Conflict Between Son And Dark Skinned Son

cannot talk to their masters as equals. While Paul D states his master would “defer to his slaves’ opinions,” he still concedes him doing so “did not deprive him of authority or power” (Morrison 147). Even though the slave men can give their opinions, their master still has the liberty to ignore their opinions. He has the final say, thereby negating their “equal” position.
Son, like Paul D, searches for meaning in himself. His search, however, is not impeded by a traumatic past but by a beautiful light-skinned black model. He struggles to balance his enrapturement for Jadine with his hunger for self-discovery, as the two goals contradict each other. He connects with the slaves who worked on Isle des Chevaliers from the moment he sees it, as
His enchantment with her beauty compels him to attempt seducing her while she sleeps, but “he barely had time to breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency before he crept away… so the animal smell would not alarm her or disturb the dream he had placed there” (Morrison 120). Their different dreams and skin make the contrast between the two readily apparent. Dark-skinned Son tries “to breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency” to reconcile the difference between their pigmentation. Their skin parallels their racial views: he is dark like tar and proud of his blackness while she is light-skinned and ashamed of the negative connotations that accompany black skin. By attempting to make her more black, he fails to realize he is trying to force two polar objects together. He cannot make his tarskin appear to have a “shiny consistency” to her because blackness is beautiful to him but not to her. He is so dark his presence in her room is compared to an “animal smell.” Trying to artificially induce Jadine with thoughts of traditional black life fails to sway her away from her infatuation with European culture. Yet, he naïvely tries with “the dream he had placed there.” While Jadine is far more interested in the notion of being white and European than being black, she is not completely aloof from the fact she is still black. She is repulsed by Margaret’s description of Son hiding in
Ironically, the two fight more as they spend more time with each other. Jadine’s stereotypical white view of black men manifests itself when the two argue and after hearing Son speak she surprisingly repeats, “Lazy. Really lazy. I never thought I’d hear a black man admit it” (Morrison 170). Son and Jadine cannot truly love each other because the two come from different cultures and have different values. By calling Son lazy, Jadine makes her view of black men clear. She sees them in the same egregious way most whites do, but Son fails to realize such a view is too egregious for him to correct. As a result, he wastes his time trying to make her see the beauty in blackness. Such is the case when he takes her to his hometown of Eloe. Upon seeing the town for the first time she disapprovingly asks, “This is a town? It looks like a block. A city block. In Queens” (Morrison 244). Son sees his loving black family and community in Eloe but Jadine is accustomed to New York’s glamour and sees Eloe as a backward society. Her instant judgement of the physical appearance of Eloe shows her lack of interest in black culture. Eloe’s small black community attracts Son but dissuades Jadine from staying with him. At this point, the two understand they have irreconcilable differences but Son still chases after her. Just as Jadine dislikes Eloe, Son dislikes New York. When he visits the large urban city with