A Chocolate Soldier by Cyrus Colter

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1920’s-1980’s

Locale: In and around Gladstone College in Valhalla, Tennessee

Principal Characters:

• Meshach Coriolanus Barry, a lonely, obsessive, fifty-five-year-old, black pastor
• Carol Barry, Meshach’s daughter, a serious young woman in her late twenties whose relationship with her father has been strained since her teenage years
• Rollo Ezekiel “Cager” Lee, the rebellious, doomed hero of Meshach’s narrative
• Mary Eliza Fitzhugh Dabney, the elderly matriarch of an old Virginia plantation family
• Haley Tulah Barnes, a compassionate black professor of history at Gladstone College
• Flo, a beautiful and dignified single mother in her late twenties or early thirties who falls in love with Cager

The Novel

A Chocolate Soldieris a story within a story that reveals the obsession and loneliness of Meshach Barry’s life. He narrates the history of his hero, a classmate at Gladstone College thirty-five years earlier. The novel is a nonlinear direct address narrative, flashing from the present, in which Meshach attempts to make emotional contact with his estranged daughter Carol through the act of sharing his story, to the past, in which closely alternating segments in the lives of Meshach and Cager establish the contrast between them. The tragedy of the novel is that Carol is unable to understand that her father needs to retell this story in order to come to terms with the meaning of his life. To Carol, Meshach’s interest in Cager’s life is nothing but a useless compulsion. Because Carol, Meshach’s only human connection, refuses to listen to her father’s story, he is forced to turn and speak directly to the audience.

Meshach and Cager, both from rural southern families, meet at Gladstone College, an all-black school in Valhalla, Tennessee, in the midst of World War II. Meshach has been forced by his mother to study to be a preacher. Cager is determined to escape the fate of his sharecropper father by becoming a militant black leader.

Eventually Cager’s belief that education is useless without force to support it leads him to neglect his studies in favor of training the small, all-black militia he has mustered among the townspeople. Cager is a visionary leader, but before long the other members of the group come to believe that their effort is useless, and they leave him. Disheartened by this failure and hurt by his girlfriend Flo’s brutal honesty concerning the misshapenness of his sexual organ, Cager is on his way to flunking out of school when Haley Barnes, a history professor, intervenes. Barnes, concerned that Cager is on his way to ruin, convinces the boy to take some time off from school and get a job to allow himself time to think about his future. It is Barnes who uses his connection with Mary Dabney to get Cager a job as a house servant in the Dabney mansion.

Although Cager finds Mrs. Dabney’s white supremacist attitude maddening, he decides to stay on in her employ until he has studied all the volumes in her library of military books. He sneaks the books to his room to read at night. He discovers an inflammatory black newspaper, The Chicago Hawk, that another servant’s relatives smuggled south. He is amazed by the apparent solidarity and aggression of Chicago African Americans, and he determines to go there as soon as he is done with Mrs. Dabney’s library.

It is while reading through a historical volume in the Dabney household that Cager learns about Ofield Smalls, a nineteenth century slave who led a rebellion against his kind white masters. In a dramatic scene approaching the climax of the novel, Cager is struck by an epiphany while he stands over a bridge above the river Darling. Realizing that Smalls was denouncing oppression hidden in charity, Cager is seized by a feeling that he is fated to carry out a rebellion similar to Smalls’s. Driven by a messianic vision, Cager dresses himself in the uniform of his defunct black militia and stabs Mrs. Dabney to death with the bayonet of her heirloom confederate Enfield musket, just as she is on the eve of donating an enormous amount of money to Gladstone College.

As Meshach narrates this story, constantly emphasizing Cager’s saintly intensity and his will to sacrifice his own good for his ideals, it becomes clearer that Meshach, having spent time in prison and several spells in a mental hospital as well as having sexually violated his daughter, is trying desperately to create some order in his own life by relating himself to Cager. The novel ends as Meshach, in an epilogue, tells of Cager’s death as the victim of a mob lynching and Flo’s death from tuberculosis. There is no definite action left for the narrator to take once his tale is told. The novel’s ending suggests that Meshach has achieved some sort of catharsis from reorganizing his memories.

The Characters

Meshach Barry is a complex character who acknowledges to his audience that he is perhaps not the most reliable of narrators. By describing his feelings of guilt toward his daughter and by referring to himself as a hypocrite, a preacher who loves to stand in the pulpit and give sermons but who does not actually believe in God, Meshach makes it clear that he is not to be considered a noble or even a likable character. By establishing his own actions as negative, Meshach focuses positive attention on Cager, whom he calls the hero of his story. By introducing himself as an unreliable, biased storyteller, Meshach suggests that everything in his narrative, including Cager’s goodness, is questionable.

Cager Lee’s faith in African Americans’ need and ability to control their own destiny, coupled with his single-minded determination to help his people regardless of the cost to himself, clearly establishes him as a foil for the ambivalent Meshach. Cager is a martyred saint, a visionary secular prophet who believes that the ends justify the means. Cager’s intense conviction in the necessity of black self-determination is offset, however, by his naïveté. He is unable to distinguish between the militant rhetoric of The Chicago Hawk and factual reporting, and he is crushed when Haley Barnes informs him that Chicago is no mecca for African Americans. Although his determination is admirable, Cager’s childish simplicity, as pointed out by Barnes, makes him another questionable character.

