[In the following essay, Dickerson analyzes the “doubled” identity of fathers—characterized as at once both “familiar” and “unknowable” to their daughters—in The Bluest Eye, focusing on the way Cholly's familiarity with Pecola causes not only his daughter's demise but also his own.]

In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), the nine-year-old narrator Claudia McTeer and her ten-year-old sister Frieda lie in bed one night and peer at their naked father who “pass[es] the open door of [their] room”:

We had lain there wide-eyed. He stopped and looked in, trying to see in the dark room whether we were really asleep or was it his imagination that opened eyes were looking at him? Apparently he convinced himself that we were sleeping. He moved away, confident that his little girls would not lie open-eyed like that, staring, staring. When he had moved on, the dark took only him away, not his nakedness. That stayed in the room with us. Friendly-like.

(60)

These lines are busy with meaning. On the one hand, they point up the father's insistence on the innocence of his daughters. On the other hand, they intimate the vulnerability of McTeer himself: the lines suggest that for the father the gaze of his daughters would constitute some exposure or violation of his self. Incredulous and suspicious, the father resists the reality of the incident; silent and wide-eyed, the girls grant the significance of the encounter as they acknowledge a difference between a “him” that the darkness takes away, removes, or obscures, and a “nakedness” that is “friendly-like.”

Understandably, McTeer refuses to see the open-eyed presence of his daughters because their gaze is an assertion of female selfhood, which threatens the personal power of McTeer. By looking at “him” the girls show a curiosity and a boldness, which the patriarch Noah found so presumptuous and disrespectful as to warrant anathema (Gen. 10:18-29). By denying the gaze of his daughters, McTeer, like this biblical figure, both restricts Frieda and Claudia's access to and understanding of a masculine self that is rendered awesome because it is remote and obscure, and also limits the knowledge, growth, and empowerment of the girls themselves by disallowing the part of his daughters that may be curious about sexuality. While McTeer refuses to acknowledge this dimension of his girls, the daughters perceive two sides to the father—the “him” or self that is in the shadows—that is, the self that the dark obscures, the self they cannot see or know directly—and the nakedness of a physical self revealed, a self they can see and interpret as familiar, if not intimate, companionable, if not congenial, knowable, if not open: “friendly-like.”

The phrase “friendly-like” takes the relationship between McTeer and his daughters out of the realm where the father is the “big and strong” (7) parent who acts as the lawgiver and the benevolent keeper of his biological charges to a place where the children feel they are not confronting a seemingly infallible, inscrutable other, but rather an adult they recognize as vulnerable, warm, primal, accessible. Frieda and Claudia construe the nakedness of their father as “friendly-like” because when he is naked he is less dignified and distant, less concealed, less adulterated, more natural. Cloaked by the darkness, McTeer symbolically adds one more layer to the personal, social, psychological complexities that already separate child and adult. To put it another way, the clothed adult is a complicated, often formidable—if not intimidating text for which the child lacks the analytical skills. “Adults,” announces Claudia who perceives grown-ups as enigmatic and obscure, “do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information” (12). Claudia describes the father who denies the possibility that his daughters would stare at his nakedness, the shadowy father who insists that he remain unseen, unknown, hidden. But she also admits, “The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotion is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for the truth in timbre” (16). Naked, the body becomes a primer that the child can more easily decipher.

In The Bluest Eye, the children, those readers of the truth in adult hands, faces, feet, and voices, also give us the key we need to understand the most provocative father in the novel, Cholly Breedlove, who rapes his eleven-year-old daughter Pecola at the height of “lust and despair,” states of genitals and of mind engendered in his own unneat primerless childhood. Toni Morrison writes in awe of a character she herself finds it difficult to fathom: “The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the fold of curved metal, or the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut shins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life” (125).¹ It is not only this jazz musician of Morrison's specification, but also the more primal musician of her suggestion, the child, that can give us the clues needed to piece together the episodes of Cholly's being. Indeed, the explanation for Cholly's tender rape lies fittingly enough in the afterschool chant of “uncorrigival” (56) black schoolboys who taunt Pecola one day after school. “Black e mo Black e mo,” they incant, “Ya daddy sleeps nekked” (55).

