this emblem of freedom to the death. His love for his land would be passed on to his son and grandson, but their understanding of this inheritance would be tarnished by the money, the grit and greed of the cold, and often heartless, city skyline. As the generations progressed, ownership became for Macon and Milkman not a sense of pride, but an occasion for greed and profit. The spirit of Macon (Jake is his given name) will speak to Milkman and to Pilate until they understand their connections to the land, to their heritage, and to one another.

Song of Solomon is a novel whose third-person, limited omniscient narrator is sympathetic to the protagonist, Milkman Dead. To illustrate Milkman’s journey to self-knowledge as specifically African American, Toni Morrison uses Magical Realism, a worldview incorporating a culture’s myths, religion, and superstitions as natural, believable components of reality. The plot resembles a gothic detective story centered on four generations of one African American family, the Deads. At the age of thirty-one, Milkman knows little of his family history; he is caught in limbo, isolated from his past and uncertain about the future. His father tells him nothing of his own boyhood in Pennsylvania or about their relatives in Virginia; his aunt Pilate tells him a bit more, but her knowledge is limited. To become a man, Milkman needs to understand his heritage.

A former slave, Milkman’s grandfather received his name from information incorrectly recorded on a form. When asked his place of birth, he replied “Macon”; when asked about his father, he replied “Dead.” A careless clerk entered both words on the line marked “name,” so that the man’s name became Macon Dead. Such “accidents” impede Milkman’s quest for history. His grandfather became a successful farmer by cultivating wild forest into fertile farmland, but white neighbors coveted his land, offered to buy it, and killed him when he refused to sell, leaving Macon II and Pilate orphans. Pilate roamed from state to state, job to job, and man to man. Macon II finished high school, became a successful businessman, and married the daughter of the only black doctor in Mercy, Michigan. It was a loveless marriage, but it produced three children: Lena, First Corinthians, and Macon Dead III (Milkman).

Milkman’s motives for searching out his ancestors are not noble. Through a series of events involving his friend Guitar Baines’s political activities, Milkman learns a Dead family legend about bags of gold supposedly hidden in a Pennsylvania cave. He wants to find the gold and claim it for himself. To do so, however, he must return to the birthplaces of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Milkman is soon hooked on finding the missing pieces to his family tree. In Danville, Pennsylvania, he meets his father’s old friends and hears pleasant stories that almost make the son proud. Milkman also visits Circe, the old woman who took care of Macon II and Pilate after their father died. Circe tells Milkman where the cave is, but when he gets there, he finds not gold but bones. Thinking that Pilate might have moved the gold elsewhere, he remembers rumors of family members in Virginia and searches there. In Shalimar, he hears children singing a song about Solomon and Reena, his great-grandparents. Although he never finds any gold, Milkman pieces together his family history. Yet, the novel does not end well for Milkman. His friend Guitar, with whom he had agreed to share the gold, believes he was betrayed and kills Milkman.

Morrison’s use of time is complex. As the story progresses chronologically, Milkman traces his family history further into the past. The beginning of the novel is set in 1931, the year of Milkman’s birth; at the end of the novel, Milkman is physically in 1962, but he has psychologically joined his great-grandparents in the late days of slavery. Milkman’s location changes as he traces his family history: He travels from a Michigan city, to a small Pennsylvania town, and finally to rural Virginia. Morrison divides the novel into two unequal parts with a total of fifteen chapters. Chapters 1 through 9 take place in Mercy, Michigan, and deal with the background of Milkman’s immediate family, as well as his sexual initiation with his cousin Hagar. Chapters 10 through 15 deal with Milkman’s quest for gold and his extended family history.

The title of the novel refers to a children’s song which is sung in part in the opening scene of the novel, recurs at intervals later, is heard in its entirety about four-fifths of the way through, and is the litany Milkman sings for the death of Pilate in the final scene. Associated with the song throughout the novel is death, bereavement, and flying. The bereaved sing this song of loss, this ballad of the flight into oblivion of Solomon, who leapt from a high outcropping of rock to return to his native Africa, leaving a grief-stricken wife and twenty-one children. And children chant this song as part of a game, a ritual remembrance of the event of long ago. Pilate sings the refrain as a funeral dirge, and finally Milkman himself sings the song as a lamentation for Pilate’s death, as a final statement of his identity, and as an assertion of his love and courage to face life or death. The novel is laced with references to the supernatural or transcendent: ghosts appear to Pilate, Solomon flies, weird sounds of monas issue forth from Ryna’s Gulch, and when the once passive Milkman leaps, and even soars, to his life-or-death confrontation with Guitar, his courage and assertion of willingness to fight for his life are an almost miraculous change from his former behavior.

