Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

woman wore a knitted navy cap pulled far down over her forehead. She had wrapped herself up in an old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto:

The sight of Mr. Smith and his wide blue wings transfixed them for a few seconds, as did the woman’s singing and the roses strewn about.

Without knowing any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, the name he overheard the ragman use when he paid the boy three cents for a bundle of old clothes—he guessed

that this name was not clean. Milkman.

It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust.

Macon knew Freddie as a fool and a liar, but a reliable liar. He was always right about his facts and always wrong about the motives that produced the facts.

He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

Pilate laughed. “You all must be the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth.

Her voice made Milkman think of pebbles. Little round pebbles that bumped up against each other. Maybe she was hoarse, or maybe it was the way she said her words, with both a drawl and a clip.

You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind.

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

Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read.

“Mama liked it. Liked the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past. Wipe it all out.”

Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. Starting Monday, I’m going to teach you how.”

No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say.

The silver-backed brushes were a constant reminder of what her wishes for him were—that he not stop his education at high school, but go on to college and medical school. She had as little respect for her husband’s work as Macon had for college graduates.

Milkman closed his eyes and then opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street.

“You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar. “They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said. “They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”

Guitar smiled. His teeth were as white as the snowflakes that were settling on his jacket.

“How old are you, Freddie?” “Who knows? They made dirt in the morning and me that afternoon.” He giggled. “But I been around a long long time.”

Milkman didn’t glance around the office, but he wanted to. The wind howled outside in the blackness and Freddie, looking like a gnome, flashed his gold teeth.

“You sound like that red-headed Negro named X. Why don’t you join him and call yourself Guitar X?”

Malcolm X.

the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country’s edge—an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic.

“Gold,” he whispered, and immediately, like a burglar out on his first job, stood up to pee. Life, safety, and luxury fanned out before him like the tail-spread of a peacock, and as he stood there trying to distinguish each delicious color, he saw the dusty boots of his father standing just on the other side of the shallow pit.

He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well.

Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world. First, by training her for leisure time, enrichments, and domestic mindlessness. Second, by a clear implication that she was too good for such work.

She had just come from a house in which men sat in a lit kitchen talking in loud excited voices, only to meet an identical scene at home. She wondered if this part of the night, a part she was unfamiliar with, belonged, had always belonged, to men. If perhaps it was a secret hour in which men rose like giants from dragon’s teeth and, while the women slept, clustered in their kitchens.

You can’t take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it’s a better thing, a more better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way, it frees up your mind.”

People behaved much better, were more polite, more understanding when Milkman was drunk. The alcohol didn’t change him at all, but it had a tremendous impact on whomever he saw while he was under its influence. They looked better, never spoke above a whisper, and when they touched him, even to throw him out of the house party because he had peed in the kitchen sink, or when they picked his pockets as he dozed on a bench at the bus station, they were gentle, loving.

This one time he wanted to go solo. In the air, away from real life, he felt free, but on the ground, when he talked to Guitar just before he left, the wings of all those other people’s nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him.

“I mean did they have a trial; were they arrested?” “Arrested for what? Killing a nigger? Where did you say you was from?”

All that business about southern hospitality was for real. He wondered why black people ever left the South. Where he went, there wasn’t a white face around, and the Negroes were as pleasant, wide-spirited, and self-contained as could be.

They looked at his skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers.

Two feet in any direction from the headlights was black night.

At last he surrendered to his fatigue and made the mistake of sitting down instead of slowing down, for when he got up again, the rest had given his feet an opportunity to hurt him and the pain in his short leg was so great he began to limp and hobble.

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved—from a distance, though—and given what he wanted. And in return he would…what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

His grandmother would have been “too dark to pass.” She had actually blushed. As though she’d discovered something shameful about him. He was both angry and amused and wondered what Omar and Sweet and Vernell thought of Miss Susan Byrd.

It was six-thirty in the morning and the town was bustling as though it were high noon. Life and business began early in the South so the coolest part of the day could be taken advantage of.

He had used her—her love, her craziness—and most of all he had used her skulking, bitter vengeance.

O Solomon don’t leave me here Cotton balls to choke me O Solomon don’t leave me here Buckra’s arms to yoke me Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.

It was a long time after he left, that warm September morning, that she was able to relax enough to drop the knife.

It startled one of the sympathetic winos in the vestibule and he dropped his bottle, spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere.

“When you say ‘flew off’ you mean he ran away, don’t you? Escaped?” “No, I mean flew.

He flew. You know, like a bird. Just stood up in the fields one day, ran up some hill, spun around a couple of times, and was lifted up in the air.

“Everybody! He left everybody down on the ground and he sailed on off like a black eagle. ‘O-o-o-o-o-o Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone /Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home!’”

Far away from Virginia, fall had already come. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan were dressed up like the Indian warriors from whom their names came. Blood red and yellow, ocher and ice blue.

The Algonquins had named the territory he lived in Great Water, michi gami. How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country.

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

Would you save my life or would you take it? Guitar was exceptional. To both questions he could answer yes.