While these boys provide the key to Cholly's unstorybooklike improvised fatherhood, the girls—Pecola, Maureen, Frieda and Claudia—pick up the reference to nakedness that the boys so quickly drop and worry it until it begins to yield meaning. It is Frieda and Claudia's frank and shameless encounter with their own father's nakedness that enables us to define the truth of Cholly's nakedness. The scene in which McTeer stands naked before his daughters introduces, as we have seen, the figure of two fathers—one, the “him” that passes into the darkness, is obscure, distant, dignified, jealous of his power, a lawgiver; the other, the father with the “friendly-like” nakedness that remains before the girls and the reader, is warm, exposed, spontaneous, physical. Unlike Claudia and Frieda's father, who survives, Morrison suggests, because he is able to be the obscured and the naked father, Pecola's father, even more the victim of unpropitious personal, social, and economic conditions, is cast out. He lives the life of the naked father. In a society controlled by traditional white patriarchs, Cholly, denied the opportunity to protect, provide, and command, becomes not just confused and frustrated, but desperately extreme in his spontaneity, passions, physicality, weakness—his nakedness. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison portrays the conditions under which a naked father such as Cholly is created and shows how such a nontraditional father operating in a traditional Dick-and-Jane society ruins himself and his own.

Cholly Breedlove's childhood is vexed by bitter-sweet exposure and overexposure. When he is only a helpless four-day-old, his mother compromises his existence when she leaves him on a junk heap, “Down in the rim of a tire under a soft black Georgia sky” (105). The ugliness of the junk heap is not mitigated by the soft black Georgia sky, rather the two are juxtaposed forever like the ebony and ivory of a keyboard in Cholly's life. Fifteen years later, when Cholly has his first sexual experience, he suffers a more blatant exposure that undercuts the ecstacy of the moment. Heady with the “thunderous beauty of [Aunt Jimmy's] funeral” and the “exultation” of the funeral banquet (113), Cholly, who has set out with a small group of youths to a wild vineyard, finds himself alone and about to experience his first sexual encounter with one Darlene. However, just as Cholly, astride Darlene, feels “an explosion threaten” (116), two white men out coon hunting interrupt the lovemaking with their eyes, lamps, flashlights, and laughter.

“Hee hee hee heeeee.” The snicker was a long asthmatic cough.

The other raced the flashlight all over Cholly and Darlene.

“Get on wid it, nigger,” said the flashlight one.

“Sir?” said Cholly, trying to find a buttonhole.

“I said, get on wid it. An' make it good, nigger, make it good.”

(117)

As the “flashlight [makes] a moon on his behind” (117), Cholly, having lost the thrust of his desire, fakes “with a violence born of helplessness” (117) the moves of intercourse. The two white men have spotlighted Cholly's nakedness, vulnerability, and powerlessness, and in doing so have put a junk heap beneath his soft Georgia sky. The dissonance is jarring as the pleasurable excitement of coition collides with the painful make-believe of coition performed for two white men, as love slides into hate. Cholly feels deeply the degradation of having this very private act of affirming his manhood turned into a sideshow, into the spectacle of two animals rutting in the woods.

Unable to shield Darlene or himself from the snickering, guntoting, coon hunting, white men, Cholly transfers his hatred to the weakest player in “the drama” (117), the one who lies beneath him literally and figuratively: “He hated her. He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much. The flashlight wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile. He stared at Darlene's hands covering her face in the moon and lamplight. They looked like baby claws” (117).

This hatred is no more or less than the inversion of Cholly's desire to protect Darlene from exposure. But since he “had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover [her] from the round moon glow of the flashlight” (119), he opts to save something of himself by hating Darlene. Since hating the hunters “would have destroyed him” (119), he must degrade and reduce Darlene. She has proffered him a thing as fruity as muscadine, but under the light of the white men her gift has soured. The pitiful hands she uses to cover her face so that she cannot see or be seen become “claws,” but significantly those of a small, helpless baby.

This reference to Darlene's babylike helplessness recalls Cholly's own helplessness as an abandoned infant at the same time that it points up his inability to protect not only Darlene but himself from the violation of the white man. In fact Cholly's hatred of Darlene is also self-hatred. For in her he senses the dawning of his own parental nakedness. That is, unable to protect, to fight, to hide, Cholly cannot manifest the patriarchal prowess, benevolence, or obscurity (after all, his backside is literally exposed) that is traditionally associated with maleness and manhood. Like Darlene he is accessible, weak, and naked. And to be thus naked is to share not only the tenderness and the plight of the female, but also to share a role traditionally assigned to her. The naked male is feminized, if not humanized.²

It follows, then, that Cholly, revolted by his identification with the femininity of nakedness, goes in search of his father. What Cholly finds strips him of any illusions he entertains about a relationship with that parent. He does see in his parent his own eyes, mouth, and head; however, instead of a man as tall as the black father who had broken open the watermelon at the July picnic, he finds a man shorter than himself and going bald at that. Instead of a man as sympathetic as Blue, one who is willing to share the heart of life with his son just as Blue had shared the heart of the watermelon, instead of the dignified, firm, but benevolent patriarch, he finds a man impatient, insensitive, unapproachable, and hard. The father made present is flawed and alien, the bastardization of the inscrutable father, the diametrical opposite of the naked father.

