Summary
This chapter recounts the history of Cholly Breedlove.
His mother abandons him on a trash heap when he is four days old,
but his Great Aunt Jimmy rescues him. She beats his mother and his
mother runs away. After four years of school, Cholly gathers the
courage to ask Aunt Jimmy his father's name; it is Samson Fuller.
After two more years of school, Cholly takes a job at Tyson's Feed
and Grain Store and meets a man named Blue Jack. Blue Jack enthralls
Cholly with his stories and shares the heart of a watermelon with
him at a church picnic. Cholly remembers this kindness for a long
time.
Then Aunt Jimmy gets sick. The community calls in M'Dear,
the local healing woman, whose height and authority impress Cholly. She
prescribes pot liquor, and Aunt Jimmy begins to improve, but then
she eats a peach cobbler and dies. Cholly finds her the next morning.
He does not immediately feel grief, because everyone takes care
of him during the funeral and he is fascinated by all the excitement.
Aunt Jimmy's brother, O.V., and his family plan to take care of
him.
Cholly tries to impress one of his older cousins, Jake,
by taking him to a place where the girls are. Jake persuades a girl
named Suky to take a walk with him, and Cholly persuades the girl
he likes, Darlene, to come along as well. They eat muscadine berries
and chase each other, and then lie down to rest. When they get up
to head back, Darlene tickles Cholly, and the two of them begin
to touch each other. Just as Cholly is having sex for the first
time, two white hunters shine their flashlights upon him. They
tell him to continue while they watch, and Cholly pretends to finish.
The men leave when they hear their dogs. Cholly is furious with
Darlene instead of with the white men because some part of him knows
that if he feels anger against the white men, it will destroy him.
It occurs to Cholly, irrationally,
that Darlene might be pregnant, and he decides to run away and look
for his father. He finds some money that Aunt Jimmy had hidden and
spends several months working his way toward Macon, Georgia, where his
father lives. He finally purchases a bus ticket, arrives in Macon,
and is sent to an alley to look for his father. There he finds men
gambling in various states of excitement and desperation. When he
asks for Samson Fuller, he finds a man who looks especially fierce,
but who is, to Cholly's surprise, shorter than he is. Samson thinks
that Cholly has been sent by a creditor (or perhaps the mother of
another child he has fathered) and curses him. Cholly stumbles back
into the street and, in his effort not to cry, defecates in his
pants. He runs to the river, hides under the pier, and washes his
clothes after dark. For the first time, he feels grief for Aunt
Jimmy.
From this point forward, Cholly is free in a dangerous
way. He loves and beats women, he takes and leaves jobs, and he
kills three white men—all the while remaining indifferent. He is
indifferent about when or how he dies. He meets Pauline, and her
sweetness and innocence make him want to marry her, but marriage
makes him feel trapped. His interest in life is sapped, and he begins
to drink. Most of all, he does not know how to relate to his children.
Now, in the present, Cholly comes home drunk and finds
Pecola doing the dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and rage,
both fueled by guilt, he rapes her. She faints, and he covers her
with a quilt. She wakes to find her mother looking down at her.
Analysis
The novel's prologue warns us that Cholly will do something unthinkable—impregnate
his own eleven-year-old daughter. If this event were told from Claudia's
or Pecola's point of view, it would likely remain a senseless act
of violence, something impossible to understand. But Morrison chooses
to explain the rape from Cholly's point of view. Understanding how
it was possible for Cholly to commit incest does not change our
knowledge that he has caused tremendous suffering to his daughter
but does change the nature of our horror. Cholly's violence is not
frightening because it is senseless; it is frightening because it
makes all too much sense, given the kind of life he has lived. Knowing
Cholly's story may not change the horror of what he does, but it
does make his action more bearable to us.
As with Pauline's story in the previous chapter, we sympathize with
Cholly not only because he has suffered abandonment, sexual humiliation,
and racism, but because there was once real beauty and joy in his
life. We are given a long celebratory description about the breaking
and eating of the watermelon, as if it were “[t]he nasty-sweet guts
of the earth.” Cholly's childlike joy in sharing the heart of the
watermelon with Blue Jack is vividly rendered. Also, the pleasure
of Cholly's flirtation with Darlene is narrated at length. Their bodies
are compared to those of the muscadine berries. The comparison suggests
that both are new and tight, not yet ripe enough to yield full pleasure,
but as exciting in their promise as their full ripeness would be.
The staining of Darlene's dress with berry juice recalls Pauline's
memory of a similar, joyful stain. Rather than dirtiness that must
be scrubbed away, here a stain is cause for celebration. In the
innocence of their coming-of-age, Cholly is shy and naïve, and he
tenderly helps Darlene tie her ribbon in her hair. It is she who
makes the first overture, and their touching is presented as fully
consensual and completely natural. When their experience is brutally
interrupted by the white men, it is clear that white power deforms
black lives, rather than some kind of inherent black “dirt” that
must be cleaned (as Geraldine, for example, seems to believe).
This chapter demonstrates Morrison's ability to move
seamlessly between compelling, individual characters and a more
generalized portrait of black life. Aunt Jimmy is an individual
but is also a representative of elderly black women. She has suffered
racism and abuse at the hands of her man, but she has also felt
the joy of sexual love and motherhood; she has suffered violence
and committed violence. Now that she is old, she is at last free—free
to feel what she feels and go where she wants to go without fear.
At first glance, Aunt Jimmy's freedom seems similar to
the dangerous freedom that Cholly finds, which is marked by an indifference
that makes him fearless. But the novel makes a distinction: the
black women understand the difference between grinding work and
making love, and “the difference was all the difference there was.”
Cholly's depression comes when his indifference becomes a total
lack of interest in life, when freedom becomes a premature desire
for oblivion.