After Cager goes to work for Mrs. Dabney, several people, including Mrs. Dabney’s daughter Gussie, remark how the old woman has grown strangely attached to the boy in some mysterious way. Gussie remarks that it is as if Cager has cast some sort of spell over the old woman. Portrayed early in the novel as a crotchety, iron-fisted matriarch used to having the last word in every matter, Mrs. Dabney evolves into a more compassionate woman who begins to question whether the racist beliefs she has lived by are really ordained by God, as she has been taught. Her sympathy for Cager grows as the novel progresses, ending, ironically, only when she realizes that Cager is about to kill her.

Haley Barnes, noting the change that has come over Mrs. Dabney, provoking her to donate money for a new liberal arts building on the Gladstone campus, is satisfied that he has helped Cager out of his academic predicament. When Cager comes to see Haley about his plan to move to Chicago, Barnes is angered by his student’s naïveté. The compassionate Barnes truly cares about Cager and worries that the boy will spend his life dreaming up fruitless schemes for black militant action. Begging Cager to abandon his inflammatory newspaper and devote himself to learning the history of his people, Barnes acts as a father figure for Cager, trying to steer him on what he perceives as the best path. When Cager kills Mrs. Dabney and is lynched, it is Haley Barnes who feels responsible for bringing the two together. The ruin of Cager’s life, added to the burden of losing his sister in a violent way, reduces Barnes to a somber shadow of a man who lives the rest of his life in a well of guilt.

The peripheral characters in the town of Valhalla are also profoundly affected by the novel’s dramatic climax. Cyrus Colter presents a vivid picture of the various inhabitants of Valhalla who knew Cager and whose lives were irrevocably altered by the events surrounding his death. There are no minor characters in Valhalla. Colter illustrates each person, from restaurant keeper Shorty George to the lecherous traveling preacher Bearcat Walker, in great detail. It is clear the entire community can never be the same after Cager kills Mrs. Dabney and is later dragged from the courthouse and set on fire.

Critical Context

In his review of A Chocolate Soldier, writer Brooke K. Horvath notes Colter’s borrowing of a historical conflict. Black educator Booker T. Washington wanted black people to have equal economic opportunities but separate social structures, while activist W. E. B. Du Bois believed that equal economic opportunity alone was not enough. Although Horvath praises the novel’s theme, he is skeptical about its effectiveness, noting that one of the problems of a first-person narration is that awkwardness results when the speaker recounts episodes about which he or she could not know. Poet and editor Reginald Gibbons points out that in A Chocolate Soldier, Colter’s fifth work of fiction, the author’s conscious use of an open-ended form is a stylistically sophisticated way of addressing the lack of resolution in the lives of believable characters faced with difficult choices. Gibbons praises Colter’s development of characters, noting Cager as a particularly effective portrait of an individual torn in two directions by his single-minded determination at war with his ethical sensibilities. Furthermore, Gibbons notes the mythological dimension of the novel. Recognizing that the characters are often intended to seem overly dramatic and, in Meshach’s case, omniscient, Gibbons praises the high tragedy of Colter’s plot.

A Chocolate Soldier was also favorably received by Fred Shafer. In an interview with Colter, Shafer suggested that he could detect stylistic influences from Irish author James Joyce in the novel’s characters, who, like Joyce’s creations, are multidimensional, almost mythic individuals who face the circumstances they encounter not with simplistic clarity but with a rich complexity true to real life.

Bibliography

Colter, Cyrus. Interviews by Gilton Cross et al. “Fought for It and Paid Taxes, Too: Four Interviews with Cyrus Colter.” Callaloo 14 (Fall, 1991): 855-897. Four writers interview Colter on a range of topics, from his political and personal relationship with his work to the influences that have shaped his writing. Colter, a lawyer for most of his life, lists Jean-Paul Sartre, Herman Melville, James Joyce, and William Shakespeare among the literary figures who made impressions on his way of addressing literature.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Collected in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Du Bois’s famous ideas on the education that African Americans needed to succeed. Written largely as a rebuttal to the program proposed by Booker T. Washington.

Gibbons, Reginald. “Colter’s Novelistic Contradictions.” Callaloo 14 (Fall, 1991): 898-905. Survey of Colter’s four previous works of fiction as well as A Chocolate Soldier. Gibbons traces the growing trend toward open-endedness in Colter’s short stories and novels, with a special emphasis on Colter’s use of characterization throughout his literary career.

Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays that together provide a comprehensive overview of the history of the African American novel; places Colter’s work in the context of thematic and formal developments of the late 1980’s.

Horvath, Brooke K. Review of A Chocolate Soldier, by Cyrus Colter. Review of Contemporary Fiction 10 (Spring, 1990): 325. Notes the many subthemes that run through Colter’s text, including the idea of the pervasiveness of pseudo-scientific social Darwinist beliefs and the interplay between self-determination and literacy.

Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture. New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970. Examines issues of twentieth century African American culture, ranging from the aims of black education to the role of blues and jazz in American society to the politics and myths of the African American middle class.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Collected in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. The famous autobiography of the founder of the Tuskegee Institute whose ideal of autonomy through technical vocation influenced generations of African Americans.