In the wake of these painful discoveries, Cholly reveals how tender and vulnerable he really is when “he soil[s] himself like a baby,” goes down to the river where, “finding the deepest shadow under the pier … [he] crouched in it [the river] behind one of the posts … [and] remained knotted there in the fetal position, paralyzed, his fist covering his eyes, for a long time” (124). The fetal position and the paralysis of this scene recall Cholly the infant deserted on the junk heap and Cholly the teenager momentarily paralyzed by the flashlight of the white men. Smelling himself just as he had smelled the white men in the woods, just as he had “inhaled a rife and stimulating man smell” (121) among the black gamblers, young Breedlove “takes off his pants, underwear, socks, and shoes” and washes all but these last in the river” (125).

Having thus regressed, Cholly lets his thoughts return to one of the first females who helped define his passage from childhood to manhood:

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.

(125)

Up to this point, Cholly's feelings for Aunt Jimmy have been as confused as those he later has for Darlene. Aunt Jimmy has saved Cholly from death on a junk heap; however, Cholly has wondered whether it “would have been just as well to have died” (105) on that junk heap. Some of Cholly's ambivalent feelings about his mother-aunt are mirrored in the character of the aunt as Morrison presents her. For example, Aunt Jimmy subsumes the manly role of the rescuer and provider as well as the womanly role of the nurturer. The feminine role of nurturer finally characterizes the aunt for Cholly (he is nearly split open with a recognition of love when he remembers her “just picking up a bit of meat and holding it out to him”); as her androcentric name suggests, she has not only been aunt and mother to Cholly, but also Jimmy and father.

Aunt Jimmy, then, embodies both a remoteness, firmness, and maleness, and a tenderness, weakness, and femaleness that Cholly finds difficult to accept. When Cholly smells the old asafetida bag that Aunt Jimmy wears to ward off sickness and infirmity, when he sees the purple rag (not kerchief) she uses to cover and protect her hair, and when he is made to sleep with her for warmth in the winter, he has mixed feelings of pity and revulsion about the smell of that asafetida bag, about the sight of that purple rag, and finally about the sight of Aunt Jimmy's nakedness, of her old, wrinkled breast sagging in her nightgown (105). Cholly has misgivings about the vulnerability these things ultimately signal.

The pity Cholly has felt for his Aunt Jimmy intimates an identification with the aunt. And it becomes clear elsewhere in the novel that the experiences of a maturer Cholly will bear some resemblance to those of all the Aunt Jimmy's of Cholly's childhood. For like these old black women he too “had grown, [e]dging into life from the back door” (109). He too had taken orders from the white men. And he too had knelt by the riverbank. But the difference between Cholly and these old black women is indeed “all the difference there was” (110). Listening to the chatter of these old women, hearing the lullaby of their grief (110), the child Cholly can at best only revision the thing that most strikingly sets him apart from them and validates his man-life. “In a dream his penis changed into a long hickory stick, and the hands caressing it were the hands of M'Dear” (110). This childhood dream identifies Cholly's penis as the one thing that does not allow him, like the old black women, to “walk the roads of Mississippi, the lanes of Georgia, the fields of Alabama unmolested” (110). His penis marks a manhood that the Southern white man openly and continually flouts or denies. In this way Cholly's penis is simultaneously his rod of affliction and of self-validation. The transformation of Cholly's penis into a hickory stick that M'Dear caresses also points to another association that will in part help account for Cholly's rape of Pecola. For the hickory stick that M'Dear carries when Cholly first sees her is used “not for support but for communication” (108). The dream suggests, then, that Cholly will use his stick-penis to communicate.

From start to finish, Cholly's communications and relations with women are problematic. Aunt Jimmy's love for Cholly, clumsy and unspoken, is nevertheless and eventually communicated. Cholly, however, never manages to express clearly to Aunt Jimmy what he feels. Dead, she can never receive the bouquet of tears that token his love for and loss of her. Similarly, after the trauma Cholly and Darlene both experience under the glare of the white man's flashlight, Cholly's communications with Darlene are strangled when he turns to her: “We got to get girl. Come on!” (118). Cholly's confusion and fear of vulnerability coupled with the growing desire to move from adolescence to manhood further qualify Cholly's relations with the female as he opts, if not for the role of the traditional male who is firm, in control, a protector of women, then for the “strong black devil” (106) who is defiant, daring, bad, a user of women.

