December 7, 2007
Toni Morrison’s writing is like an addiction, like magic — when I first read Beloved, one of her later novels, I was captivated by the depth of the sadness in the book; the power of the memories. The prose ebbed and flowed around me, creating a poignant, evocative world — creating something deceptively familiar, yet intrinsically exotic. Song of Solomon was nothing less — at its very least, it is a humbling tale of family and fortune. Believe me. Some books are just worth a $10 library fine.
On a winter’s day in 1931, Macon “Milkman” Dead is born, a bridge between two almost isolated ends of his family, bathed by velvet rose petals and shaded by two blue silk wings that fell to the ground under the weight of the body they carried. His mother, Ruth Foster, never escaped the cocoon that her father had created around her, sheltering her with wealth and an almost scandalous closeness — Ruth, the doctor’s daughter, the doting child and mother all the same.
And I also prayed for you. Every single night and every single day. On my knees. Now you tell me. What harm did I do you on my knees?
His father, also Macon Dead — as was his father before him — is a proud, self-made man, quick to assume, quick to anger, and quick to hate — he suspects everyone around him of trying to upset the success that he created for himself and his family — up to and including his own family. From within their home on Not Doctor Street, his older sisters, Magdalene called Lena, and First Corinthians, make rose petals from expensive velvet — struggling to live their lives without the constant specter of their family’s culture and sophistication.
On autumn nights, in some part so the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An odor like crystallized ginger, or sweet iced tea with a dark clove floating in it … this heavy spice-sweet smell that made you think of the East and striped tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets … the ginger smell was sharp, sharp enough to distort dreams and make the sleeper believe the things he hungered for were right at hand. To the Southside residents who were awake on such nights, it gave all their thoughts and activity a quality of being both intimate and far away … but they didn’t think of ginger. Each thought it was the way freedom smelled, or justice, or luxury, or vengeance.
Eager to be free of his immediate family, although he never will be, Milkman seeks the company of his aunt, Pilate Dead, who lives in a shack far from the luxury and prestige of Not Doctor Street, making illegal wine and singing cryptic songs, old and young in the same body, and wearing a single earring — a brass snuffbox in which her father’s only written word, her name, Pilate, meticulously copied onto a scrap of paper, is buried for all time. Pilate teaches him about simplicity and loyalty; her daughter Reba teaches him about luck; her granddaughter, Hagar, teaches him about love, fear, and lunacy. Desperate for Milkman’s love, she tries first to recapture his attention, and second, to kill him — neither efforts succeed, leaving Hagar broken:
Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him … they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way.
Milkman, eager to escape from Hagar and pursue his own glory, teams up with his “friend” Guitar, a young man, and a member of the secretive “Days”, a quasi-terrorist group intent on setting the racial score straight; for every black man killed by a white man, he kills one white man. For every black church bombed, he bombs a white church. For every betrayal, every twist of fate, he determines a price to be paid — and too often, that price is someone’s life. When he and Milkman plan to steal Pilate’s gold, a quest that eventually leads Milkman to uncover the secret of his family’s identity, Guitar knows that he will be watching Milkman at every turn — anything to keep the dream of gold alive, even for only one of them.
Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? … Guitar was exceptional. To both questions he could answer yes.
And so Milkman ventures alone, looking at first for gold, and later for ancestry — for truth. He travels in and out of small towns that are jealous of cars, jealous of three piece suits, but never, as Milkman is, of family. Stalked endlessly by Guitar, Milkman strives to uncover the past as it happened, brimming with bones, with names, with songs, with tears, but never with gold. He learns the story of his great-grandfather, Solomon, who flew with the intent of saving his dearest son, Jake, the last of twenty-one children — and of Jake, who was shot by jealous landowners, who flew off of his fence post and, while in life, his children’s anchor, but in death a broken beam between them. But most of all, he learns his own story — outside of Hagar’s arms, his mother’s arms, Guitar’s arms. He learns to soar.
Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.
