Soaphead Church

 Soaphead Church

Dr Manisha Patil 

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. (136) 

If Geraldine represents cat in the primer who loves ‘order, precision and constancy’ as well as the actual animal cat who is ‘as clean and quiet as she is’ (66), then Soaphead with his ‘hatred of and fascination with any hint of disorder or decay’ (134) hates the old and dirty dog Bob, but subconsciously his mind is as dirty as Bob’s body. His case study is curious for two reasons – first, he originally comes from West Indies and second unlike most of the characters in the novel, he is highly educated in Western Classics and as a result, writes down his views (instead of telling) in a standard English which carries no trace of black vernacular dialect. Morrison writes, ‘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’ (132) and therefore always married ‘up’. They learnt to separate their bodies, minds and spirits from all that suggested Africa and cultivated dignified British manners which gave them ‘a conviction of superiority’ but made them ‘corrupt in public and private practice, both lecherous and lascivious’ which in fact was considered as their ‘noble right’ (133). Soaphead is the end product of this mutual colonization, willing surrender to the colonizer – a ‘mimic man’. Gurleen Grewal makes this connection between colonial hegemony and mimicry as well as between domestic and international colonization in American context.

The presence of Soaphead Church implicates the mimicry of Geraldine, Pauline, and Pecola as part of colonial oppression. Homi Bhabha has situated mimicry in the context of the colonizer’s project of disregarding the cultural, racial, historical difference of the other while securing value and priority for its own culture and race history. Education was instituted in the colonies to produce a native elite whose interests would coincide with those of the colonizers. Soaphead Church is an example of such production. In the novel, he is much more than a mere function of plot, more than an agent who will grant Pecola her blue eyes and who will substitute as the dog in the Dick-and-Jane primer. We are told that “his personality was an arabesque: intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed” (131), the very words we might use to describe the novel’s narrative structure. His story, the last of the novel’s studies in alienated consciousness, places the other accounts into perspective, for he brings from the West Indies an anglophilia and a consciousness both informed and deformed by a history of colonization. The connection between colonialism and the economic institution of the American South – domestic colonialism – was often made during the 1900’s by radical analysts of black history. In the words of social critic Harold Cruse, “The only factor which differentiates the Negro’s status from that of a pure colonial status is that his position is maintained in the ‘home’ country in close proximity to the dominant racial group.” The novel suggests a similarity of predicament between a colonized West Indian black subject and an African American one; both are inheritors of complex social/historical formations that vex their identities...A man of breeding, of metropolitan learning, the “lightly browned” Soaphead has much more in common with the “sugar brown” Geraldine. Soaphead’s and Geraldine’s common identity formations relate the colonies abroad and at home.12

Soaphead’s personal history informs us not only the refinement of his colonized mind but also his practical failure as a happy, good natured, hardworking and well-functioning human being. He turned out to be a failure in both his personal and professional life. His early marriage (at the age of seventeen) lasted only for two months and depression of it drove him to study hard but without any real interest psychiatry, sociology and physical therapy for long six years at the end of which he found that he cannot earn respectable living. He also realized that he cannot openly confront his potential homosexuality. So finally, he started earning money by deceiving innocent people and gratify his unnatural desire by sexually abusing small girls. Morrison depicts Soaphead as a weak person who considers himself to be strong and powerful. He pounces on the illiterate, superstitious, innocent weak and needy people to sustain his self-deception and illusion of power. He indulges in all his vices and still wears the mask of virtuous and righteous. Morrison uses the same ironic language to describe Soaphead which she uses to describe Cholly’s rape of Pecola. 

He could have been an active homosexual but lacked the courage…his cravings, although intense, never relished physical contact. He abhorred flesh on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him…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 mind with cleanliness. He was what one might call a very clean old man. (131-2)

When Pecola comes to his house with her fantastic wish (“My eyes”…”I want them blue.” [138]), Soaphead considers it to be the most realistic and sensible wish. He understands Pecola’s desperate need to own blue eyes so that she can be beautiful, lovable and consequently happy. He also knows that he does not have the real power to change them. Yet it is not his nature to speak truth. What he does is to tell convincing lies and thereby fulfill his own selfish wishes. Accordingly, he gives Pecola poisonous food to feed Bob, the dog, whom Soaphead abhors touching and tells her, “If the animal behaves strangely, your wish will be granted on the day following this one.” (139) Thus Soaphead accomplishes two feats in one jump. He kills the dog without touching it and makes Pecola believe that she has got eyes without actually changing them. In the normal circumstances, Soaphead would have molested Pecola physically, but her extreme ugliness repulses him. On the other hand, her innocence, her utter helplessness and powerlessness tempts him to do the formidable thing – to play the God. Furthermore, in his biting letter to God, he even justifies his assault on Pecola’s psyche. He writes, 

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 lone that she could find her way to me? ...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…You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God...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 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…Now you are jealous. You are jealous of me. (143-4)

This letter incriminates not only God but also the church. In their duty to help weak and needy people they have failed and instead begun to play God themselves, judging society’s mistakes in the name of righteous superiority and blaming the victim for her own victimization.

Dr Manisha Patil