In a rite de passage with three unnamed prostitutes, Cholly proves himself the mighty disposer of women, a male reminiscent of the “woman-killer” Blue, whom Cholly had so admired and yet had found an unapproachable father figure (119). In the encounter with the prostitutes, an event that quickly follows Cholly's memories of his dead aunt, Cholly puts aside the weakness, tears, and love he begins to feel by the Georgia riverside for the kind of power and obscurity that sex in a brothel affords him. Here, Cholly takes back “aimlessly” (125) a manhood from women who remain unnamed because they are dwarfed by Cholly's need to affirm his male self. In the transaction, these women are used to satisfy his hunger. And yet what Cholly receives from this incident, Morrison suggests, is equivocal in value as he does not get anything as substantial as Aunt Jimmy's smoked hock or even Darlene's grapes. From the prostitute he takes “lemonade in a Mason jar,” “slick sweet water” (125).

Having received this unsubstantial libation from a Mason jar, Cholly sets out on the road to a godlike freedom too extreme to result in good for himself or others. The man Pauline meets and marries has experienced a freedom that ultimately accentuates his nakedness:

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 to die, the how and the when of which held no interest for him. In 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.

(125-26)

The “godlike” freedom that reveals itself in these lines is neither the genuine nor the conventional thing. The force here represented is not that of a lawgiving, unbending, inscrutable godlike Yaweh. Cholly's acts tend to invert those of the patriarchy. For Cholly, the law becomes lawlessness; firmness can quickly turn to meanness, order passes into confusion. The freedom posited in these lines is one of contradiction, of paradox, of extremity, of heavenly tenderness and hellacious murder. Cholly's liberation is here exposed as a liberation of detachment and worthlessness: “there was nothing more to lose.” Having no real power, no real possessions, no relationship, Cholly is naked. Having no real power, Cholly is subjected to prison, insults, bullets, and rejection. Having no real possessions, he is cut adrift as he moves from one place to another. Having no real relationship, he is “alone with his own appetites and perceptions.”

As we have seen, Cholly's appetites and perceptions have in the course of his move from childhood to manhood shifted from smoked hock to slick sweet water, from love to sex. In his marriage to Pauline, Cholly tries to have the smoked hock, the love, the traditional Dick-and-Jane idea. He even tries to realize that which can more firmly establish the male's place in a patriarchal society—fatherhood. However, “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 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” (126-27). The problem is that as a father Cholly has been stripped by his past of the possibilities of material accumulation and of social standing. Poor and black, renting a storefront because of a poverty that “was traditional and stultifying” (31), Cholly Breedlove and his family cannot indulge the “hunger for property, and for ownership” (18) that drives other blacks like the Peals, the Geraldines, and the McTeers (18). Cholly's modest attempts to buy his family and himself some of life's amenities are thwarted by whites who, in control of money and materials, take advantage of the helplessness and powerlessness visited upon black men in American society who, like Cholly, suffer deprivation of the goods and experiences by which manhood is signified.³ Thus when Cholly buys a new sofa that is delivered to his house with split fabric, it becomes, as the delivery man tells Cholly, “Tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit” (32).

The “joylessness” (32) of paying for something that is damaged marks a social impotence that is accentuated by the presentation of other fathers in the novel. The white male in Morrison's novel, for example, usually realizes the idea of the powerful but somewhat distant if not inscrutable provider. Morrison encourages this notion of remoteness and obscurity with her purposefully brief representations of the white fathers in the novel. At most the reader learns that these patresfamilias have money, which equals power, or they have possessions, land, and servants, which also amount to power and control. Though these often unnamed white men tend not to be physically present in the novel (and we can never know them or even McTeer as intimately as we do Cholly), their presence is very definitely felt as the heads of households of “power, praise, and luxury” (101). As the Dick-and-Jane text with its own brief mention of the father suggests, these obscure figures are the ideal patriarchs, the father against which society measures Cholly. At the top of a hierarchy of color and money is Mr. Fisher, a well-to-do white father who commands a household in which Pauline finds “beauty, order, cleanliness and praise” (101). At the very bottom is Cholly, a poor renting black father whose household is characterized by ugliness, cold, and strife. The distance between this naked black father and the white ideal of fatherhood looms insurmountable.

