Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a apart from allowing or interfering with his own.

Her son had never been a person to her, a separate real person. He had always been a passion.

You can’t take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours.

Healer, deliverer, in another world she would have been the head nurse at Mercy. Instead she tended Weimaraners and had just one selfish wish: that when she died somebody would find her before the dogs ate her.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.