The underlying theme of the whole story is love—the transmuting power of love to make life worthwhile: to give people the courage to live despite grueling adversity. Counterpoised to this theme of love is that of hate, and its deadly souring effect on all who harbor it within themselves. As the Biblical Song of Solomon is a song of love, so this novel is a song of the love of people for one another, and the effect it has on making the people who love, and those who are loved, endure and flourish.

It is the anguish of his loneliness and hatred which drives the insurance agent Smith finally to seek escape through his mad attempt to fly with cloth wings from the cupola of Mercy Hospital out across Lake Superior. We learn later that he is one of the Seven Days, who have dedicated their lives to murder. From the development of the character, Guitar, we learn how corrosive hate can be, so that finally Guitar suspects, condemns, and attempts to execute his best friend Milkman, who is blameless in the matter of deception which Guitar accuses him of. Guitar, who has tried to justify his murderous ways by saying that they were acts of love for his own people, undertaken only as retribution against white people for their murders of blacks, finally is murdering for anger, suspicion, greed, and even pure carelessness, as when he kills Pilate arising from her father’s graveside.

In the narrative, the action develops out of the static situation of the Macon Dead family, in which the parents live in a state of continual antagonism, erupting frequently into verbal confrontations and occasionally into physical assaults against the mother by the father. The mother’s passiveness is deceptive, however: she provokes the father’s anger by her remarks, and the children have learned that this is so.

The parents’ warfare, which has blighted both their lives, is based on their perception of their relative social status. The mother was the daughter of the most prominent black man in town, a doctor of some wealth and social connections. She grew up as the adored and adoring only child of the widowed doctor. When the young, ambitious Macon Dead appeared in town from obscure and obviously lowly origins, he sought to marry Dr. Foster’s daughter to enhance his own social status and to increase the amount of money available to him to invest in real estate. In short order he became embittered by the doctor’s only slightly veiled haughtiness and scorn, and jealous of his young wife’s continued ardent devotion to her father.

It is a triumph of the author’s character development that even though we have been told of the relationship between the father and daughter from the father’s point of view (it was not sexual, and he was somewhat embarrassed by her continued childlike closeness into her later teens), when Macon Dead tells Milkman of his conviction that his wife and father-in-law had been somehow sexually connected, the reader is, like Milkman, very nearly convinced. When finally the mother tells her version of the relationship she had with her father, Milkman and the reader are finally able to fit the confusing pieces together and see the situation with compassion and with despair—despair because there is no love to heal the breach between the husband and wife, despair because the anger and outrage at being rejected have poisoned them and are destroying their capacity to love and grow.

Milkman and his sisters are used by both parents. Both want to make the children into images of their own ideals and to make them reject the values and lifestyle of their mate. The mother wants Milkman to become a doctor like her father, and even suggests that he might take her maiden name as his own last name. She wants her daughters to marry well, and will consider as suitors only professional men. Then finally, when no such suitors appear, she considers that perhaps some civil worker like a postal employee might do. The father wants his son to join him in the real estate business he owns, and is adamant that the daughters shall choose men of ambition and status.

The father’s covetousness, his manipulation of his power in the community, and his inability to love people or be loved by them, drives his children and his wife and indeed everyone from any warm relationship with him. Contrasted to Macon Dead’s greed, suspicion, and self-righteousness is his sister Pilate’s openness, trust, and love. She is all that he is not. She lives in the utmost simplicity, with generosity, kindness, and love motivating all her actions. Macon cannot accept her love, her generosity, her ethics, nor her forgiveness. He tells Milkman, “You want to be a whole man, you got to know the whole truth”; yet he himself is the one who is constantly diminished by his lack of knowledge or acceptance of the truth. He relies instead on suspicion and conjecture. Just as he suspects his wife of incestuous relationships with her father, he suspects his sister of taking and hoarding a cache of gold. Milkman realizes the hopelessness of trying to arouse any feeling for people in his father when the father makes it plain that he has no interest in going to Virginia to renew family ties with his people. He would only like to return to Pennsylvania where he could display his wealth and power pridefully to the men who remembered him as a small boy, and who would admire him for attaining wealth and prestige.

The boy Milkman is much influenced by the people who touch his life and urge him to adopt their ways. He is essentially passive, accepting all, choosing none. He accepts his father’s offer to work in the real estate business, and conducts the business according to his father’s ways. He accepts his mother’s friends and social position, and enjoys parties and the social contacts of the best black social stratum. He accepts the love and generosity of Pilate and Hagar, and uses them both, without reciprocating in any real way.