While Cholly in no way resembles the white patresfamilias in the novel, Morrison's multiple imaging of black fatherhood shows that he is both unlike and like his black contemporaries especially in his relations with his daughter. Cholly is most unlike the father of “the high-yellow dream child” (52), Maureen Peal. A black approximation of Mr. Fisher, Mr. Peal is able to secure the financial well-being of his daughter. According to the McTeer girls, Maureen “was rich … as rich as the richest of the white girls, swaddled in comfort and care” (52). The fine patent-leather shoes, fluffy sweaters, brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur, kelly-green knee socks, and money with which Peal outfits his daughter help reinforce, if not foster, her sense of self-esteem and beauty: “I am cute! And you ugly!” she screams to “the three black girls [Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola] on the curbside, two with their coats draped over their heads, the collars framing the eyebrows like nuns' habits, black garters showing where they bit the tops of brown stockings that barely covered the knees” (61).

Pecola is finally the strongest foil to the confident daughter of Mr. Peal. For Cholly Breedlove has neither genetically nor financially created a doll-like child, a storybook Jane, or a Polly Fisher. In one of her most unconfident and vulnerable moments, Cholly's daughter, a representative of his fatherly accomplishments, stands in a “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 has been walked down with the heel of the shoe … a safety pin holding the hem of the dress up” (75).

The McTeer girls are not without slack in their own worn stockings (54); however, Morrison suggests that though their father shares some of Cholly's weaknesses, his is not so starkly impotent or naked. We can never know McTeer as well as we know Cholly. The circumstances of his childhood and his entry into manhood are not given; Morrison textually obscures and reveals McTeer. For us, then, as well as for his children, a side of him remains in shadow. We glimpse him only when we hear of his nakedness and again when he turns the lecherous boarder, Mr. Henry, out of his house for making lewd advances to Frieda (80).

Yet one of the most sustained though oblique commentaries on Cholly's fatherhood comes through the portrayal of McTeer in a poetic interlude that commences the section of the novel called “Winter.” Here Claudia McTeer pays tribute to a father who, like Cholly, cannot swaddle his girls in luxury, but a father, who unlike Cholly, is not so naked as to turn physically his frustration at his condition upon his daughters. Claudia writes:

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie, hiding currents of gelid thought that eddy in darkness. Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills. Vulcan guarding the flames, he gives us instructions about which doors to keep closed or opened for proper distribution of heat, lays kindling by, discusses qualities of coal, and teaches us how to rake, feed, and bank the fire. And he will not unrazor his lips until Spring.

(52)

The first part of this tribute to McTeer describes a parental figure reminiscent of the white patriarchs whom Cholly can never be or emulate. With skin that “takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun,” father McTeer is identified not only with the coldness and whiteness of a season, but also with the remoteness of the traditional white father. A cheerless face given to “avalanche” and “currents of gelid thought” requires study, as it is formidable, grim, and reticent—the face of the stern, unreadable “him” obscured by the dark.

As Claudia continues the description of her daddy, and that cold parent warms up, as it were, with images of heat that lead toward a spring, the father depicted comes to resemble Cholly especially as he assumes the role and blackness of the Vulcan. Vulcan, the lame keeper of the flames, is a more human and frail form than the wintry one Claudia first pictures. In his blackness and vulnerability, Vulcan is also a figure closer to the black devil with which Cholly had identified as a youth.⁴ Nevertheless, as the description progresses, it becomes clear that even as a Vulcanlike figure, McTeer's warmth, his nakedness is still governed by the wintriness of the obscured parent we hear of in the opening lines. He never completely exposes himself to his daughters as Cholly finally does. When McTeer opens up enough to talk to his offspring, he teaches, directs, and instructs them about the blackness of coal and about warmth, and thus remains the lawgiver and the supervisor. In other words, the unrazored slash in McTeer's face becomes a mouth as he moves from the role of wintry, remote patriarch to the role of the communicative, less aloof, father who is not so almighty and invincible as not to worry “night and day” about food, shelter, and warmth. And in his difficulties, his troubles, and his nakedness, McTeer is able to remain distant enough to give what comfort and care he can to his children in a way that is not so extreme as to devastate them. He has that degree of nakedness that his daughters need to feel loved and secure instead of defiled and brutalized.

