept his eyes on one
thing, the tears would not come. So he sat in the dripping
honey sun, pulling every nerve and muscle into service to
[page 157]
stop the fall of water from his eyes. While straining in this
way, focusing every erg of energy on his eyes, his bowels suddenly
opened up, and before he could realize what he knew,
liquid stools were running down his legs. At the mouth of
the alley where his father was, on an orange crate in the sun,
on a street full of grown men and women, he had soiled himself
like a baby.
In panic he wondered should he wait there, not moving
until nighttime? No. His father would surely emerge and see
him and laugh. Oh, Lord. He would laugh. Everybody
would laugh. There was only one thing to do.
Cholly ran down the street, aware only of silence.
People’s mouths moved, their feet moved, a car jugged by—
but with no sound. A door slammed in perfect soundlessness.
His own feet made no sound. The air seemed to
strangle him, hold him back. He was pushing through a
world of invisible pine sap that threatened to smother him.
Still he ran, seeing only silent moving things, until he came to
the end of buildings, the beginning of open space, and saw
the Ocmulgee River winding ahead. He scooted down a
gravelly slope to a pier jutting out over the shallow water.
Finding the deepest shadow under the pier, he crouched in it,
behind one of the posts. He remained knotted there in fetal
position, paralyzed, his fists covering his eyes, for a long
time. No sound, no sight, only darkness and heat and the
press of his knuckles on his eyelids. He even forgot his
messed-up trousers.
Evening came. The dark, the warmth, the quiet, enclosed
Cholly like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its
own seed.
Cholly stirred. The ache in his head was all he felt. Soon,
like bright bits of glass, the events of that afternoon cut into
[page 158]
him. At first he saw only money in black fingers, then he
thought he was sitting on an uncomfortable chair, but when
he looked, it turned out to be the head of a man, a head with
a bald spot the size of an orange. When finally these bits
merged into full memory, Cholly began to smell himself. He
stood up and found himself weak, trembling, and dizzy. He
leaned for a moment on the pier post, then took off his
pants, underwear, socks, and shoes. He rubbed handfuls of
dirt on his shoes; then he crawled to the river edge. He had
to find the water’s beginning with his hands, for he could
not see it clearly. Slowly he swirled his clothes in the water
and rubbed them until he thought they were clean. Back
near his post, he took off his shirt and wrapped it around his
waist, then spread his trousers and underwear on the
ground. He squatted down and picked at the rotted wood of
the pier. Suddenly he thought of his Aunt Jimmy, her asafetida
bag, her four gold teeth, and the purple rag she wore
around her head. With a longing that almost split him open,
he thought of her handing him a bit of smoked hock out of
her dish. He remembered just how she held it—clumsy-like,
in three fingers, but with so much affection. No words, just
picking up a bit of meat and holding it out to him. And then
the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under
his chin.
Three women are leaning out of two windows. They see the
long clean neck of a new young boy and call to him. He goes
to where they are. Inside, it is dark and warm. They give him
lemonade in a Mason jar. As he drinks, their eyes float
up to him through the bottom of the jar, through the slick
[page 159]
sweet water. They give him back his manhood, which he
takes aimlessly.
The pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in
the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk
through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of blackand-
white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing
from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life.
Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red
watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the
flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade
in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what
all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it
its final and pervading ache of freedom. Only a musician
would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew,
that Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever
he felt—fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender
or violent, to whistle or weep. Free to sleep in doorways or
between the white sheets of a singing woman. Free to take a
job, free to leave it. He could go to jail and not feel imprisoned,
for he had already seen the furtiveness in the eyes of
his jailer, free to say, “No, suh,” and smile, for he had
already killed three white men. Free to take a woman’s
insults, for his body had already conquered hers. Free even
to knock her in the head, for he had already cradled that
head in his arms. Free to be gentle when she was sick, or
mop her floor, for she knew what and where his maleness
was. He was free to drink himself into a silly helplessness,
for he had already been a gandy dancer, done thirty days on
a chain gang, and picked a woman’s bullet out of the calf of
his leg. He was free to live his fantasies, and free even to die,
the how and the when of which held no interest for him. In
[page 160]
those days, Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk heap
by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there
was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions
and appetites, and they alone interested him.
It was in this godlike state that he met Pauline Williams.
