The Bluest Eye: In-class

Cholly grew up in the South and was raised by his great aunt Jessy.
Jessy rescued him from a trash heap when he was only several days old. He had been left there, purposely, by his teen-aged mother. After Jessy's beating of Cholly's biological mother she ran away. Cholly never met his mother, nor his father, when he was a child. No one was even quite sure about who Cholly's father was; he had only been in town a few nights. After Jessy's death Cholly is meant to live with her brother in another town. The night before he is supposed to move however, he has a very humiliating and emotionally painful sexual experience. He soon becomes afraid that the girl he had made love to might be pregnant. Yet, instead of leaving to live with the uncle, or staying in the town with the girl, he decides to leave everything to find his own father, who had run away from Cholly's mother 16 years before. He finally does meet his father, only to be disappointed.
Later in his life Cholly had his own son, Sammy. Sammy "was known, by the time he was 14, to have run away from home no less than twenty-seven times" (p. 43). So, it had become a tradition. Sammy wasn't running away from a feared pregnancy, but he ran away just like his father and his grandfather had done before him.
All three had gone against the cultural standard of facing their troubles and responsibilities. Each of them ran away independently. Something that most do not have courage to do. Just like Cholly, Cholly's father, and Sammy were free, "dangerously free." They were allowed to do as they pleased, by others and by themselves. This behavior was almost expected of "them."