McTeer does what Cholly Breedlove has not, can not: “Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, he [McTeer] worked night and day to keep one from the door and the other from under the windowsills.” This is to say that McTeer has kept hunger from the door and the cold from the windowsills. Cholly, so repeatedly unmanned by a society and by personal relationships that have allowed him comparatively no respect, no money, no voice, has been worsted in the struggle of the father to provide care and comfort. He has suffered a defeat that negates his ability to act conventionally—that is, within a patriarchal circle of commerce. Therefore instead of “guarding the flames” Cholly does not bother to fetch the coal his wife needs to warm the house and prepare the food. Rather, he burns down the house and puts his family outdoors. Finally when spring comes and Cholly unrazors his mouth—that is, when he tries to speak to his child—he rapes her.⁵

The actual rape (which is preceded by a rush of seemingly contradictory emotions) is the culmination of Cholly's own deflowered life, his own weakness and powerlessness, his own nakedness. Without money, without authority, without dominion, without education, Cholly looks at the hunched back of his child and perceives in the “clear statement of her misery … an accusation” (127). Here is the same accusation with its accompanying guilt, pity, and revulsion that Cholly felt when, caught with his pants down, he could not shield Darlene. “He wanted to break her neck [Pecola's, as presumably he had Darlene's]—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?” (127) As Cholly casts about for something to lay hold of that will confirm his manhood and his fatherhood, it is apparent that he has a strong desire to communicate with his child, to relieve her of the burden of unhappiness; however, he feels stripped and exposed as he so often has been in the past.

When Cholly, “reeling drunk” (127), sees his young, helpless, hopeless daughter, he sees in her the focal point for poignant feelings predominant in childhood events, such as the picnic with Blue and his encounter with his father. But more important, he experiences feelings codified in his relationship with the significant females in his life. Cholly's mixed feelings for Aunt Jimmy, his interrupted experiment with Darlene, his marriage to Pauline, and presumably his knowledge of his rejecting mother generate varying degrees and combinations of the “revulsion, guilt, pity, then love” (127) that lead up to Cholly's violation of Pecola. The questions that run through Cholly's mind before he crawls “on all fours” toward his daughter are questions that pertain to all the women who have cared for Cholly Breedlove. “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 hand 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 respect, that would in turn allow him to accept her love?” (127).

Pecola at this point is not just Cholly's offspring, she is Cholly's everywoman. She is the woman who can open her legs and thereby testify to Cholly's manhood, and yet when he cannot protect that same woman that he himself is victimizing, she becomes the one who undercuts that testimony; she is implicated in the degradation and the denial of his manhood. She is a human baby with claws. Cholly's ambivalence, contradiction, and befuddlement are underscored in questions that reveal an almost indignant desire to help and to please his child and a simultaneously anxious need to aggrandize himself (to “earn him his own respect” and allow him to accept her love?).

Cholly, of course, answers these questions, which lay bare his feelings of worthlessness and degradation, by offering (for the rape is, in his mind, both a violation and a gift, a tender fuck) the knowledge and the power that is naturally his, the knowledge and the power that has ever been begrudgingly and mythically granted the black male, that of sexuality. And in the wake of Cholly's carnal gift to his daughter is the wholesale carnage of his life and hers, of their potential and hope. Pecola, despairing of a white “heavenly, heavenly Father” (141) who will grant her the bluest eyes, unwittingly sacrifices an old dog Bob at the altar of another of the black fathers imaged in the novel Soaphead Church.⁶ Pecola loses her baby and her sanity. Even the marigolds that Claudia and Frieda superstitiously plant to insure the life of Pecola's baby die. Cholly's “touch was fatal,” writes Claudia, “and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her [Pecola's] agony with death” (159).

Claudia goes on to explain that Cholly had really loved Pecola, loved her enough to be the only one “to give something of himself to her.” Cholly is not the obscured paterfamilias who hides himself from his daughter. Unlike the partially naked McTeer who denies the gaze of his daughters, Cholly bares himself: he gives Pecola complete access to his masculine self. However, while Cholly thus acknowledges the sexual side and power of his daughter, his nakedness is not “friendly-like,” because it is finally unmitigated by any reference to others or to a reachable, sociable idea of fatherhood. Unleashed in its social meaning, friendly nakedness becomes fiendish in the havoc wreaked upon the child. The gift Cholly gives his daughter is poisoned by the starkness of Cholly's very self, which has been warped by personal experience, social and economic conditions and circumstances that have stripped him of the capacity to share in a tradition inimical to that self. As Claudia puts it, “Love is never any better than the lover,” and “the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glow of the lover's inward eye” (159-60).

