Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

But it was the death of that girl—the one who lived in his head—that I mourned when he died.

Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done.

His hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over doorsills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs.

He walked there now—strutted is the better word, for he had a high behind and an athlete’s stride—thinking

More probably it was the ecstasy that always seemed to be shining in Ruth’s face when he bent to kiss her—an ecstasy he felt inappropriate to the occasion.

Ruth has got some weird intamacy things w family

Kill a nigger and comb their hair at the same time. But I’ve seen grown white men cry about their dogs.”

There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

You know they ain’t even got an orphanage in Jacksonville where colored babies can go? They have to put ’em in jail.

And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him. He felt like a garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people. He himself did nothing.

The calculated violence of a shark grew in her, and like every witch that ever rode a broom straight through the night to a ceremonial infanticide as thrilled by the black wind as by the rod between her legs; like every fed-up-to-the-teeth bride who worried about the consistency of the grits she threw at her husband as well as the potency of the lye she had stirred into them; and like every queen and every courtesan who was struck by the beauty of her emerald ring as she tipped its poison into the old red wine, Hagar was energized by the details of her mission.

She could not get his love (and the possibility that he did not think of her at all was intolerable), so she settled for his fear.

Even if you weren’t frightened of a woman who had no navel, you certainly had to take her very seriously.)

I truly dont get this

It occurred to her that although men fucked armless women, one-legged women, hunchbacks and blind women, drunken women, razor-toting women, midgets, small children, convicts, boys, sheep, dogs, goats, liver, each other, and even certain species of plants, they were terrified of fucking her—a woman with no navel. They froze at the sight of that belly that looked like a back; became limp even, or cold, if she happened to undress completely and walked straight toward them, showing them, deliberately, a stomach as blind as a knee.

“The earth is soggy with black people’s blood.

Milkman rubbed the ankle of his short leg. “I’m scared for you, man.” “That’s funny. I’m scared for you too.”

“What harm did I do you on my knees?”

For a few minutes he tried to enjoy the scenery running past his window, then the city man’s boredom with nature’s repetition overtook him. Some places had lots of trees, some did not; some fields were green, some were not, and the hills in the distance were like the hills in every distance.

Everything in this world they lived for will crumble and rot.

The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell.

What she did for his sore feet, his cut face, his back, his neck, his thighs, and the palms of his hands was so delicious he couldn’t imagine that the lovemaking to follow would be anything but anticlimactic. If this bath and this woman, he thought, are all that come out of this trip, I will rest easy and do my duty to God, country, and the Brotherhood of Elks for the rest of my life. I will walk hot coals with a quart of kerosene in my hand for this. I will walk every railroad tie from here to Cheyenne and back for this. But when the lovemaking came, he decided he would crawl.

Lipsticks in soft white hands darted out of their sheaths like the shiny red penises of puppies.

It was as though she held her breath and could not let it go until the energy and busyness culminated in a beauty that would dazzle him.

Empire State (he just stood around and swayed),

she really made us wait for this