Concerning Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

“Hitler’s the most natural white man in the world. He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn’t have us. Can you see those Klansmen shocked by him? No, you can’t.

Morrison did it again. She crafted another masterpiece novel. Song of Solomon is unlike her other works for featuring a male protagonist and perspective, and for its urban setting. Reading her other works, such as Beloved and Sula, one grows accustomed to rural and small-town settings for characters. Solomon is set in urban Michigan, and its uncertain which city. Perhaps Detroit, but there is not enough definitive information to ascertain the city. Regardless of the urban habitat, the story is unique for focusing on manhood and the male perspective on the purpose of life. Indeed, the story is a coming of age novel about Macon "Milkman" Dead, who moves beyond his naive and selfish extended childhood to learn to care about others and trying to understand the world from another's perspective. Thus, the novel draws on 20th century African-American urban life and oral traditions to deliver a message of universal love and compassion.

Macon "Milkman" Dead III is referred to as Milkman because his mother kept breastfeeding him until he was about seven years old. Freddie, a local black man, saw Milkman and his mother, Ruth, in the act, and his nickname for Macon III became common around the city's black community. His parents have a loveless marriage filled with scorn, physical abuse, and lack of understanding that creates a dysfunctional family. After the birth of his two older sisters, Corinthians and Magdalene 13 and 12 years before his birth, his parents' marriage fell apart. Ruth, the daughter of the first colored doctor in the city, and light-skinned like her father, inherits his disdain for the darker-skinned and lower class Negroes. The good doctor only accepted Macon Dead II as husband for his daughter because of his middle-class background and the fact that he himself was apparently uncomfortable with the closeness of his daughter to him as she ages. Ruth's inheritance of color prejudice and class prejudice mostly prevent her from loving and understanding others.

Macon II, Milkman's father, believes the purpose of manhood is acquire things at the cost of others, so his materialistic approach to understanding others prevents him from showing compassion for lower class blacks and learning to not exploit others. Indeed, Macon II Dead exploits his tenants in his apartments he accumulates to enrich himself at the expense of proper living conditions and community relations. His pursuit of wealth and the exploitative capitalist system to get the respect of whites ultimately fails him as well. When he goes to prison to free his son after foolishly telling him to rob his sister, Pilate, he assumes his accumulation of wealth and high status as an African-American will lead to white acceptance of him. Macon assumes his wealth and name was the reason the police freed Milkman from prison, but in fact his wealth and reputation among whites due to his higher economic status had nothing to do with Macon. Macon also attempts to behave like whites when he buys lakefront summer property for vacations, the first colored man in the city to do so. He believes that if he keeps accumulating wealth he will then be accepted by whites and receive additional credit and loans from white-controlled banks to allow him to further enrich himself. Obviously, his materialistic relations with others prevent him from loving others, or forming real relationships. Anyone who believes the only meaning in life is to acquire more and more will not have real relationships with other human beings.

Unfortunately, for most of Milkman's young life, his approach to understanding human relations and love is soured by that of his parents, and his best friend, Guitar. Guitar, as motherless child raised by his grandmother after both his parents die, is penniless and leads a very immature and rather hedonistic lifestyle until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s radicalizes him. Guitar's grandmother rents from Milkman's father, and despite his low class origins, Milkman and him continue their friendship, much to Ruth's chagrin. Unlike Guitar, who grows to accept violence as a necessary part of the human condition and race relations, Milkman remains an immature, selfish, and lazy youth. His father employs him after high school in the real estate business, and his mother and sisters lavish him with attention and praise so he lives an idle life of drinking, partying, sex, and constant financial support from his well-to-do father.

His friendship with Guitar begins to fall apart as Guitar begins to sound more and more like Malcolm X, especially concerning the innate evil in whites. For Guitar, whites are incorrigible devils whose violence must be met with violence to preserve the racial ratio. Moreover, for whites, black men are only to be silenced or killed, and every white, including Kennedy, or "innocent" white children and women, have the potential to kill and lynch blacks. Indeed, after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four girls, Guitar and his organization of black assassins, the Seven Days, desire to kill four white girls with explosives to restore the racial ratio, meaning that since killing a human being eliminates their chances for reproducing, killing whites will keep their population growth static. Of course Guitar realizes that blacks are outnumbered by whites in America, but on a global level, blacks and people of color outnumber whites, therefore they outnumber Caucasians. Thus, Guitar's adult years are marked by a consuming violence that eventually expands to include non-whites (despite his claims to Milkman that he only kills whites, and only after Negroes are murdered by whites. Contradicting himself, Guitar claims to kill random whites out of retribution due to his love for blacks, but his violence and hatred of whites corrupts his personal relationships with everyone, perhaps proving that Martin Luther King's message of universal love and compassion is a better approach to human and race relations than outright violence and hatred. In fact, Guitar's wrath later spreads to Milkman, his best friend, despite their mutual blackness, due to Guitar believing Milkman had not given him promised gold from his father and Pilate's past, which would have been used by Guitar to purchase explosives to kill four white girls.