Milkman joins Guitar and his “lower class” group for companionship and pleasure, but while he is personally loyal to Guitar as a friend, he rejects the code of ethics which Guitar espouses. But if he rejects this code of life based on hate, he likewise rejects the love and the responsibility of love which Hagar represents. He would seem, like his father and Guitar, to be eschewing love and espousing greed and selfishness when he rejects Hagar and plots to rob Pilate. The abortive robbery whets his appetite for wealth. What had been a half-hearted, clumsy attempt at a robbery becomes, after it is frustrated, a spur to him to seek the gold wherever it may be: in the hills of Pennsylvania or in Virginia if it is not in Michigan. Then he does not want his father or Guitar to go with him. He wants to get it himself. This shift from a passive to an active stance is the beginning of a change in Milkman. Guitar notices it at once, and is suspicious, believing that his friend has decided to cut him out.

But once out of his home community, Milkman encounters kindness, generosity, warmth, welcome, and acceptance by strangers. Confused at first, he finally responds in kind. He aids the freight yard worker who needs help to lift a heavy load. He accepts the embrace of the aged Circe and suppresses his revulsion at the filth and decay in which she lives. He feels a genuine chagrin when people are affronted by what they consider to be his arrogant ways. He is challenged, and fights for his right to be in Shalimar. But he finds peace among these people when he sinks exhausted against the tree and acknowledges that they can do things he cannot, and that these people, his people, have merit and pride in their accomplishments and talents which have nothing to do with wealth or social status.

In this new knowledge, in this revelation of the truth, the desire for the gold vanishes. Nor does it return again. He has found something more precious: a genuine respect for people, which rapidly ripens into affection. He seeks to learn from his past, his forbears, and his relations living still. He enjoys Sweet as he has never enjoyed a woman before. He even tries to convince the murderous Guitar that he is still his true and honest friend.

Returning home, he learns of Hagar’s death, and while he acknowledges that he never loved her and never could, he accepts his guilt and regret that he caused her such anguish. He takes from Pilate the box of Hagar’s hair, and takes it home to keep, to remember his guilt and his relationship to her. Earlier Hagar had told Pilate that Milkman hated her hair, that he liked smooth, silky, copper-colored hair. The black kinky hair of Hagar is a potent symbol of Milkman’s change of attitude. He has accepted his relationship to his people, though they be poor, uneducated, and strange in their ways.

With this acceptance, with this new evaluation of the worth of man and his worldly goods, he comes to see Pilate as the ideal person. Her death transforms him. He is infused with her spirit of love—her dying wish to have been able to love more people—and he sings louder and louder the Song of Solomon. It is chanted as a dirge, a conviction, and a promise. He rises, in the splendor of his love and grief, and literally soars to his confrontation with hatred and evil in the person of his friend Guitar.

The magic of flying and the association with love and loss are pervasive throughout the book. Solomon leapt from the bluff to fly back to his beloved Africa and his people there. When Jake the son of Solomon was shot, he soared five feet into the air before falling dead to earth. As he cradles the dying Pilate in his arms, Milkman observes that she could fly without ever leaving the ground. Then he flies too, in his new control of himself, in his new awareness of his power to make his life increase in all the important ways of loving and giving.

The strength and complexity of the main characters make it difficult to label them simplistically, although they certainly embody thematic concepts within their character development. For if Guitar embodies the idea of the curdling of righteous resentment into evil for its own sake, he is also the one who chides Milkman for his cavalier treatment of Hagar, and who solicitously urges him to give up smoking and drinking. Again, Milkman’s father seems to have almost no warmth or affection in him, yet he becomes tender and gentle when reminiscing about his father and recalling the happiness and affection they shared when working in the fields together many years before. Even Freddie’s gossipy malice hides a wistful loneliness, and Milkman’s sisters turn out to have unexpected depth of character when First Corinthians finally falls in love and defies the family to be with Henry.

The world of this story is entirely black. No white characters really enter it at all. The whites exist only as a nebulous menace, a reported encounter, a faceless power. If this is possibly unrealistic, it has the artistic merit of eliminating the unessential and concentrating the story on the thematically important issues, without introducing elements which might be confusing or distracting in the development of the central idea.

Some potentially interesting and complex characters are introduced and then dropped or minimized. One could wish to learn more about them, but the story would have had to be longer to do that, perhaps without being any better, only richer in subplots and characterizations. But the novel does not need that; it has all it needs of people and events. It moves swiftly and effortlessly through its time and space, as events, encounters, and narrations impinge on the consciousness of Milkman. Then in Part Two, Milkman comes alive and begins to shape events, and to formulate his own design for living. The Song of Solomon, the song of love and flying and total commitment, has become his song, and he understands it even as Pilate did. The dialogue has such a ring of authenticity that the melody of the words is almost audible in print. Descriptive passages fit in well and are notably clear and concise.

