African American Male Chauvinism
Dr Manisha Patil
Milkman’s trip south to Shalimar, to the liberating discovery of family and past parallels Solomon’s return to Africa, to origins and to freedom. Yet when we celebrate Milkman’s and Solomon’s return to roots, we forget that it is nothing but the escapist male individualism. Both Solomon and Milkman leave their female counterparts Ryna and Hagar to grieve and to die broken hearted. Gurleen Grewal rightly points out that, ‘Women’s subjection, their lack of control over their own lives is the subtext of Song of Solomon.’9
Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon intensely foregrounds the process of identity formation in the novel’s hero (Milkman) on decidedly male grounds similarly both the title of the novel (Song of Solomon) and its one ward dedication (“Daddy”) emphasize the male genealogy. In both the processes, females, femininity and female genealogy are push to the margins. We can even go one step ahead and say that the novel, in fact, exposes the way in which the male identity and ideology are actually formed by exercising male control over women.
John Duvell, at length discusses how women are controlled by men. For this purpose, he deciphers the metaphors of doe-hunt and pea/e cock and puts the philosophy of seven Days under magnifying glass for minute analysis. When Milkman strikes Macon for hitting Ruth and comes to Guitar for comfort, Guitar’s sympathy takes the form of a brief narrative based on his hunting experience: “Anyway I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden, I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it – and I was going real slow because I thought I right have to shoot it again – I saw it was a doe […] I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man […] So I know how you felt when you saw your father hit your mother. It’s like that doe. A man shouldn’t do that. You couldn’t help what you felt.” (85) Here killing a doe metaphorically suggests hurting on African American women. In Guitar’s Realization that Milkman doesn’t grasp the metaphor (“Chances were Milkman didn’t even know what a doe was” [86]), there seems a kind of why inter textual gloss that calls into question the efficacy of the metaphor, a metaphor that suggests that the female’s safety depends upon the honour of good male hunters. In particular, Guitar’s metaphor shed a different light on his membership in the seven days and his work of hunting and killing white people.10
Another metaphor is that of pea/e cock. Several men in the novel pee on women literally and metaphorically. Chronologically speaking, the first person who is shown peeing is again Macon. When Macon discovered the gold of the old white man he had presumably killed in the cave he ‘like a burglar out on his first jet stood up to pee.’ (170) This moment anticipated the shift in relationship between Macon and Pilate. Macon waited to take gold as a compensation for the loss of their farm. Pilate on the other hand viewed this action as theft. Both were adamant on their stands and it created the permanent animosity between them. Then onwards Macon always misjudged Pilate. “That Woman’s no good. She’s a snake and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.” (54)
Still a little boy, Milkman wets on his sister Lena during one of their Sunday car rides. This makes Lena cry. Almost twenty-five years later, Lena recalls the same moment for Milkman and turns it into a metaphor for the thoughtless way he has treated the women of the family, since ‘there are all kinds of ways to pee on people.’ (214) Lena gives a totally different perspective on Milkman’s protection of Ruth from Macon: “You are exactly like him […] You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting [our mother]. Taking her side. It’s a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do.” (215-6) Thus if for Guitar, Milkman was protecting the doe, for Lena he was still hunting the doe. Lena questions the authority of Milkman, “Where do you get the right to decide our lives?” She herself answers the question, “I’ll tell you where. From that hog’s get that hangs down between your legs.” (215) Here Lena points out not just Milkman’s literal phallus but also his patriarchal privilege which allows him to control and select the sexuality of ‘his’ women. Though Milkman has the legitimate reason for his objection to Corinthians-Porter relationship (Porter being a member of Seven Days), he does not disclose it to Corinthians; rather he tells his father, aligning himself with the authority of the father. Macon, too, does not know about the Seven Days, but objects because Porter is his social interior.
Porter, too, is not behind in peeing on women. On the other hand, his peeing is the most spectacular in the novel. ‘Standing in the window of his attic apartment (an apartment Macon owns) the drunken Porter threatens suicide. His drunker shorts turn from a demand that the crowd of women “Send me up somebody to fuck” (25) to his assertion that “I love ya! I love ya all” (26). Between the former and the latter Porter “leaned his shotgun on the window sill, pulled out his penis and in a high arch, peed over the heads of the women, making them screen and run in a panic that the shotgun had not been able to create.” (25) Porter’s mixed messages – one of self-interest, the other suggesting altruism – take on special significance when we recall that this attempted suicide results from his work as a member of Seven Days. His ambivalent utterances, spoken in drunkenness reveal the ideological fraternity of Porter, Macon, Milkman and Guitar; despite differences of class and political perspective, each acts on the assumption of male privilege that is grounded in the possession of women. Moreover, Porter’s assertion to the women below that “I love ya” cast an odd light on Guitar’s insistence that his killing of whites is motivated purely by love of African American people.’11
Coming to the Seven Days, it is an underground organization which avenges the injustices done to the African American people. Guitar tells Milkman,
“When a Negro child, Negro woman or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done about it by their law and their courts, this society selects a similar victim at random and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hand; if a Negro was burnt, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder.” (154-55)
Lynching of black men has a long history in America. It is motivated by two reasons – economic and sexual. If a black man prospers economically and thus exceeds his limit, he is eliminated all together. (e.g., Macon I) Similarly, if he becomes too bold and crosses the racial line by showing an interest in a white woman, he is squarely put into his place. The cases of lynching increased after World War I, because black American soldiers experienced a radically less segregated world in Europe (especially France) where white women were available to them sexually. Not surprising they carried the same attitude back home in America. But in America they met a different late. Among many examples, the two Guitar mentions (but leaves the sexual dimension unsaid) include a man castrated and the other blinded because white American males perceived a threat to their possession of white women. John Duvell comments,
The white males responsible for the violence against African American men were sending a particular message – one form of miscegenation, African American men and white women would not be tolerated.
