Cholly

 Cholly

Dr Manisha Patil 

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 a 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 when of which held no interest for him. In those days, Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk of heap by his mother, rejected for a crap of game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites and they alone interested him. (125-6)

Cholly’s history shows him as an antithesis of the white father in the Primer who is big and strong. Cholly on the contrary was small and weak. As a child, he was abandoned by both his parents and was raised by his great aunt Jimmy. Jimmy provided him with both nurture and love. He also found a father figure in a nice old man called Blue Jack who told him old time stories about Emancipation Proclamation, the black community life and also lynching. Blue Jack also taught him sharing – on a July 4, at a church picnic Blue offered Cholly heart of the melon – red and sweet – symbolizing pure love. Blue Jack exemplified the ‘nurturing masculinity’ – an understanding of manhood that involves nurturing a child who is not necessarily one’s biological child – as against ‘a mole hierarchical conception of manhood which is determined by the work a man does, the authority he has or the mastery he achieves.’13 The former involves mutual co-operation and sharing among all men and women, young and old while the later involves subjugating women to men, children to adults. In the first case, sexuality goes hand in hand with respect and caring, for one’s partner (as in case of Cholly’s dream where his penis was caressed by M ‘Dear’, the old, revered root doctor), while in the second case, sexuality means violating the partner’s body by force and causing her pain and shame (as Cholly later did in case of Darlane and Pecola). Till aunt Jimmy was alive, Cholly developed in the first way but immediately after her death, he was subjugated to the other.

On the funeral day of Aunt Jimmy, he tried to compensate his loss by the gain of sexual experience. However, this private act was invaded by the gaze of two white men for whom black male sexuality is simply an entertaining spectacle, reinforcing their inherent manliness and superiority. It took away the spontaneity, thrill and love from the act and left helplessness and hatred. Bell hooks states, ‘As the psychology of masculinity in sexiest societies teaches men that to acknowledge and express pain negates masculinity and is a symbolic castration, causing pain rather than expressing it restores men’s sense of completeness, of wholeness, of masculinity.’14 So this hatred was not directed against the white men but instead against his partner, a black girl, Darlane. ‘Sullen, irritable he cultivated his hatred of Darlane. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess – that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke…he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spar, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight.’ (118) Cholly’s emasculation by the white men destroyed his sense of identity and community. Instead of accompanying aunt Jimmy’s brother who would have provided him with further support, Cholly went in search of his father, thus serving his matriarchal communal bonds to embrace patriarchy. However, at the end of his journey he met his father only to be abandoned by him for a second time, symbolizing his always-already exclusion from patriarchy. If the encounter with the white men emasculated him, his encounter with his black father infantilized him for in an attempt to control his tears (because crying is unmanly), ‘on a street full of grown men and women, he had soiled himself like a baby’ (123) which brought on further shame.

His marriage to Polly, who belonged to a large Southern family might have re-assimilated him in the matriarchal community, but in search of big money, he migrated to North. Northern life as a factory worker further alienated him from his black roots in the South and left him at the mercy of white capitalism completely. The white nuclear family structure calls upon a man to provide for his family and in return assume he power and stability of masculinity. White capitalism, on the other hand, exploits black labor with low wages and hire-and-fire policy, thereby making the role of sole breadwinner of the family impossible for a black man. Francis Beale rightly points out, ‘unfortunately, neither the Black man nor the Black woman understood the true nature of the forces working upon them. Many black women tended to accept the capitalist evaluation of manhood and womanhood and believed, in fact, that Black men were shiftless and lazy, otherwise they would get a job and support their families as they ought to. Personal relationships between Black men and women were thus torn asunder and one result has been the separation of man from wife, mother from child etc.’15 Lack of supporting keens made Cholly and Polly focus more and more on money. ‘Money became the focus of all their discussions, hers for clothes, his for drink.’ (92) Moreover, his orphanhood and lack of watching any healthy martial relationship, made the whole idea of marriage and family unnatural to him. ‘The constantness, variety-lessness, 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… But the aspect of married life that dumbfounded him and rendered him totally dysfunctional 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’ (126) As a result, he was never able to develop healthy emotional bonds with his wife and children. He never cared for Pecola and when he did care for her, he did not know how to show his caring except ‘to fuck – tenderly.’ (128) His rape of Pecola is an act ultimately generated by a brutal system of dehumanization resulting out of white hegemony. Bell hooks puts this phenomenon in the following words:

When he [poor black man] beats or rapes women, he is not exercising privilege or reaping positive rewards; he may feel satisfied in exercising the only form of domination allowed him. The ruling class male power structure that promotes his sexual abuse of women reaps the real material benefits and privileges from his actions. As long as he is attacking women and not sexism or capitalism, he helps to maintain a system that allows him few, if any, benefits or privileges. He is an oppressor. He is an enemy to women. He is also an enemy to himself. He is also oppressed.16

The ironic description of this rape as showing ‘tenderness’, reflects back on the ironic Primer lines ‘See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling’ (1). Commenting on the rape scene Laurie Vickroy says, ‘When the environment sustains him, i.e., when his marriage and work are stable, Cholly copes well, but when these sources of support and stability are taken away his past returns to plague his present actions. Psychological research indicates that stress causes “state dependent returns to earlier behavior patterns” (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 444). A stressful situation will cause thoughts to travel along the same pathways as those connected to a previous traumatic event, and if immediate stimuli recall this event, the individual will be transported back to that somatic (bodily) state and react accordingly; responding as if faced with past threat, and losing “the mental synthesis that constitutes reflective ill and belief,” the individual will simply “transform into automatic wills and beliefs the impulses which are momentarily the strongest” (445). Such is the process, which accounts in part for Cholly’s rape of Pecola. When Pecola makes a gesture which reminds him of the tender feelings he once had for Pauline, Pecola’s sadness and helplessness and his own inability to make her happy provoke a repetition of the violent impotence and the helpless fear that he and Darlene felt with the white men. His angry response toward Darlene returns and becomes confounded with feelings of love for Pauline and Pecola, and also with self-hatred, because Pecola is like Cholly once was, small and impotent. His pessimistic attitudes toward life, himself and his capacity to love return to this traumatic context, and he loses the ability to approach life or his daughter positively. One way for him to rid himself of his fears is to project them onto Pecola, and in part he tries to destroy those fears by raping her.’17

Dr Manisha Patil