Shorn, and neutralized, himself, Cholly's love for his child is the love not only of a man who is free, but also of one who is so naked he is consequently dispossessed. And in the extreme nakedness of abandonment, degradation, poverty, and confusion there is no friendliness for children; there is only the waste and barrenness of aborted fatherhood. With its worship of whiteness, maleness, and power, and its high valuation of land, wealth, and acquisitions, with its hatred and exclusion of blackness and its fierce disdain of femaleness, frailty, and want, Western society has warped black fatherhood and consequently sacrificed the children.

The magic, the miracle of Morrison's novel is the survival, if not the transcendence, of a black father like McTeer who, in spite of the stress of being a black man in a white paternalistic culture, is able to foster in his children a feeling of security and a good sense of self. The saddest reality in the novel is the naked father like Cholly who, distressed unto madness by his total segregation from purportedly godly ideals of manhood and fatherhood, raises children who cannot see, and so deny the value and beauty of their selves and wish for the bluest eye.

Notes

1. In her analysis of The Bluest Eye, Barbara Christian notes the musical qualities of the novel's form (Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 [Westport: Greenwood, 1980], 138-53).

2. The ways in which Cholly's humanity is undercut are worth noting. Mrs. McTeer straightaway refers to Cholly as “that old Dog Breedlove” (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye [New York: Washington Square Press, 1970], 17). Claudia explains, “Cholly Breedlove, then, a renting black, having put his family outdoors, had catapulted himself beyond the reaches of human consideration. He had joined the animals; was, indeed, an old dog, a snake, a ratty nigger” (19). Later on we find Cholly sniffing the air like an animal to identify the scents of white men and the black gamblers (116, 121). And finally before he rapes his daughter, he gets down on all fours and crawls toward her like an animal.

3. Susan Willis (Specifying: Black Women Writing, The American Experience [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987]) offers an interesting insight into the ways in which black men have maintained themselves when she writes, “Historically, gambling and bootlegging have afforded black men the opportunity to deal in a money economy without being employed by the economy” (12). When Cholly finds his father, that parent is gambling. When Cholly moves north with Pauline he quickly finds work in the steel mills of Lorain, Ohio. By the end of the novel Cholly has succumbed to the bootleggers, if he has not become one. Frieda notes that he is “always drunk” (Bluest Eye, 81), and he dies in a workhouse.

4. According to Thomas Bulfinch (Mythology, abbr. Edmund Fuller [New York: Dell, 1959]), in one account of the titans, Vulcan (Hephaestos), son of Jupiter and Juno, was born lame; Juno, dissatisfied with Vulcan's deformity, flung him out of the heavens. In another account, Vulcan's lameness results from his fall.

   This reference to Vulcan links McTeer with Cholly. Though a crippled potentate, Vulcan was also the celestial artist. Morrison hints at Cholly as a frustrated artist of sorts when she insists that his psyche and life are the stuff of jazz musicians. Vulcan, in his smithy with all its attendant blackness and heat, is also reminiscent of the devil in his workshop. The devil is, of course, a figure with which young Cholly at one point openly identifies. Significantly, Cholly's understanding of the devil is not traditional or conventional. Cholly's devil is that opposite of the patriarchal devil. “He wondered if God looked like that [the black father at the picnic]. No, God was a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad” (106). Cholly's devil is a strong black man, caring and accessible. The black devil-father wants, as Cholly sees it, to split open the world (watermelon) and give its red guts (sustenance, good things) to the blacks who need it. Quite the opposite of the obscured, distant father, the devil-father stands so close that Cholly “felt goose pimples popping along his [own] arms and neck” (106). Cholly here is describing a version of the naked father. As Cholly in his own nakedness performs apparently devilish acts in the novel, it becomes clear that in the weakness and vulnerability of the naked father is also included the idea of the fallen father. This is to say that the naked father is fallen in the sense that he has fallen away from the white patriarchal idea, and fallen in the sense that acts in which he engages mark his weakness, his powerlessness to resist temptation, his sin, and finally fallen in the sense that he is pushed away or dispossessed. A tabular schema of this assertion follows:

   1st father—“obscured”	2nd father—“naked”
   Yaweh	devil
   inscrutable	exposed
   powerful	weak (or fallen)

5. In his Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), Keith Byerman writes that Cholly attempts to deal with “self-hatred and oppression by becoming as evil as possible. … Behind this ‘bad-nigger’ persona lies a history of distortions of principal relationships and rituals of life.” In various ways society has so conditioned and controlled Cholly, Byerman perceptively observes, that the effect has been one of “denying him a socially acceptable means of expressing authentic human emotion.” Byerman goes on to note that Cholly “is incapable of appropriate fatherly behavior because he has had no parents” (187-89). I contend that this want only partly accounts for Cholly's inappropriate behavior. What Cholly needs most is covering and the protection that may come out of love, consistency, sustenance, and equality in any significant personal and social relationships. For indeed, such covering provides the space, the time, and the wherewithal to integrate and affirm a culturally constructed self.