The book ends just as the battle to the death between Guitar and Milkman is beginning. And yet the book seems complete, for the most important thing has happened. Whether he lives or dies, Milkman has become a courageous, actively committed, loving human being, indifferent to wealth, appearances, and superficialities. He is his own man, knowing what he believes, and ready to fight to the death for it, but eager to live and to seek out and share love.

This story of a life is really a story of many lives, for all his people share in Milkman’s life, as he shares in theirs. And this is part of the story too, that belonging, support, and understanding are more precious than gold, and more lasting. Pilate is the strongest character in the book, by far; but this is finally Milkman’s story. For he learns from her and from others, and chooses her way, although the way of the fliers is disruptive, anarchic, unrealistic, and unprofitable. Indeed, it is dangerous unto death, the story tells, but it is also the way of fulfillment and life, and Milkman chooses his way with rejoicing.

Song of Solomon, winner of the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is an intricately woven, thematically complex novel that addresses ancestral history, class-versus-race bonds, and sexism. Milkman Dead begins searching for gold and freedom from familial ties; in the process of searching, he discovers his family history and learns about his own tribal power. Although the opening scene occurs in 1931, the characters tell stories that date back to the late nineteenth century, when Milkman’s great grandfather, Solomon, flew away from a field in which he worked as a slave, leaving behind twenty-one children and an African myth of flight.

Milkman is born despite his father’s efforts to make Ruth perform a home abortion. The problems in Macon and Ruth’s marriage stem in part from Macon’s discovery of Ruth lying naked in bed beside her father’s corpse, kissing his hands. Moreover, Macon denies his wife and two daughters any respect or autonomy, using them instead as gauges of his financial success. Macon defines life as “learning to own things,” and the things he owns include his family members.

When Milkman becomes a teenager, Macon tries to involve Milkman in his business of renting property in a low-income district. Macon constantly counts and rattles his keys to the properties he rents, indicating his pride in ownership. Nevertheless, it is during these years that Milkman meets Pilate, the sister from whom Macon was separated for more than twenty years; she inspires Milkman’s curiosity about his family history.

Strongly connected to her own history, Pilate wears an earring that is made of a small silver box containing the original piece of paper on which her father first wrote her name. Pilate and Macon were twelve and sixteen when they witnessed their father’s murder. While in hiding, fearing that the same people would kill them, they encountered a white man, whom Macon killed, and they discovered several bags of gold near a cave. Pilate and Macon argued over whether to keep the gold. They separated, and when Macon returned to the cave a couple of days later, the gold was missing. He decided that Pilate had stolen it from him.

Instead, she has carried around the bones of her father for more than twenty years. Pilate does not realize that they are her father’s bones until the end of the novel. She thinks that they are the bones of the white man whom Macon killed.

After putting together pieces of stories from Pilate and Macon, Milkman travels to Virginia, where he learns that his great grandfather is the subject of folk songs sung by children and folktales told by adults. Milkman realizes his rich history, his ancestral power, and his connection to nature.

Aware of the truth, Milkman returns to Michigan. He shares his stories of the places, songs, and stories dedicated to his people. Milkman tells Pilate that the bones are her father’s and takes her to Virginia to bury them on Solomon’s Leap, a flat outcropping of rock that overlooks a deep valley. A participant in the search for gold, Guitar, standing in the valley, shoots and kills Pilate, thinking that he has been cheated out of his share of the gold. Empowered by his discovery of his ancestors and himself, Milkman surrenders “to the air” and leaps toward Guitar’s arms.

Morrison’s women in this novel are fascinating, and they are necessary to Milkman’s maturity and development as well as to the fulfillment of his journey. The magnificent Pilate, juxtaposed with her brother Macon, illustrates for Milkman how far removed his parents and sisters are from natural lives. During Milkman’s search in Virginia, women provide significant pieces to the puzzle of his history. An examination of Pilate, Ruth, and Hagar indicates, however, that Morrison wishes to point out that women are not allowed the freedoms that men enjoy in this society.

Milkman’s mother and aunt are the two important women in his life. As the daughter of the only African American doctor in town, Ruth is bred to an upper-middle-class existence. She is presented in the novel as the underside of the ideal Southern lady image. She is totally cut off from life, benevolently imprisoned by her father, and spitefully contained by her husband, who marries her because of her class position and despises her for her inherent weakness. Ruth’s life is one of uneventful waste. As critic Barbara Christian explains, her life is symbolic of the terror that awaits those women who become the emblem of a man’s wealth and class position.

Unlike Ruth, Pilate exists totally outside societal structures, as is indicated by her lack of a navel. Her home, which is not even equipped with electricity, stands outside town. She sees little value in material things and sells homemade wine to provide an income for herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter. Pilate possesses admirable strength and energy, but, in order to grow and survive on her own terms, she has to move outside society.

