Cyrus Colter’s ‘A Chocolate
Soldier’ was published in 1988; during a period in African American literature
when some critiqued that Black males were being bashed, portrayed in a negative
light, by Black female fiction writers. What Colter did during the controversy
was write a Black male protagonist, Meshach Barry, who had a Black male hero,
Rollo Ezekiel Lee – called Cager throughout the text. By creating two Black
male characters, with flaws, that took the lead in the text, Colter writes
Black males with human frailties that were not demonized due to their defects
of character. The reader meets Meshach, a complicated character indeed, at a reflective
phase of his life; he was contemplating his memoir.
The storyline of the novel is Meshach,
an educated minister, college professor, former convict, and recurrent mental
patient arguing with his beloved daughter over writing his memoir. The daughter
is afraid that Meshach revisiting his past will lead to him having yet another
mental breakdown. The proposed memoir would center on him remembering and
recollecting the events and facts of the murder his college friend, Cager, committed.
There was no mystery in the work regarding Cager committing the murder; the
story centered on why he murdered. Why would a once stellar student commit such
a brutal murder? And Meshach tries to estimate the part he played in Cager
committing the crime; this reckoning of events and facts unraveled into the plot
of Colter’s ‘A Chocolate Soldier.’
The childhoods of both Meshach and
Cager was presented in the work and added the necessary depth to understanding
the many whys that occur to the reader while engaged in the novel. Colter not
only juxtaposed the life of Cager against Meshach but Cager against several
support characters including: a university president, college professor,
barkeep, female lovers, and the eventual murder victim - a rich white donor to
the school. Through these conflicts it became apparent who the chocolate
soldier was, and the war he fought was with an old and experienced adversary,
racism in America.
During Meshach’s accounting of the
past the reader experiences the preacher, professor, convict, and mental
patient lives that he lived. The growth, development, doubt, and frustrations
of each life was witnessed, and this added literary weight to novel. The craft
employed to demonstrate how racism along with the personal demons yielded such
a complicated character, as Meshach, required a writer of exceptional
skill.
Both Meshach and Cager were faced
with the obstacles that Black men living within a predominately white society of
their era faced: Jim Crow restrictions, overt racism, Uncle Toms, and the
plaguing desire to be treated as an equal by those who saw them as less. This
was the war Colter had them both fighting – against racism and self, but the
question the novel raises is how much of self is shaped by living in a racist
society, how many of one’s character defects are caused by living in a hostile
society.
A reader leaves Colter’s expertly crafted
‘A Chocolate Soldier’ with the stark reality that a racist society affects
those targeted by unjust prejudice policies, and to survive in the system one
may develop character defects that may harm others. With all of its
well-crafted prose ‘A Chocolate Soldier’ serves as a simple warning against the
damaging effects of racism.
Tony Lindsay is an award-winning author and adjunct professor at Chicago State University. He can be reached on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tony.linssay2.
