Song of Solomon

Overview

Song of Solomon is three hundred and forty pages, published in 1977, Morrison’s third novel and her first with a male protagonist. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was the first novel by a Black writer chosen as a Book of the Month Club main selection since Native Son in 1940, and is the book most often named when the Nobel committee’s citation talks about her giving life to an essential aspect of American reality.

She said she wrote it after her father died, and that she had been thinking about what men know and pass on, which is why it is the one book of hers organised around a son rather than a daughter.

The opening tells you what kind of novel it is. A man in a blue silk cape stands on the roof of a hospital in a Michigan city announcing he will fly to the other side of Lake Superior; a woman below begins to sing a strange song; rose petals blow across the snow; a woman goes into labour. Everything in that first page returns three hundred pages later.

The manner is realist and the frame is not. Morrison uses the African American folklore of people who could fly, which she heard as a story about slaves who flew back to Africa, and puts it inside a novel with rent books and hospital beds and does not mark the transition. She said she was writing the way the people she grew up with talked, in which the supernatural was not a separate category.

What happens

The city, chapters 1 to 9. Macon Dead III is born the day after the insurance agent jumps, and is nicknamed Milkman because his mother nursed him far too long and was seen doing it. His father is a landlord who owns property in the Black part of a Michigan town and whose first principle is that owning things is what makes a man. His mother Ruth is the daughter of the first Black doctor in the city and is barely present in her own house. His two sisters, First Corinthians and Magdalene called Lena, are kept at home making artificial roses well into middle age.

Across town is Pilate, Macon’s sister, who is the novel’s centre of gravity: a bootlegger who lives without electricity, was born after her mother died and has no navel, and wears her name written on a scrap of paper in a brass box in her ear, because her illiterate father chose it by putting his finger on a page of the Bible. She lives with her daughter Reba and granddaughter Hagar, and she sings.

Milkman drifts. He works for his father collecting rents, sleeps with his cousin Hagar for a dozen years and then drops her by letter, and is told by both parents versions of the family’s past that contradict each other. His friend Guitar, sharper and angrier, joins a group called the Seven Days, which answers the killing of Black people by killing white people in the same number and manner.

Lena eventually tells him what he is: a man who has been taking from the women in the family since he was born and has never once given anything.

The journey, chapters 10 to 15. Macon believes Pilate is sitting on a bag of gold. Milkman goes south to steal it.

There is no gold. What he finds instead, in Danville, Pennsylvania, and then in Shalimar, Virginia, is his family. He is stripped of everything on the way, almost deliberately: his suit ruined, his watch broken, his shoes destroyed, his city manners useless. He is knifed in a shop fight over nothing, and then taken on a night hunt by old men who will not talk to him until he can keep up, and sitting in the dark with his back against a tree, with nothing on him that means anything, he begins to listen.

The thing he hears is a song. Children in Shalimar play a ring game to a rhyme about Solomon, and the names in it are the names of his own family. Solomon was his great-grandfather. There were twenty-one children. According to the song and the town, he flew, went up into the air and back to Africa, and left his wife Ryna, who went mad, and dropped the baby he was carrying, Jake, who was raised by Heddy and became Milkman’s grandfather, the man shot off his own land in Pennsylvania.

The bag in Pilate’s house never held gold. It holds her father’s bones, which she had been carrying for decades believing they belonged to a stranger she thought her family had wronged.

The ending. Milkman brings Pilate back to Shalimar to bury the bones on Solomon’s Leap. Guitar, who has followed him believing he was cheated of the gold, shoots and kills Pilate instead. Milkman, holding her, understands why she could fly: she never left the ground.

Then he calls Guitar’s name and leaps toward him off the rock, and the novel ends in the air without telling you whether he lives.

How to read it

Read the first page and then read it again when you have finished. Everything in the novel is in it.

Follow the names. Morrison is explicit that this is the book’s subject: Macon Dead from a drunk clerk’s error, Pilate from a blind stab at a Bible, First Corinthians, Magdalene, Sing, Singing Bird, Guitar, Circe, and the streets that people call Doctor Street while the city insists it is Mains Avenue. Losing a name and getting one back is the whole movement of the book.

Learn the song as you go. It is given in fragments and the reader assembles it slightly ahead of Milkman, which is Morrison letting you do the work he is doing.

Give Guitar his argument. The Seven Days are appalling and his case, that a society which does not count Black deaths must be made to feel the arithmetic, is put with real force and is never refuted by anything except its consequences.

Notice the cost of the flying. The song is beautiful and it is about a man who left his wife and twenty-one children. Ryna’s Gulch is named for a woman who never stopped screaming. Morrison puts the price of the myth in the myth.

Do not try to settle the ending. Whether Milkman flies, falls, kills Guitar or dies is left open, and every reading has to say which possibilities it is closing off and why.

Questions it raises

• Solomon flew home and abandoned his family. Is the novel celebrating that, mourning it, or insisting that both are true at once?
• Milkman takes for thirty years and gives at the end. Does the book show him earning that, or grant it to him?
• Guitar’s arithmetic is monstrous and his description of the problem is accurate. Where exactly does the novel say he goes wrong?
• Pilate has no navel, which marks her as outside ordinary birth. What is Morrison doing by making the book’s moral centre literally unnatural?
• The names were taken by accident, force and illiteracy. Is recovering a name the same as recovering anything else?
• The last sentence leaves a man in the air. What does a novel gain by refusing to land?