Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one.

his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest,

The rose-petal scramble got a lot of attention, but the pregnant lady’s moans did not.

But the laughter of a gold-toothed man brought them back to their senses.

Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done. None of them had suspected he had it in him. Just goes to show, they murmured to each other, you never really do know about people.

Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier—that only birds and airplanes could fly—he lost all interest in himself.

The quiet that suffused the doctor’s house then, broken only by the murmur of the women eating sunshine cake, was only that: quiet.

ash,

yolks

mangled

velvet

sunshine

And once exposed, it behaved as though it were itself a plant and flourished into a huge suede-gray flower that throbbed like fever, and sighed like the shift of sand dunes. But it could also be still. Patient, restful, and still.

You don’t want to give this motherless child the name of the man that killed Jesus, do you?”

“A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see. A terrible, terrible thing to see.”

bantamweight,

“Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it.

And heard as well her shouts when the baby, who they had believed was dead also, inched its way headfirst out of a still, silent, and indifferent cave of flesh, dragging her own cord and her own afterbirth behind her.

Her powerful contralto, Reba’s piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl, Hagar, who must be about ten or eleven now, pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet.

Singing now, her face would be a mask; all emotion and passion would have left her features and entered her voice.

It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

You say ‘Hi’ to pigs and sheep when you want ’em to move. When you tell a human being ‘Hi,’ he ought to get up and knock you down.”

Now he was behaving with this strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal pride, as though she had tried to expel him from a very special group, in which he not only belonged, but had exclusive rights.

Then you put a folded newspaper over the pot and do one small obligation. Like answering the door or emptying the bucket and bringing it in off the front porch. I generally go to the toilet.

So when we left Circe’s big house we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them woods.

Her hands were stained with blackberry juice, and when she wiped the tears from her eyes she streaked the purple from her nose to her cheekbone.

“Baby?” Reba’s voice was soft. “You been hungry, baby? Why didn’t you say so?” Reba looked hurt. “We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You been knowing that.”

Hagar’s voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own. When he thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling, he risked a glance at his friend and saw the setting sun gilding Guitar’s eyes, putting into shadow a slow smile of recognition.

Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. 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.

You could have stayed in the halls of academe and looked evil.”

“Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.”

It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”

Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away.

Now he saw her as a frail woman content to do tiny things; to grow and cultivate small life that would not hurt her if it died: rhododendron, goldfish, dahlias, geraniums, imperial tulips. Because these little lives did die.

In a way she was jealous of death. Inside all that grief she felt when the doctor died, there had been a bit of pique too, as though he had chosen a more interesting subject than life—a more provocative companion than she was—and had deliberately followed death when it beckoned.

“You touch her again, one more time, and I’ll kill you.”

Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

Wasn’t that the history of the world? Isn’t that what men did? Protected the frail and confronted the King of the Mountain?

A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness.

all on account of the fact that she had no navel.

“Unpleasant. Extremely unpleasant. Even when you know he’ll do the same to you, it’s still a very indelicate thing to do.”

No one had ever denied him any, so it had no exotic attraction. Politics—at least barbershop politics and Guitar’s brand—put him to sleep. He was bored.