Tellingly, the kinds of crimes the Days average include a number that involve sexual possession, such as the rape of an African American woman by a white man of the lynching of an African American man for his interest in a white woman.12
To give weight to Guitar’s anger and to show that the Seven Days are the reaction to the institutionalized racism in America, Morrison mentions the historical figure Emmett Till. Till, a black teenager from Chicago was murdered in Mississippi by three white men for whistling at a white woman and the three men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Commenting on this historical (not fictional) case, Guitar notes, “Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair.” (82) Even after emancipation, the blacks do not have the full right to citizenship. They are still discriminated against overtly and covertly. In fact, the Jim Crow laws make the word emancipation itself meaningless. Guitar is so much perplexed by this situation that he views the African American man as ‘the supreme marginal figure; silenced not only by whites but undermined and unmanned even by African American women.’13 Guitar says,
“Everybody wants the life of a black man. Everybody, white men want us dead or quiet – which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing. They want us, you know, universal’, human, no ‘race consciousness’. Tame, except in bed. They like a little racial loin cloth in the bed. But outside the bed they want us to be individuals. You tell them, ‘But they lynched my papa’, and they say, ‘Yeah, but you’re better than the lynchers are, so forget it.’ and black women they want your whole self. Love, they call it and understanding ‘why don’t you understand me?’ What they mean is, Don’t love anything on earth except me…They won’t even let you risk your own life – unless it’s over them. What good is man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?” (222-3)
Paradoxically, Guitar chooses to die for the love of African American women (and African American race as a whole). However, his whole idea of love is so twisted that for him loving is killing. All the Seven Days (including Smith) have the same delusion. Milkman (who loves nobody else other than himself) is able to penetrate this delusion. He asks Guitar, “[E]xcept for skin color, I can’t tell the difference between what the white women want from us and what the colored women want. You say they all want our life, our living life. So, if a colored woman is raped and killed, why do the Days rape and kill a white woman? Why worry about the colored woman at all?” Guitar answers, “Because she is mine.” Once again John Duvell’s comments are worth quoting:
As the chief spokesman for the Seven Days, Guitar here makes it abundantly clear that all the Days, not just Porter, pee on women, particularly African American women. In his response we see the issue of race bracketed momentarily and instead discover what is really at issue – male possession of women. Thus, the Seven Day’s ‘heroic’ stance on saving the African American race parallels Milkman’s ‘defence’ of his mother. Both are about males staking claim to women-as-property, so that we might say that the rule of Milkman in the family or of the Days in society is one and the same perpetuation of patriarchal authority, pea/e-cock power.
The Seven Days epitomizes patriarchal organization… [and excels] in its unarticulated effort to establish masculinity as violent mastery and manhood as the right to say what one’s women do. African American male violence does not simply imitate male violence. The former self-consciously imitate the later. Thus, the unrecognized mission of the Seven Days seems to be the following: if white male violence works to keep African American men from white women then African American men need to organize to insure continued property rights in African American women.14
Michael Rothberg also agrees with Duvell, on the point of imitation. He says,
Morrison’s critique of racial revenge is very clear: while the Seven Days seem to work outside the dominant system, the group’s emphasis on ‘ratio’ and ‘reason’ represent not an alternative but a mimesis of the system’s instrumental logic. The attempt to exist outside or below the surface of everyday life merely reproduces what it seeks to undermine. The price for such mimetic calculation is the breakdown suffered by Smith and others in the group and the escalation of violence within the black community, indicated by the fratricidal turn of Guitar and Milkman’s friendship and the calculated violence of Hagar’s ultimately self-destructive pursuit of Milkman. the novel suggests that conspirational politics w takes their impetus from traumas rendered to the black community end by repeating those traumas in ever more ghastly scenarios of acting out.15
The result of this complex phenomenon is again the double colonization of African American women. They have to suffer twice – first as blacks and secondly as women. We have already seen the plight of Ruth. The condition of her daughters is no better. Their father always treated them as the decorative articles. They were provided with all the material comforts but emotionally they were starved. Macon and Ruth could never provide them with emotional support. They were also not allowed to develop intimate friendship with other children because Macon considered it to be below his dignity. Lena tells Milkman “When we were little girls, before you were born, he took us to the ice-house once. Drove us there in his Hudson. We were all dressed up and we stood there in front of those sweating black men, sucking ice out of our hands’ chiefs, leaning forward a little so as not to drip water on our dresses. There were other children there. Barefoot naked to the waist, dirty. But we stood apart, near the car, in white stockings, ribbons and gloves and when he talked to the men, he kept glancing at us, us and the car. The car and us. You see, he took us there so they could see us, envy us envy him. Then one of the little boys came over to us and put his hand on Corinthians’ hair. She offered him her piece of ice and before we knew it, he was running toward us. He knocked the ice out of her hand into the dirt and shoved us both into the car. First he displayed us then he splayed us. All our lives were like that: he would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.” (216) Lena did not go to college because she was afraid for her mother and wanted to protect her at home. Corinthians went to college: ‘Her education had taught her how to be an enlightened mother and wife, able to contribute to the civilization – or in her case, the civilizing – of her community.’ (188) But the things she required were totally different from what she was taught. ‘[S]he had no real skills. Bryn Maws had done what a four year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of the useful work of the world. First by training her for leisure, enrichments and domestic mindlessness: Second, by clear implication that she was too good for such work.’ (189) Ruth had high expectations from both of them. She wanted them to marry doctors. But there were no suitable doctors. Then there were other professional men of colour – teachers, lawyers, mortician and even post office workers – but Lena and Corinthians were not suitable for them because they were a little too elegant. Thus, it turned out to be that they did not marry anybody. As young girls, they had started making rose petals as a way of passing time and even in their forties, they were wasting time by making rose petals. When at the age of forty-two, Corinthians realized her condition she suffered a severe depression. To come out of it, she decided to find a job. Then came the second realization (and shock) – that twenty-one years cut off from the world of the work had made her unemployable for any professional job. However, so intense was her need to be independent that finally she became a maid. ‘After graduation she returned to a work world in which colored girls, regardless of their background, were in demand for one and only one kind of work. And by 1963, Corinthians’ main concern was simply that her family not know that she had been doing it for two years.’ (189) Her job also gave her an opportunity to develop a relationship with a man – unfortunately he was Porter (one of the Seven Days). Porter wants her to give up her role of ‘a doll baby’ (196) and become a grown-up woman. What he really means is Corinthians should accept his authority instead of her father’s. In return, he promises her ‘love’ instead of the costly gifts of her father. (We have already seen that the Seven Day’s philosophy of love is destructive rather than constructive). Fortunately, (or unfortunately) Milkman comes to know about this affair and with his father’s assistance puts an end to it. Thus, Corinthians is controlled economically, sexually and as a result even mentally by all the men in her life – Macon (father), Milkman (brother), and Porter (lover). All three men are joined by the moments of urination (peeing on people).
Condition of Hagar (Pilate’s granddaughter) is even worse. Five years elder to Milkman, beautiful and whimsical, Hagar again is provided with all the material comforts but starved emotionally. Pilate and Reba were poor but they fulfilled each and every wish of Hagar because ‘all they knew to do was love her.’ (307) They sacrificed their whole selves for their ‘baby girl’ (319) but failed to develop self-worth in her. Cut off from the larger African American community and her roots in the rural South, her life was spiritually as barren as that of Milkman (before his trip south). ‘Her spiritual emptiness – “She had no self-left” (137) – is ironically balanced by her vast sense of entitlement: She believes that Milkman must love her simply because she loves him. Her feeling of entitlement is a result of Pilate and Reba’s enmeshment, their eagerness to give her everything.’16 In turn, Hager too eagerly gave her whole self to Milkman. Not just sexually but psychologically, Milkman became indispensable for her. However, its effect on Milkman was opposite. ‘It was so free, so abundant; it had lost its fervour…She [Hagar] was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; or the second that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because, it can’t hurt and because what difference does it make?’ (91) By comparing her with beer Milkman devalued her just like his father devalued his sisters by comparing them with car. But Lena and Corinthians, at least tried to free themselves from the male control. For Hagar, that was unthinkable. When Milkman abandoned her, she tried to kill him. But she got trapped in a circular puzzle – she wanted to kill Milkman so that he would leave her for ever. There seemed to be no way out for Hagar. In her last desperate, attempt to win Milkman’s heart again, she fell prey to the American consumerism – she purchased all the fashionable products which promised to alter her body and to make her desirable. (In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is also the victim of same delusion – blue eyes will make her desirable by other people) However, she soon realized that outer materials cannot fill the inner void. ‘Because she can only love herself in the reflected light of Milkman’s false love, Hagar’s world is suddenly turned upside down and her love mutates into an impotent rage that rules her body and soul. After Milkman leaves town in search of tabled family gold, Hagar focuses her love-turned-hatred upon her and soon spirals into bottomless sadness.’17 Ultimately Hagar meets Ryna’s fate: ‘While [Milkman] dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying.’ (332) History is repeated once again. African American male chauvinism, reflected in Macon’s materialism, Seven Day’s philosophy of love and Milkman’s dream of flying like Solomon, has ultimately resulted in the objectification, devaluation and untimely death of African American woman.