Hagar, the granddaughter of Pilate and therefore cousin of Milkman, represents another type of love, or approach to human relationships. Spoiled by her mother Reba and grandmother, Hagar initially shows no interest in Milkman, who adores her from the first minute he lays eyes on her. Eventually, she grows to love him in a possessive manner, which drives Milkman away from her. He immaturely ends their relationship through an email, driving her into an anger-fueled passion to murder him, lasting for over a year. She ultimately perishes after never accepting life without the man she loved, thereby illustrating another self-destructive type of love. She, who loves Milkman so much she no longer cares for herself, represents a type of selfless love that is too selfless, leading to her depression and eventual death. She dies, ironically, after beautifying herself in an attempt to win Milkman back. Her devotion to Milkman causes her to not care for her body, thus catching a fever after walking in the rain in her newly purchased clothes. Interestingly, Guitar tells Milkman that black women, like whites, try to control black men's lives as well, although unlike whites, black women do not want to silence or kill them. Instead, black women want to "settle them down" and force them into monogamous relationships where the man is completely dedicated to them. There are some truths to that, perhaps, in the case of Milkman and Hagar, but it's more obvious that this type of possessive and selfless love is destructive and not ideal for either party.

Pilate, aunt of Milkman and younger sister of Macon II, may be the only character in the novel who truly loves universally and endeavors to connect with all human beings. Unlike her brother, she values all human life, and treats everyone equally, including Ruth and her nephew. Indeed, she saves Milkman twice: before he is born when his angry father was trying to stop his birth through domestic abuse of Ruth, and later when he is in prison for stealing a green sack in her home that her brother belives to be the gold of an old white man he killed in self-defense when they were living in the South. The green sack surprisingly contains the bones of what both Macon and Pilate believe to be the old white man from that frightening night outside of Danville, Pennsylvania in their youths, after their father had died and left them homeless and penniless. Ironically, the woman named for Pilate, the man who ordered the crucifixion of Christ, is the most merciful and a staunch defender of the inherent value in human life. She, who was eventually separated from her brother after the death of the old white man for her refusal to take his gold, lives an independent life traveling across the United States. Born minutes after her mother died, she lacks a navel, which leads to some black communities expelling her for her lack of a navel later in life. Nevertheless, she never excludes herself from others, and embraces her lower class fellow Negroes in the northern town in Michigan. She even cares for her brother and his wife, despite not having a relationship with Macon due to his anger at her for not allowing him to take the gold.

According to Milkman, his aunt Pilate is the only one who truly flies in his life, since her message of universal love transcends material and destructive relationships. Milkman, on the other hand, remains a selfish and destructive man until he undergoes a journey home, to discover his father's family roots in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Taking the archetypal journey to ultimately discover himself and real manhood forces Milkman to not rely on his father's wealth and actually live autonomously, thereby also making him mature. He takes this journey in his thirties, which is later than usual for the cosmogonic cycle. Of course Milkman's initial reasons for taking the journey were self-centered and materialistic: he believes the gold from the old white man is still waiting at the cave in Pennsylvania where Pilate and Macon split several decades ago. Later, after realizing that neither his grandfather's bones nor the gold are not in the cave, Milkman continues his journey south to Virginia, in search of his grandfather and grandmother's roots. After multiple trials and tribulations, including thievery, conflicts with Southern blacks disdainful or wealthy northern blacks, and an angry Guitar, who thinks Milkman found the gold and shipped it with no intention of sharing with him, and including discussions with wise elders, Milkman eventually discovers his origins in the small town of Shalimar in the hills of Virginia. He discovers that his aunt, Pilate, actually has the bones of her father, Macon I, in the green sack she has in her home, and that his grandmother, who was half Indian, Singing Bird, had left Shalimar with Macon I, whose real name was Jake, a dark-skinned exslave without a father. Indeed, Milkman finds the solution to his quest from the least likely source: the rhyme sung by children about a mythical Solomon, a flying African slave who had 21 children, including Jake. According to the oral traditions and the song sung by the children in Shalimar, Solomon tried to fly away with Jake in his arms, but dropped him after hitting a tree, leaving him to be raised by Heddy, the Indian grandmother of Singing Bird.