And it was Pauline, or rather marrying her, that did for him
what the flashlight did not do. The constantness, varietylessness,
the sheer weight of sameness drove him to despair and
froze his imagination. To be required to sleep with the same
woman forever was a curious and unnatural idea to him; to
be expected to dredge up enthusiasms for old acts, and routine
ploys; he wondered at the arrogance of the female.
When he had met Pauline in Kentucky, she was hanging over
a fence scratching herself with a broken foot. The neatness,
the charm, the joy he awakened in her made him want to
nest with her. He had yet to discover what destroyed that
desire. But he did not dwell on it. He thought rather of whatever
had happened to the curiosity he used to feel. Nothing,
nothing, interested him now. Not himself, not other people.
Only in drink was there some break, some floodlight, and
when that closed, there was oblivion.
But the aspect of married life that dumbfounded him and
rendered him totally disfunctional was the appearance of
children. Having no idea of how to raise children, and having
never watched any parent raise himself, he could not
even comprehend what such a relationship should be. Had
he been interested in the accumulation of things, he could
have thought of them as his material heirs; had he needed to
prove himself to some nameless “others,” he could have
wanted them to excel in his own image and for his own sake.
Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen,
knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for
[page 161]
him, but whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from
his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself
and the children. As it was, he reacted to them, and his
reactions were based on what he felt at the moment.
So it was on a Saturday afternoon, in the thin light of spring,
he staggered home reeling drunk and saw his daughter in the
kitchen.
She was washing dishes. Her small back hunched over
the sink. Cholly saw her dimly and could not tell what he
saw or what he felt. Then he became aware that he was
uncomfortable; next he felt the discomfort dissolve into
pleasure. The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt,
pity, then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young,
helpless, hopeless presence. Her back hunched that way; her
head to one side as though crouching from a permanent and
unrelieved blow. Why did she have to look so whipped? She
was a child—unburdened—why wasn’t she happy? The
clear statement of her misery was an accusation. He wanted
to break her neck—but tenderly. Guilt and impotence rose
in a bilious duet. What could he do for her—ever? What give
her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man
say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter? If
he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving
eyes. The hauntedness would irritate him—the love would
move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn’t she any
sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return
it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make
her smile? What of his knowledge of the world and of life
could be useful to her? What could his heavy arms and
befuddled brain accomplish that would earn him his own
[page 162]
respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love? His
hatred of her slimed in his stomach and threatened to
become vomit. But just before the puke moved from anticipation
to sensation, she shifted her weight and stood on one
foot scratching the back of her calf with her toe. It was a
quiet and pitiful gesture. Her hands were going around and
around a frying pan, scraping flecks of black into cold,
greasy dishwater. The timid, tucked-in look of the scratching
toe—that was what Pauline was doing the first time he saw
her in Kentucky. Leaning over a fence staring at nothing in
particular. The creamy toe of her bare foot scratching a velvet
leg. It was such a small and simple gesture, but it filled
him then with a wondering softness. Not the usual lust to
part tight legs with his own, but a tenderness, a protectiveness.
A desire to cover her foot with his hand and gently nibble
away the itch from the calf with his teeth. He did it then,
and started Pauline into laughter. He did it now.
The tenderness welled up in him, and he sank to his
knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter. Crawling on all
fours toward her, he raised his hand and caught the foot in
an upward stroke. Pecola lost her balance and was about to
careen to the floor. Cholly raised his other hand to her hips
to save her from falling. He put his head down and nibbled
at the back of her leg. His mouth trembled at the firm sweetness
of the flesh. He closed his eyes, letting his fingers dig
into her waist. The rigidness of her shocked body, the silence
of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline’s easy laughter
had been. The confused mixture of his memories of
Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited
him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it
length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of
this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck
[page 163]
her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness
of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul
seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the
gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only
sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her
throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon.
Following the disintegration—the falling away—of sexual
desire, he was conscious of her wet, soapy hands on his
wrists, the fingers clenching, but whether her grip was from
a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or from some
other emotion, he could not tell.
Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut
it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her
vagina. She appeared to have fainted. Cholly stood up and
could see only her grayish panties, so sad and limp around
her ankles. Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The
hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced
him to cover her.
So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying
on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect
the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming
over her.