6. Mr. Henry, but especially Elihue Micah Whitcomb, alias Soaphead Church, are part of Morrison's device of multiple imaging. These two characters are not biological fathers per se, rather they are father figures. Mr. Henry, a fatherly figure who lives with the McTeers, is soon cast out of that household when he gets too friendly with Frieda McTeer. Soaphead Church, whose attentions to Pecola are not physical, though they are very damaging, emerges as a more interesting fatherlike character. A self-appointed instrument of God (138), a type of Father Divine who had “dallied with the priesthood in the Anglican Church” (130), Soaphead Church, as his name suggests, is a pseudo-father whose relations with “his daughters”—that is, the young black girls who visit him—connect him to Cholly Breedlove. Morrison deliberately and carefully links Soaphead to Cholly to drive home further her point about how Western standards of fatherhood or fatherliness can be distorted or perverted in black fathers who live in a society that has historically, socially, and economically pushed them toward complete vulnerability. In his letter to the “heavenly, heavenly Father” of white patriarchy, Soaphead essentially locates his weakness and the beginning of his trouble in the history of his West Indian family, which has sought to whiten itself:

   We in this colony took as our own the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white masters' characteristics, which were, of course, their worst. In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom. We raised our children and reared our crops; we let infants grow, and property develop. Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womanhood by acquiescence. And the smell of your fruit and the labor of your days we abhorred.

   (140)

   In trying not only to be white, but also to adopt the white standards, the Whitcombs are falsified and weakened.

   Soaphead's father, a bad version of the white Yawehlike paterfamilias inflicts upon young Elihue not only “the precision of his [the father's] justice and the control of his violence” (133), but also “his theories of education, discipline, and the good life” (133). But “for all his exposure” to the fathers of “the Western world”—Christ, Hamlet, Gibbon, Othello, Dante—Soaphead only learns “the fine art of self-deception” and hatred (133). These two inculcations help lead Elihue to, among other things, his preference for little girls, the members of humanity whom he finds “least offensive” because they “were usually manageable and frequently seductive” (132). The little girls are just as vulnerable as he, if not more so, and so he identifies with these children in his sick way.

   Soaphead Church himself is every bit as destructive as Cholly Breedlove when he insists that he felt that he was being “playful” and “friendly” when he “touched their [the little girls'] sturdy little tits and bit them—just a little” (142). Soaphead's characterization of his deeds as “playful” is his perverted rendering of the lines in the Dick-and-Jane primer: “See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile” (7). A bogus parent, Soaphead is neither big nor strong, though magical powers are attributed to him. Were he a little boy, his actions may possibly be construed as innocent exploratory play; however, the play of this “father” is not, as he declares, innocent. His play is abuse and victimization. Soaphead's description of his actions as “friendly” is not the “friendly-like” (my italics) warmth and nurturing that Claudia and Frieda sense in the presence of their naked father who denies, as it were, the tacit and full-blown realization of “friendly” (that is, unlike Cholly and Soaphead, McTeer dismisses the possibility of ever physically manifesting friendliness to his daughters).

   Like Cholly, this false father Church gives to Pecola a gift no better than himself. The parallels between Cholly and Soaphead are telling. The caresser of little girls, Soaphead never touches Pecola. Instead, like a fairy godfather, he grants her wish for the bluest eyes. While he, a self-deceived and deceiving father figure, passively gives Pecola a lie that leads her to madness. Cholly Breedlove, a more confused than deceived father, violently gives Pecola his physical self, a gift that has propelled her not only toward Soaphead's gift of insanity, but also toward exile and death.

   Finally, Soaphead voices an important indictment against white patriarchy and how it has excluded and injured black lives when he writes:

   You said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not.” Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.

   That's why I changed the little black girl's eyes for her, and I didn't touch her; not a finger did I lay on her. … 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 a very good show!

   (143)

   The truth here is that Yaweh has not been kind to the children, especially to the daughters like Pecola who have black fathers in white society who cannot recreate Yaweh in themselves, cannot manage a mite of the power to protect, provide, and comfort. In Soaphead's cry for the children is a cry interestingly enough for both Cholly and for Soaphead himself. For both these men are in some sense reduced to children; that is, in as far as their manhood has been denied or undercut in society, they remain children who have urges to “play” in particular with those who are at least as weak and exposed as they are—the little girls.