Upon discovering his family’s origins and that his own great-grandfather had the ability of flight, something Milkman has endeavored to possess his whole life after being born the same day an insane life insurance agent for North Carolina Mutual jumped to his death from the roof of a building in his hometown, rushes home to tell his father and Pilate, who return to bury the Macon I in the near the cave outside of Danville where he was killed. While burying her there, Guitar appears again, and shoots Pilate after the burial is complete. The novel ends with Milkman leaping from the ledge of the cave above Guitar, and its unclear if Milkman really “flies” or falls to his death like Icarus. Regardless, Milkman completes the cosmogonic cycle by as he “flies” into the abyss, or soars above the heavens. He is freed from living the meaningless existence without love that characterized him prior to the journey.

Song of Solomon is essentially an exploration of love, and the flying African motif that appears in African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American slave narratives and oral traditions. In fact, the flying African appears in the United States, Cuba, and Jamaica, and likely influenced magic realism in Latin American literature, especially in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other writers from areas with culturally significant populations of African descent, including Caribbean Colombia. Flight in this case, does not have to remain literal, but perhaps a transcendence or elevation of human moral character, such as in the case of Pilate, or Milkman near the end of the novel. It also clearly refers to the liberation of African slaves, back to Africa, their homeland free of racial slavery and the collapse of human relations that occurred in the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, which actually dehumanized whites rather than blacks by displaying the cruelty and savagery of the white man’s heart. Solomon, the great-grandfather and progenitor of 21 children, whose progeny are spread all over the town of Shalimar, carry on his legacy of flight and love in their relationships, although one could question his decision to leave his wife and children in slavery while he flew away to Africa alone as unethical. In the end, nobody knows if Solomon really flew back to Africa, but the widespread belief in flying Africans during slavery and in the present by residents of Shalimar symbolized resistance and hope for blacks. The struggle is to achieve flight as a way for collective liberation, instead of personal freedom as Solomon does, which leads to the death of his wife Ryna due to grief. Like his great-grandfather, Milkman does the same thing to Hagar: he “flies” away to the South on the search for his roots but leaves her behind, leaving her to die. Thus, Pilate, who learns to fly without ever leaving the ground, is the true master of flight since she pursues collective freedom rather than individual happiness.

As one would expect from Morrison, feminist themes are omnipresent as well. Her critique of black males’ abuse of black women appears in the relationships of Milkman and his father with their relationships with Ruth, and their sisters. Until his journey of self-discovery, Milkman only saw women as a means for obtaining pleasure, and did not respond with proper maturity or respect to Hagar’s affection. Other men, like Macon II, use physical abuse and their power of strength and wealth to control women, never realizing their oppression of women and how it prevents real love by perpetuating the racial hierarchy and gender oppression. Milkman’s sister, Corinthians, for example, has to hide her relationship with a lower class dark black man from her parents even though she is over fourty years old because they would not accept a working class, dark-skinned man as an acceptable partner. Morrison also highlights the importance of naming in African-American culture. Blacks attach importance to names because it becomes eternal, something that will live on after death, such as Solomon and his story of flight, which survives through the children’s song, or Ruth’s father, whose street is called Not Doctor Street by the colored community. In addition, Morrison addresses issues of race, class, color prejudice within the black community, and magic realism manifests itself in the tales of flight, ancient midwives from antebellum days, ghosts, and Pilate’s lack of a navel. The most amazing thing about the novel is how easily most people accept flight as possible. Indeed, when Robert Smith leaps to his death while wearing his blue wings, none of the Negroes in the crowd thought of it as a suicide attempt, but something that was entirely possible, perhaps due to the longstanding belief in flying Africans as literal and metaphorical in slavery as a means of achieving freedom. Indeed, the flying motif appears in African-American spirituals such as “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” folklore, and literature before and after Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Ultimately, the most important message in the book is really one of love. A universal love and understanding that neither excludes whites nor women is required to change daily human interactions and make a better world. Social change cannot come through undeserved violence taken out on whites, nor anyone else. One must move beyond narrow-minded self-interest, accumulation for the sake of growth, violent retribution, and self-destructive love to embrace universal compassion and empathy and create a meaningful existence. If one cannot connect to other human beings, then there is no purpose in life.