[page 164]
SEETHEDOGBOWWOWGOESTHEDOG
DOYOUWANTTOPLAYDOYOUWANT
TOPLAYWITHJANESEETHEDOGRUNR
Once there was an old man who loved things, for the slightest
contact with people produced in him a faint but persistent
nausea. He could not remember when this distaste
began, nor could he remember ever being free of it. As a
young boy he had been greatly disturbed by this revulsion
which others did not seem to share, but having got a fine
education, he learned, among other things, the word “misanthrope.”
Knowing his label provided him with both comfort
and courage, he believed that to name an evil was to
neutralize if not annihilate it. Then, too, he had read several
books and made the acquaintance of several great misanthropes
of the ages, whose spiritual company soothed him
and provided him with yardsticks for measuring his whims,
his yearnings, and his antipathies. Moreover, he found misanthropy
an excellent means of developing character: when
he subdued his revulsion and occasionally touched, helped,
counseled, or befriended somebody, he was able to think of
his behavior as generous and his intentions as noble. When
[page 165]
he was enraged by some human effort or flaw, he was able to
regard himself as discriminating, fastidious, and full of nice
scruples.
As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people
led him into a profession designed to serve them. He was
engaged in a line of work that was dependent solely on his
ability to win the trust of others, and one in which the most
intimate relationships were necessary. Having dallied with
the priesthood in the Anglican Church, he abandoned it to
become a caseworker. Time and misfortune, however, conspired
against him, and he settled finally on a profession that
brought him both freedom and satisfaction. He became a
“Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams.” It was a profession
that suited him well. His hours were his own, the
competition was slight, the clientele was already persuaded
and therefore manageable, and he had numerous opportunities
to witness human stupidity without sharing it or being
compromised by it, and to nurture his fastidiousness by
viewing physical decay. Although his income was small, he
had no taste for luxury—his experience in the monastery
had solidified his natural asceticism while it developed his
preference for solitude. Celibacy was a haven, silence a
shield.
All his life he had a fondness for things—not the acquisition
of wealth or beautiful objects, but a genuine love of
worn objects: a coffee pot that had been his mother’s, a welcome
mat from the door of a rooming house he once lived
in, a quilt from a Salvation Army store counter. It was as
though his disdain of human contact had converted itself
into a craving for things humans had touched. The residue
of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he
could withstand of humanity. To contemplate, for example,
[page 166]
evidence of human footsteps on the mat—absorb the smell
of the quilt and wallow in the sweet certainty that many
bodies had sweated, slept, dreamed, made love, been ill, and
even died under it. Wherever he went, he took along his
things, and was always searching for others. This thirst for
worn things led to casual but habitual examinations of trash
barrels in alleys and wastebaskets in public places . . . .
All in all, his personality was an arabesque: intricate,
symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed—except for
one flaw. The careful design was marred occasionally by
rare but keen sexual cravings.
He could have been an active homosexual but lacked the
courage. Bestiality did not occur to him, and sodomy was
quite out of the question, for he did not experience sustained
erections and could not endure the thought of somebody
else’s. And besides, the one thing that disgusted him more
than entering and caressing a woman was caressing and
being caressed by a man. In any case, his cravings, although
intense, never relished physical contact. He abhorred flesh
on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him. The
sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or
missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin
crusts—all the natural excretions and protections the body
was capable of—disquieted him. His attentions therefore
gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least
offensive—children. And since he was too diffident to confront
homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting,
scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little
girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive.
His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of
little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his
[page 167]
mind with cleanliness. He was what one might call a very
clean old man.
A cinnamon-eyed West Indian with lightly browned skin.
Although his given name was printed on the sign in his
kitchen window, and on the business cards he circulated, he
was called by the townspeople Soaphead Church. No one
knew where the “Church” part came from—perhaps somebody’s
recollection of his days as a guest preacher—those
reverends who had been called but who had no flock or
coop, and were constantly visiting other churches, sitting on
the altar with the host preacher. But everybody knew what
“Soaphead” meant—the tight, curly hair that took on and
held a sheen and wave when pomaded with soap lather. A
sort of primitive process.