Hagar’s acceptance of European standards of beauty, such as light skin, straight hair, and thin noses, illustrates the ill effects of society’s tendency to objectify women who live within it. When Milkman rejects Hagar, she concludes that her woolly hair, unfashionable clothes, and lack of makeup are the reasons. Frantically, she shops for stockings, lipsticks, and other cosmetics, hoping to transform herself into something she imagines Milkman finds acceptable.

By the end of the novel, Milkman recalls and regrets his treatment of Hagar. His experience with her and his exposure to the other women in his life lead him toward the fulfillment he enjoys as his journey closes. Morrison seems to imply that women are necessary participants in the development of males. Meanwhile, male-dominated cultures impede female development.

Post-World War I America

Though Song of Solomon is set during the 1950s and 60s, much of its action results from events that happened at the turn of the century, including the Great Migration and World War I and its aftermath. The Great Migration involved the movement of millions of southern Blacks to the urban North in search of jobs and freedom in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. In her novel, Morrison gives voice to one of those families, the Deads, showing their progression from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Michigan. Likewise, Guitar has left the South with his family after his father's death, and no doubt many of the other inhabitants of Southside are relatively recent migrants from the rural South. The Great Migration, though it represented marginal material progress, is also portrayed by Morrison, among others, as representing the loss of a traditional rural culture. Certainly her characterization of Macon Dead, whose loss of his father and his rural lifestyle makes him emotionally stingy and materially greedy, represents this loss.

In addition to heading north, many Blacks enlisted in the armed forces during World War I as a way to improve their status in society. They were subject to discrimination even during their time in the armed forces, but they hoped that the war's end would bring new opportunities in economic life and in civil rights. After all, the war had been waged ostensibly to protect and extend democracy. Instead, the war's end marked a renewal of Ku Klux Klan activities; some Black soldiers were lynched while still in their uniforms. The summer of 1919, after the end of the war, marked the greatest period of interracial strife in the nation's history. In part, the violence escalated because Blacks were more willing to defend themselves from racist attacks. Morrison echoes this in her treatment of the Seven Days, the older members of which are World War I veterans who speak bitterly of their mistreatment on their return. Other Blacks fought back against racism by increasing their level of activism; some historians credit the period immediately following World War I with the birth of the modern-day civil-rights movement.

Civil Rights Movement

One of the important moments in Song of Solomon is the moment when Milkman finds Guitar in the barbershop listening to a report about the murder of Emmett Till. Till was a fourteen year old from Chicago visiting Mississippi in 1955. He allegedly whistled at a white woman and was murdered by whites. No one was ever convicted for his murder, but it was one of the catalysts for a renewal of the civil-rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been arguing against the legality of segregation in the courts, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and others began using nonviolent direct action to desegregate facilities in the South. In 1963, King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, which inspired many Americans. Shortly thereafter, though, whites bombed a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. This would later be described as a pivotal moment in the struggle, a moment when many Blacks began to despair that freedom would never be attained. Some civil-rights workers became radicalized, no longer believers in nonviolent action. This is echoed in the character of Guitar, whose violence becomes more acute—and misdirected—after the little girls are killed.

Motif

The main motif in Song of Solomon is flying: the novel begins with Robert Smith's flight from the roof of Mercy Hospital and ends with Milkman's flight from Solomon's Leap. The motif of flight is a complicated one: it represents transcendence as well as loss. Milkman's great-grandfather Solomon was able to transcend his circumstances by flying back to Africa, but in doing so he abandoned his wife and children. Milkman finds a better example of flight in Pilate, who can fly without leaving the ground.

Narration

Though the main focus of Song of Solomon is Milkman's story, the narrator repeatedly turns to other stories to show how they intersect with Milkman's story. The narrative jumps back and forth in time to give the reader the necessary background for understanding the current situation being discussed. For example, in chapter nine the narrative shifts to the story of Corinthians and her affair with Henry Porter. When Milkman realizes that Porter is a member of the Seven Days, he tells his father about the affair, and Macon reacts punitively, forbidding Corinthians from leaving the house and evicting Porter and garnishing his wages. This provokes Lena to confront Milkman, which in turn spurs him to leave home.

Another aspect of the narration is the point of view of the narrator, which, as Catherine Rainwater noted in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, sometimes merges "with that of a character, but later undercuts or problematizes this point of view by presenting its alternatives." Though the narrator of Song of Solomon seems omniscient, all-knowing, in fact the narrator does not present any absolute truths, only the narrow perspectives of the characters. In this way, readers are forced to interpret the history and the meaning of the story's events and the character's lives for themselves, just as Milkman does when he hears the song of Solomon.

