Geraldine

 Geraldine 

Dr Manisha Patil 

They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. (64)

The schoolteacher, Geraldine is the middle-class black woman who had struggled a lot to achieve stability in life. She embodies the white standards of morality, cleanliness and respectability. The mission of her life is to get rid of ‘funkiness’. However, funkiness here symbolizes both the African-American essence and the feminine and respectability here turns out to be an instrument of repression. Morrison deliberately describes background of girls like Geraldine at the very beginning and then gives a male perception of them before showing her response to Pecola. ‘They come from Mobile, Aiken. From New Port News. From Marietta. From Maridian’ (63), the Southern provincial towns, where social conduct of people and especially those of women are scrutinized under the magnifying glass of morality and ethics. Black women are by default considered to be loose thanks to the legacy of slavery. So, to pose themselves as virtuous, they had to suppress even the normal signs of sexuality. For them stability and security are more important than sexuality. As a result, ‘[t]hey never seem to have boyfriends, but they always marry. Certain men watch them, without seeming to and know that if such a girl is in his house, he will sleep on sheets boiled white, hung out to dry on juniper bushes and pressed with heavy iron. There will be pretty paper flowers decorating the picture of his mother, a large Bible in the front room. They feel secure.’ (65) This pursuit of white bourgeoisie values provides her with all the material comforts but at the same time suppress all spontaneity in her life and make her totally incapable of experiencing sexual joy with her husband which even Polly experiences with her husband Cholly. Michael Awkward writes, ‘Geraldine’s efforts constitute, it seems to me, a splitting of herself into a good, moral, funkless self which she works diligently to maintain, and an evil, immoral, nappy-edged black self that she suppresses and attempts to expel. That this suppression and attempted exorcism of blackness render her incapable of enjoying life or of loving her family – or herself – seems to her a small price to pay for the warding off of ignominy of an association of evil.’11 In short to embrace the American ideal, she has to deny her authentic black self. In America, white male is defined in terms of reason and culture and black female, by contrast, means passion and nature. Women like Geraldine try to overcome these so-called negative traits and in the process distance themselves from African-American community. Geraldine taught her son to differentiate between niggers and colored folk: ‘Colored people were neat and quite; niggers were dirty and loud.’ (67) It made him sadistically vicious because of his alienation from other black children with whom he is forbidden to play. Moreover, he also realized that his mother valued a cat ‘who will love her order, precision and constancy; who will be as quite as she is’ (66) more than any other human being including himself. She fulfilled all his material needs but never ever acknowledged his emotional needs, let alone fulfilling them. She also denied him close physical contact. Even to her husband she gave her body sparingly and partially. Only the cat was allowed to share her ‘sensual delight.’ (66) Due to the lack of healthy emotional bonds with his parents and with his peers, he takes pleasure in hurting others. When he took Pecola as his prisoner and threw the big black cat right in her face, he was doubly delighted by fright of both Pecola and the cat. But when he saw the same emotional bond develop between Pecola and the cat which existed between the cat and his mother, he grew furious, killed the cat by throwing it on the wall and then blamed it on Pecola. When Geraldine saw her cat, the only object of her affection, dead and encountered Pecola, a source of disorder, as its murderer, she reacted with self-protective anger and horror. 

She looked at Pecola. Saw the dirty torn dress, the plaits sticking out on her head, hair matted where the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles, the soiled socks, one of which had been walked down in the heel of the shoe…She had seen this little girl all of her life…they [girls like Pecola] had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes and the beginning and all the waste in between…Grass wouldn’t grow where they lived. Flowers died. Shades fell down…Like flies they hovered; like flies they settled. And this one had settled in her house. (71-2) 

For Geraldine, Pecola becomes the symbol of ‘funkiness’ – blackness, femaleness and poverty – the thing she most despises and fears. Unconsciously, she knows that the line which demarcates her (colored folk) and Pecola (dirty nigger) is very thin and if she is not careful enough she can easily degenerate into the ‘nasty little black bitch’ the name she calls Pecola. When she tells Pecola to get out of her house in the composed voice, her use of slang language gives away her fear of her own evil and her own unworthiness.

Dr Manisha Patil