He had been reared in a family proud of its academic
accomplishments and its mixed blood—in fact, they believed
the former was based on the latter. A Sir Whitcomb,
some decaying British nobleman, who chose to disintegrate
under a sun more easeful than England’s, had introduced
the white strain into the family in the early 1800’s.
Being a gentleman by order of the King, he had done the
civilized thing for his mulatto bastard—provided it with
three hundred pounds sterling, to the great satisfaction of
the bastard’s mother, who felt that fortune had smiled on
her. The bastard too was grateful, and regarded as his
life’s goal the hoarding of this white strain. He bestowed
his favors on a fifteen-year-old girl of similar parentage.
She, like a good Victorian parody, learned from her
husband all that was worth learning—to separate herself
in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested
Africa; to cultivate the habits, tastes, preferences that her
[page 168]
absent father-in-law and foolish mother-in-law would have
approved.
They transferred this Anglophilia to their six children and
sixteen grandchildren. Except for an occasional and unaccountable
insurgent who chose a restive black, they married
“up,” lightening the family complexion and thinning out the
family features.
With the confidence born of a conviction of superiority,
they performed well at schools. They were industrious, orderly,
and energetic, hoping to prove beyond a doubt De
Gobineau’s hypothesis that “all civilizations derive from the
white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a
society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the
blood of the noble group that created it.” Thus, they were
seldom overlooked by schoolmasters who recommended
promising students for study abroad. The men studied medicine,
law, theology, and emerged repeatedly in the powerless
government offices available to the native population.
That they were corrupt in public and private practice,
both lecherous and lascivious, was considered their noble
right, and thoroughly enjoyed by most of the less gifted
population.
As the years passed, due to the carelessness of some of the
Whitcomb brothers, it became difficult to maintain their
whiteness, and some distant and some not so distant relatives
married each other. No obviously bad effects were
noticed from these ill-advised unions, but one or two old
maids or gardener boys marked a weakening of faculties
and a disposition toward eccentricity in some of the children.
Some flaw outside the usual alcoholism and lechery.
They blamed the flaw on intermarriage with the family,
however, not on the original genes of the decaying lord. In
[page 169]
any case, there were flukes. No more than in any other family,
to be sure, but more dangerous because more powerful.
One of them was a religious fanatic who founded his own
secret sect and fathered four sons, one of whom became a
schoolmaster known for the precision of his justice and the
control in his violence. This schoolmaster married a sweet,
indolent half-Chinese girl for whom the fatigue of bearing a
son was too much. She died soon after childbirth. Her son,
named Elihue Micah Whitcomb, provided the schoolmaster
with ample opportunity to work out his theories of education,
discipline, and the good life. Little Elihue learned everything
he needed to know well, particularly the fine art of
self-deception. He read greedily but understood selectively,
choosing the bits and pieces of other men’s ideas that supported
whatever predilection he had at the moment. Thus he
chose to remember Hamlet’s abuse of Ophelia, but not
Christ’s love of Mary Magdalene; Hamlet’s frivolous politics,
but not Christ’s serious anarchy. He noticed Gibbon’s
acidity, but not his tolerance, Othello’s love for the fair
Desdemona, but not Iago’s perverted love of Othello. The
works he admired most were Dante’s; those he despised
most were Dostoyevsky’s. For all his exposure to the best
minds of the Western world, he allowed only the narrowest
interpretation to touch him. He responded to his father’s
controlled violence by developing hard habits and a soft
imagination. A hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of
disorder or decay.
At seventeen, however, he met his Beatrice, who was
three years his senior. A lovely, laughing big-legged girl who
worked as a clerk in a Chinese department store. Velma. So
strong was her affection and zest for life, she did not eliminate
the frail, sickly Elihue from it. She found his fastidiousness
[page 170]
and complete lack of humor touching and longed to
introduce him to the idea of delight. He resisted the introduction,
but she married him anyway, only to discover that
he was suffering from and enjoying an invincible melancholy.
When she learned two months into the marriage how
important his melancholy was to him, that he was very
interested in altering her joy to a more academic gloom, that
he equated lovemaking with communion and the Holy
Grail, she simply left. She had not lived by the sea all those
years, listened to the wharfman’s songs all that time, to
spend her life in the soundless cave of Elihue’s mind.