Bildungsroman

The Bildungsroman is the classic Western coming-of-age novel. The Bildungsroman usually presents a young hero struggling to find his identity. In Milkman's case, he is at thirty-two much older than the classic Bildungsroman hero, but Morrison shows how Milkman's race, class, and natural inclination to passivity keep him trapped in his carefree boyhood until events in the story compel him to grow up. Cynthia A. Davis writes in Toni Morrison that "Milkman's life follows the pattern of the classic hero, from miraculous birth … through quest journey to final reunion with his double" as Milkman comes of age. The Bildungsroman is sometimes called the "novel of education" or "apprenticeship novel." In this case, Milkman's education is not the formal education he learns in school, but an education in his family's mythic past. He apprentices himself to his mythic great-grandfather and learns to fly as a result.

Because Song of Solomon is an accessible novel, and because it involves an exciting version of the quest for cultural solidarity, it should provoke lively discussions on matters like gender and ethnic stereotyping and variations on economic independence for minorities. Another focus for conversation might be Morrison's treatment of the Seven Days. She does not defend the attitudes and values of the group, but to what degree does she suggest that such groups are inevitable in a climate of racism? To what degree are Guitar and his associates creations of a repressive white economic culture?

1. What are we to make of the irony that Milkman's first other-directed deed in the novel, helping a man load a crate in the Danville station, convinces Guitar that he deserves to be hunted down and killed?

2. Is Circe, the ancient crone he encounters in the Butler mansion, a living anomaly, or has Milkman encountered a ghost (note her youthful voice and see Beloved for another ambivalent treatment of a ghostlike presence)? What readings of the novel are implicit in either response?

3. What specific experiences liberate Milkman in Shalimar? Which are the most important, and why?

4. Is Milkman responsible for Hagar's death? Pilate seems to think so, but she later forgives him. Do we as readers hold him accountable for Hagar's dependence? If so, is his carrying her hair, presumably accepting his role in her death, an adequate gesture of responsibility?

5. What does happen as the novel ends? Does Milkman fly? Will he defeat or be killed by Guitar? What understanding of the novel is implicit in either reading? Why does Morrison end the book on such an ambiguous note?

Morrison's place in American literature was assured with the publication of her third novel, Song of Solomon, by far her most penetrating inquiry into the sources and causes of cultural alienation among African-Americans. The book earned many awards and established her as both a popular and as a serious novelist. Few writers of her generation would be so simultaneously admired by the critics and by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Building on the critique of materialism and racism in American society developed in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), with this novel Morrison deepened her understanding of the causes of African-American cultural malaise. Although her emphasis remains on discrimination and limited opportunities for minorities, the problem central to Song of Solomon concerns strategies among the fragmented African-American community to deal with institutional racism. Each generation of her central family attempts strategies to deal with minority status in America, but the novel as a whole indicates that these are dead ends without a rediscovery of the lore and legends of African-American culture.

These tactics correspond with the generations of the main family, whose eldest male heir is always named Macon Dead. The eldest Macon received this as his name when a drunk reconstruction officer registered the ex-slave as a free man. Entries on the wrong lines resulted in the new freeman's first name being listed as that of a city, and his family name was listed as the condition in which his parents were believed to be. The cracker who made the error thought it was funny, but the family persisted, perhaps perversely, in keeping the strange name. As Guitar Baines, another character whose destiny mingles with that of the youngest Macon, argues later in the novel, ex-slaves were given the names of the oppressors, and denied their own (a theme Morrison will develop fully in Beloved, 1987) — thus the central confusion in the book about the three names of the legendary Solomon: In contemporary songs he is called "Sugarman"; a Virginia town named after him is "Shalimar." If names are one public symbol for identity, as Morrison argues in this and subsequent novels, African-Americans are uniquely encumbered by names that belong to Euro-Americans and were imposed as residual vestiges of slave culture, or have been verbally garbled in the oral transmission of "ourstory."

The eldest Macon Dead responded to white economic power by establishing an African-American enterprise separate and equal economically if not socially with the majority culture. Establishing himself as a freed slave in Danville, Pennsylvania — having fled the overt racism of the south — he enacted the pioneer ideal by converting a piece of land no one else thought tillable into a model farm he called, in honor of the great Emancipator, "Lincoln's Heaven." But as his enterprise succeeded, white neighbors came to envy his success and to covet his riches. When Macon resisted a takeover by the Butler clan, then took up arms to protect his home, they murdered him on the very fence that symbolized his effort at separatism while his children watched in horror.

Scarred emotionally by watching his father die, Macon Dead II did not attempt to compete with white America, but chose to out scramble his fellow African-Americans for what white people leave behind. He emigrated to Detroit and eventually became a slum lord. He married the daughter of the town's only black physician and transformed his struggling real estate firm into an investment company that buys up unwanted properties and rents them, at exorbitant rates, to blacks. During the novel he evicts sympathetically drawn characters: Guitar Baines's widowed mother, whose husband dies in a sawmill accident implicitly because of the white owners' negligence, defaults on her rent, so out she and her children go; Howard Porter, Macon's daughter First Corinthians's lover, is evicted because, as laborer and lover.

