The Bluest Eye Spring (II) - Summer

Spring (continued)

The reading primer excerpts describe a pleasant father who smiles at his children when they ask him to play with them. Cholly thinks back on his childhood, he was raised by his Aunty Jimmy, who had rescued him from the trash where his mother had left him when he was just 10 days old. Jimmy loved Cholly and raised him tenderly, but she often told him about he had been unwanted by his mother and that she had saved his life. Cholly quit going to school before getting his matriculation and instead began to work at a shop, where he met an old black man who had been a slave. The old man would talk to Cholly about his days as a swinging bachelor, and he remembers sharing a particularly delicious watermelon with the old man on a 4th of July picnic. Aunty Jimmy did not live for very long, she became sick from attending a religious gathering, and although it appeared that she would recover, she succumbed to death suddenly after eating a cobbler prepared by a neighbor. Cholly was unable to understand her loss during the funeral, as he was too consumed by the arrival of so many of her relatives and how they all seemed to treat him so well. After the funeral, he went out for a walk with an older cousin and two girls their age. They played by throwing grapes at one another, and eventually, the two couples separated.

Cholly was reminded about the loss of his aunty when Darlene began to worry about the stains on her dress. He tries to help her clean some of it off, but she uses their closeness to initiate lovemaking. Cholly is mesmerized by her and the sensations that he feels, however, he suddenly finds a flashlight on them. Two white men happened across the two of them on fields, but they don’t allow Cholly to stop and dress himself. He hears them cock a gun at him as they order him to continue having sex with Darlene. He is terrified of them, and pretends to continue, while all of his anger is directed towards Darlene, who remains mute during this ordeal. The men leave, and the two youngsters return to the house quietly. Cholly is too embarrassed to tell anyone about the incident, and he doesn’t wish to go and live with anyone of Aunt Jimmy’s relatives. He takes the money that she had stowed away and walks to the nearest bus station. It takes him several days, and he works along the way to earn more money. Cholly sets out to find his father, without knowing anything more than his full name and that supposedly he lived in Macon. Throughout his long journey to Macon, Cholly never once blames the white men, but rather his ire remains directed at Darlene, the one who had witnessed his powerlessness.

In Macon, Cholly is directed to some men playing dice when he asks after his father. He attempts to talk to the man but receives only an angry dismissal. He doesn’t have anywhere else to turn, and the outright rejection from his father causes Cholly to lose control of his bowels right in the middle of the street. He runs and hides under a bridge near the river, and washes himself in it. Cholly is eventually given back his masculinity by three women, who offer him a place to live for a little time. He becomes a free man, kills white men, and does whatever he pleases. He meets Pauline as a free man, and her reaction to him makes him wish to nest for a little time. He has children with her and eventually turns to drink, but he never truly experiences any sense of kinship with his children. He has never known any of his parents and doesn’t quite understand what it means to be a father. He often reacts to them just as he feels in the moment. Cholly came home drunk one evening and found Pecola washing the dishes. He was overcome with guilt and love, as he wished to make her experience something other than fear. Pecola scratched her leg with her foot, just as Pauline had done when he first found her. Cholly went down on his knees and sucked her toes, she fell into his arms and he raped her in the kitchen. She passed out when they had finished and Pauline came home to find her still unconscious in the kitchen.

The Dick and Jane excerpt mentions a dog as the children ask the dog to play with them. The narrator then turns to describe the life of Soaphead Church, a former minister who advertised himself as the interpreter of dreams. Soaphead hated people, mostly because he felt that people were extremely dirty and unclean. He came from a black family that had inherited the blood of a British nobleman, but their tradition of intermarrying to preserve that nobility often produced odd children like Soaphead. He had been disowned by his family because he had been unable to complete his education. Further tragedy had struck him in the form of an eloping wife, who had become incapable of withstanding his constant need for cleanliness. As a further consequence of this obsession with cleanliness, Soaphead was a pedophile because children were the cleanest. He now lived as a tenant to an old woman named Bertha, whose only source of love in the world was an old and stinky dog named Bob. Soaphead hated the dog, and he wanted to poison but he couldn’t work up the courage to do it.

Pecola visited Soaphead Church because she thought he could help her get blue eyes. Pecola was visibly pregnant, she had left her school, and Soaphead felt that she was very ugly. He wanted to help her and understood that her desire for white physical features was only right. At first, he tells her that he cannot help her, but he then gives her poisoned meat. He tells her that she should feed the meat the dog to the dog outside, and if anything were to happen to the dog, she could be certain that God was going to grant her wish. He observes her feed the dog and is surprised when the creature falls to its side to die. Pecola leaves, while Soaphead writes a long letter to God, praising himself for giving Pecola blue eyes that no one else could see.

Summer

Claudia says that she often confuses the summer of 1941 with that of 1931, the year in which most of Lorrain was destroyed by a tornado. During the summer, Claudia and Frieda went around trying to raise a little money for themselves by selling flower seeds. They began to hear about Pecola’s pregnancy from the adults they visited. Largely, there was a consensus within the community that it would be best if the baby were to die on its own. They thought the child had no right to live given it was a product of incest, and also because the child was bound to be extremely ugly given the appearance of both Cholly and Pecola. Claudia and Frieda sympathized with Pecola, they did not wish for her child to die, and they agreed that the adults were wrong in their assessment. They prayed to God for her sake, gave up their money for her, and decided that the blooming of the flowers would be a sign that God had accepted their prayers.

The narrative turns to Pecola, who is conversing with a voice in her head. The voice is making fun of her for constantly looking in the mirror at her blue eyes. Pecola is extremely proud of her blue eyes, and she feels that others around her are jealous of her eyes, which is why they choose to ignore her. She thinks that her blue eyes are also the reason why her mother seems so sad now, and the voice wonders whether it's because she misses Cholly. Pecola doesn’t think so because they were always fighting. Pecola continues to converse with herself and readers learn that she had been raped a second time by Cholly and that she had been too afraid to tell anyone about it. Pecola is fixated on having the bluest eyes and worries to the voice about someone having eyes bluer than hers.

The narrator reveals the fate of the baby, who had been premature upon birth and ended up passing away. Pecola’s mental condition deteriorated, and she was moved to a house near the garbage dump by her mother. Cholly died in the workhouse, Sammy ran away from home, Pauline continued to work for her employers, and the MacTeer sisters blamed themselves for not lending greater aid to Pecola. In the present time, Claudia watches Pecola walking in the garbage dump and tells herself that Pecola’s fate was not her fault. She believes that sometimes the soil chooses to give life to some flowers, and nothing can be done to help the flowers that do not bloom by the will of the soil.

Analysis

The final section of Spring consists of the inciting incident of the novel, which is the rape of Pecola by her father. Toni Morrison had wished to humanize all the characters that lead Penola’s life astray, and she achieves this for Cholly as well. Cholly has a difficult life as he is forced to grow up without his parents with an understanding that neither of them truly wanted him. However, the true damage to his psychosis comes from his encounters with white hunters who train a gun on him and order him to keep having sex. Cholly’s anger and frustration from that incident is displaced and it surfaces through his drunkenness and violence. However, Morrison emphasizes that Cholly turns himself into a free man, which certainly indicates that he is not entirely a villain. This section of the novel has received significant criticism since it serves nearly as a defense of a pedophile rapist that forces himself upon his daughter on more than one occasion.