He never got over her desertion. She was to have been the
answer to his unstated, unacknowledged question—where
was the life to counter the encroaching nonlife? Velma was
to rescue him from the nonlife he had learned on the flat side
of his father’s belt. But he resisted her with such skill that she
was finally driven out to escape the inevitable boredom produced
by such a dainty life.
Young Elihue was saved from visible shattering by the
steady hand of his father, who reminded him of the family’s
reputation and Velma’s questionable one. He then pursued
his studies with more vigor than before and decided at last
to enter the ministry. When he was advised that he had no
avocation, he left the island, came to America to study the
then budding field of psychiatry. But the subject required
too much truth, too many confrontations, and offered too
little support to a failing ego. He drifted into sociology, then
physical therapy. This diverse education continued for six
years, when his father refused to support him any longer,
until he “found” himself. Elihue, not knowing where to
look, was thrown back on his own devices, and “found”
himself quite unable to earn money. He began to sink into
[page 171]
a rapidly fraying gentility, punctuated with a few of the
white-collar occupations available to black people, regardless
of their noble bloodlines, in America: desk clerk at a
colored hotel in Chicago, insurance agent, traveling salesman
for a cosmetics firm catering to blacks. He finally settled
in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, palming himself off as a
minister, and inspiring awe with the way he spoke English.
The women of the town early discovered his celibacy, and
not being able to comprehend his rejection of them, decided
that he was supernatural rather than unnatural.
Once he understood their decision, he quickly followed
through, accepting the name (Soaphead Church) and the
role they had given him. He rented a kind of back-room
apartment from a deeply religious old lady named Bertha
Reese. She was clean, quiet, and very close to total deafness.
The lodgings were ideal in every way but one. Bertha Reese
had an old dog, Bob, who, although as deaf and quiet as
she, was not as clean. He slept most of his days away on the
back porch, which was Elihue’s entrance. The dog was too
old to be of any use, and Bertha Reese had not the strength
or presence of mind to care for him properly. She fed him,
and watered him, left him alone. The dog was mangy; his
exhausted eyes ran with a sea-green matter around which
gnats and flies clustered. Soaphead was revolted by Bob and
wished he would hurry up and die. He regarded this wish
for the dog’s death as humane, for he could not bear, he told
himself, to see anything suffer. It did not occur to him that
he was really concerned about his own suffering, since the
dog had adjusted himself to frailty and old age. Soaphead
finally determined to put an end to the animal’s misery, and
bought some poison with which to do it. Only the horror of
having to go near him had prevented Soaphead from completing
[page 172]
his mission. He waited for rage or blinding revulsion
to spur him.
Living there among his worn things, rising early every
morning from dreamless sleeps, he counseled those who
sought his advice.
His business was dread. People came to him in dread,
whispered in dread, wept and pleaded in dread. And dread
was what he counseled.
Singly they found their way to his door, wrapped each in
a shroud stitched with anger, yearning, pride, vengeance,
loneliness, misery, defeat, and hunger. They asked for the
simplest of things: love, health, and money. Make him love
me. Tell me what this dream means. Help me get rid of this
woman. Make my mother give me back my clothes. Stop my
left hand from shaking. Keep my baby’s ghost off the stove.
Break so-and-so’s fix. To all of these requests he addressed
himself. His practice was to do what he was bid—not to suggest
to a party that perhaps the request was unfair, mean, or
hopeless.
With only occasional, and increasingly rare, encounters
with the little girls he could persuade to be entertained by
him, he lived rather peaceably among his things, admitting
to no regrets. He was aware, of course, that something was
awry in his life, and all lives, but put the problem where it
belonged, at the foot of the Originator of Life. He believed
that since decay, vice, filth, and disorder were pervasive, they
must be in the Nature of Things. Evil existed because God
had created it. He, God, had made a sloven and unforgivable
error in judgment: designing an imperfect universe.
Theologians justified the presence of corruption as a means
by which men strove, were tested, and triumphed. A triumph
of cosmic neatness. But this neatness, the neatness
[page 173]
of Dante, was in the orderly sectioning and segregating of all
levels of evil and decay. In the world it was not so. The most
exquisite-looking ladies sat on toilets, and the most dreadful-
looking had pure and holy yearnings. God had done a
poor job, and Soaphead suspected that he himself could
have done better. It was in fact a pity that the Maker had not
sought his counsel.
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