The represents a threat to the respectability Macon so desperately craves. Macon's pride is in the fine automobiles he drives; his dream is to develop a beach front community for wealthy blacks in a section of lakefront whites do not want anyway.

Macon's material success, while impressive, is a hollow victory, won at the expense of other struggling African-Americans. Because his power is merely materialistic, he does not command respect or love from his family, and his son, whom he grooms to follow in his footsteps as he believes he follows in his father's, is so bound up by materialism that he lacks a strong self-concept. He sees little value in himself or in his family. As he accepts his role as his father's successor, he finds no happiness or meaning in his role as landlord and collector. Throughout the first half of the novel, Milkman (so called because of his mother's nursing him beyond his infancy, suggesting her reluctance to grant him freedom and autonomy) unwittingly struggles with his father's materialistic aesthetic, in which ownership is the only way to establish parity with the whites, but, with no idea that his real enemy is materialism, not just Euro-American culture, seeks to find happiness by adding possessions: autos, fine clothes, money, women. He is, however, locking himself more inescapably into the cycle of materialism, which cost his grandfather his life and his father his soul. Morrison's point is that a materialism emulating that of Euro-American culture will not liberate black American culture from the delayed effects of slavery.

Finally, Morrison treats the growing militancy of some African-American groups of the 1970s, such as the Black Panthers and SNCC, through her creation of a radical, militant, vigilante group "the Seven Days." Drawing on historical accounts of injustice, in cases like the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till (Morrison later wrote a play, Dreaming Emmett, 1986), the Seven Days concoct a desperate, mad plan for responding to racist terrorism. Basing their theory on the (racist) assumption that only white people are capable of deliberate violence, Guitar and other men Milkman believes to be sensible commit themselves to systematic, passionless acts of violence in retaliation for that done to blacks by whites. The act must be taken against a randomly-chosen white victim, and it must emulate the crime against the blacks. The Days concoct a theory of numbers to justify their protocols, claiming that if white violence against blacks is not answered in kind, over many generations the numerical majority that now permits injustice will lead to genocide. Morrison represents the Days as a desperate effort to respond to cruelty by whites, but she also shows that their way is flawed and a form of racism itself. Although two fundamental codes of the Days are that blacks must never commit violence against blacks, and that materialism is the basis of social injustice, Guitar, representing the Days, becomes so obsessed with gold he believes Milkman is keeping from the Days for selfish ends, that he makes repeated attempts on Milkman's life, eventually taking the life of the novel's most sympathetic character. Milkman's aunt Pilate, Morrison suggests that, although the anger driving the militant Days is real, their solution is inherently flawed. Like materialism, militancy is another false solution to the problem of finding an African-American identity in European-American culture.

1963: President Kennedy is assassinated, plunging all Americans into mourning.

1970s: President Nixon resigns after being implicated in the Watergate scandal.

Today: President Clinton is impeached, becoming the butt of jokes because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

1963: Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated and his assailant brags about the murder before being acquitted by an all-white jury.

1970s: Americans of all colors are inspired by the television miniseries Roots.

Today: Byron de la Beckwith, the murderer of Medgar Evers, is sentenced to life in prison by a mixed-race jury.

1963: Many schools are still racially segregated by law.

1970s: Because of "white flight" to the suburbs, many schools become resegregated.

Today: Some Blacks begin to question the value of integration and instead work to strengthen all-Black institutions.

By most standards, Song of Solomon is technically conservative for the author of The Bluest Eye and Sula. It is unique in Morrison's canon because it takes an essentially masculine view of the quest and in that the central figure is a male. It follows the logic of the quest one of literature's true archetypes. The hero sets out looking for one thing, but learns as the quest develops that what he really needs to find is something else. Traditional variations on the quest motif involve some form of renewal — the grail quest behind much modern literature leads to a cultural and agricultural renewal — and as Milkman reshapes and defines his quest, he brings back to Detroit a new and vital appreciation for African-American culture and folklore, presumably something that liberates his life and can empower others as well. Morrison, however, qualifies this traditional quest result by introducing the killing of Pilate and the ambiguity of the final confrontation between Milkman and Guitar; will their embrace, surely resulting in the death of one, prevent Milkman from taking his new view back to Detroit?

The novel is organized into two quests, one false and one true. While Milkman seeks gold, he commits to an end that compounds rather than solves his problem. Discovering, through perils reminiscent of traditional quests such as caves, mansions haunted by ghostlike figures, hostile strangers, night-hunts, and attempts on his life, that his goal is destructive, Milkman adapts his quest to one for sources and knowledge.

During the 1970s, a large movement toward discovery of the familial and cultural origins of African-Americans took place. Perhaps the most spectacular commercial success was Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which was later adapted as a television miniseries, about a family's discovering its origins in Africa. Although Morrison does not take her characters back to Africa, she offers us a very sophisticated version of the quest for roots in American post slave culture.

The final unifying symbol of the novel is flight. The epigraph mentions the fathers' flight as a matter of legend, and Milkman is energized by learning the story of Solomon's flight. His own birth took place in a white hospital because Ruth went into labor when a man tried to fly but fell to his death, an event accompanied by Pilate's song about "Sugarman," which we eventually learn is a corruption of the song of Solomon. Milkman's low self-esteem as a child is traced to his discovery that he could not fly. Solomon's flight is a legendary defiance of the slave code, and Milkman may literally or figurally take flight to confront Guitar. The figure's full implications, like many themes and motifs in Song of Solomon, are manifested by Pilate, who, Milkman realizes as she dies, could fly all along — because of her transcendent love and forgiveness.

Sources

Appiah, K.A. and Gates Jr., Henry Louis, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Awkward, Michael. “’Unruly and Let Loose': Myth, Ideology and Gender in Song of Solomon," in his Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 137-55.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. London: Abacus, 1975.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1993.

Century, Douglas. Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1994.

Cirlot, J.E. A Dictionary of Symbols. New York: Philosophical Library, 1962.

Davis, Cynthia A. "Self, Society and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction," in Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1990, pp. 7-26.

Dematrakopoulos, Stephanie A. and Holloway, Karla F. C. New Dimensions of Spirituality—A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Garnick, Vivian. "Into the Dark Heart of Childhood," in The Village Voice, August 29, 1977, p. 41.

Harris, A. Leslie. "Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 69-76.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Howard, Maureen. A review in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Spring, 1978.

Iannone, Carol. "Toni Morrison's Career," in Commentary, Vol. 84, No. 6, December, 1987, pp. 59-63.

Jefferson, Margo. "Black Gold," Newsweek, September 12, 1977, p. 93.

Lardner, Susan. “Word of Mouth,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1977, 217–221.

LeClair, Thomas. “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” New Republic, March 21, 1981, 25–29.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Matus, Jill. "Song of Solomon: Raising Dead Fathers," in her Toni Morrison, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 72-85.

McKay, Nellie Y. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1988.

Millar, Neil. “Toni Morrison’s Brilliant Black Novel,” Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 1977, 25.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon, Knopf, 1977.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: New American Library, 1977.

Morrison, Toni. “Toni Morrison on the ‘Spoken Library,’” (Excerpt of speech at the NCTE Annual Convention). English Journal, February, 1978, 29.

Reynolds, Price. "Black Family Chronicle," in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1977, pp. 1, 48.

Rainwater, Catherine. "Worthy Messengers: Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison's Novels," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 96-113.

Strouse, Jean. “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic,” Newsweek, March 30, 1981, 52–57.

Walker, Melissa. Down From the Mountaint: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement (1966–1989). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Wigan, Angela. “Native Daughter,” Time, September 12, 1977, 76.

For Further Study

Bertram D. Ashe, " ‘Why Don't He Like My Hair?': Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurston' s Their Eyes Were Watching God," African American Review, Vol. 29, Winter 1995, pp. 579-92.

As she discusses how Black women deal with white standards of beauty by using examples from novels by Morrison and Hurston.

Susan L. Blake, "Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon," MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 77-83.

Blake discusses the tensions between community and individuality in Song of Solomon.

Joseph A. Brown, "To Cheer the Weary Traveler: Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and History," The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 49, Fall, 1996, pp. 709-26.

This essay contrasts William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! with Morrison's Song of Solomon.

David Cowart, "Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison's Song of Solomon," American Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1, March, 1990, pp. 87-102.

This piece discusses some of the literary influences on Morrison's work.

Chiara Spallino, "Song of Solomon: An Adventure in Structure," in Callaloo, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1985, pp. 510-24.

This essay maps the structure of Morrison's novel and discusses the differences between the "family past" and the "mythic past" in the novel.

Gary Storhoff, "'Anaconda Love:' Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Style, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 290-309.

Storhoff shows how each of Morrison's characters suffer from their dysfunctional family relationships.

Jean Strouse, "Toni Morrison's Black Magic," Newsweek, March 30, 1981, p. 52.

Strouse's cover story on Toni Morrison's life and career marks the publication of her fourth novel, Tar Baby.

Darwin T. Turner, "Theme, Characterization and Style in the Works of Toni Morrison," in Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press, 1984, pp. 361-69.

This piece gives a broad overview of Morrison's first four novels.