Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

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. To have to live without that single gift saddened him

Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. 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.

She had tried them all. But her glance was nutritious; the spot became, if anything, more pronounced as the years passed.

But the water mark, hidden by the bowl all these years, was exposed. 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.

In late afternoon, before her husband closed his office and came home, she called her son to her. When he came into the little room she unbuttoned her blouse and smiled. He was too young to be dazzled by her nipples, but he was old enough to be bored by the flat taste of mother’s milk, so he came reluctantly, as to a chore, and lay as he had at least once each day of his life in his mother’s arms, and tried to pull the thin, faintly sweet milk from her flesh without hurting her with his teeth. She felt him. His restraint, his courtesy, his indifference, all of which pushed her into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light.

Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name.

lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped those expressions of affection that had been so lovable in her childhood. The good-night kiss was itself a masterpiece of slow-wittedness on her part and discomfort on his. At sixteen, she still insisted on having him come to her at night, sit on her bed, exchange a few pleasantries, and plant a kiss on her lips. Perhaps it was the loud silence of his dead wife, perhaps it was Ruth’s disturbing resemblance to her mother. 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.

After their mother died, she had come struggling out of the womb without help from throbbing muscles or the pressure of swift womb water. As a result, for all the years he knew her, her stomach was as smooth and sturdy as her back, at no place interrupted by a navel. It was the absence of a navel that convinced people that she had not come into this world through normal channels; had never lain, floated, or grown in some warm and liquid place connected by a tissue-thin tube to a reliable source of human nourishment.

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.

Macon felt himself softening under the weight of memory and music,

He was not allowed to sit on his mother’s lap during the drive—not because she wouldn’t have it, but because his father objected to it. So it was only by kneeling on the dove gray seat and looking out the back window that he could see anything other than the laps, feet, and hands of his parents, the dashboard, or the silver winged woman poised at the tip of the Packard. But riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going—just where he had been—troubled him. He did not want to see trees that he had passed, or houses and children slipping into the space the automobile had left behind.

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.

Even while he was screaming he wondered why he was suddenly so defensive—so possessive about his name. He had always hated that name, all of it, and until he and Guitar became friends, he had hated his nickname too. But in Guitar’s mouth it sounded clever, grown up. 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.

Macon kept telling me that the things we was scared of wasn’t real. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Milkman could hardly breathe. 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.

At fifty-two, Macon Dead was as imposing a man as he had been at forty-two, when Milkman thought he was the biggest thing in the world. Bigger even than the house they lived in. But today he had seen a woman who was just as tall and who had made him feel tall too. “I know I’m the youngest one in this family, but I ain’t no baby. You treat me like I was a baby. You keep saying you don’t have to explain nothing to me. How do you think that makes me feel? Like a baby, that’s what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!” “Don’t you raise your voice to me.” “Is that the way your father treated you when you were twelve?” “Watch your mouth!” Macon roared. He took his hands out of his pockets but didn’t know what to do with them. He was momentarily confused. His son’s question had shifted the scenery.

“He didn’t have to keep the name, did he? He could have used his real name, couldn’t he?” “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.

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:

His action was his alone. It would change nothing between his parents. It would change nothing inside them. He had knocked his father down and perhaps there were some new positions on the chessboard, but the game would go on.

“In the bed,” he said, and stopped for so long Milkman was not sure he was going to continue. “In the bed. That’s where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.

Whether or not, the fact is she was in that bed sucking his fingers, and if she do that when he was dead, what’d she do when he was alive?

The door of his face had opened; his skin looked iridescent.

“You want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth,” his father had said. Couldn’t I be a whole man without knowing all that?

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. There were no cars and the street lights were on, now that darkness had come, but the sidewalk on the other side of the street was completely empty. He turned around to see where everybody was going, but there was nothing to see except their backs and hats pressing forward into the night. He looked again at the other side of Not Doctor Street. Not a soul. He touched the arm of a man in a cap who was trying to get past him. “Why is everybody on this side of the street?” he asked him. “Watch it, buddy,” the man snapped, and moved on with the crowd. Milkman walked on, still headed toward Southside, never once wondering why he himself did not cross over to the other side of the street, where no one was walking at all.

“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy. “Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”

“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.”

because of Mary herself, a pretty but overpainted barmaid/part-owner, who was sassy, funny, and good company for the customers. Whores worked her bar in safety; lonely drunks could drink there in peace; cruisers found chickens or hawks—whichever they preferred, even jailbait; restless housewives were flattered there and danced their heels off; teen-agers learned “life rules” there; and everybody found excitement there. For in Mary’s the lights made everybody beautiful, or if not beautiful, then fascinating. The music gave tone and texture to conversations that would put you to sleep anywhere else. And the food and drink provoked people into behavior that resembled nothing less than high drama.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection.

The lengths to which lost love drove men and women never surprised them. They had seen women pull their dresses over their heads and howl like dogs for lost love. And men who sat in doorways with pennies in their mouths for lost love. “Thank God,” they whispered to themselves, “thank God I ain’t never had one of them graveyard loves.”

Her passions were narrow but deep. Long deprived of sex, long dependent on self-manipulation, she saw her son’s imminent death as the annihilation of the last occasion she had been made love to.

Hagar looked surprised. She loved nothing in the world except this woman’s son, wanted him alive more than anybody, but hadn’t the least bit of control over the predator that lived inside her. Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own. So it was with a great deal of earnestness that she replied to Ruth. “I’ll try not to. But I can’t make you a for-certain promise.”

“Can’t say as I blame him neither. Two growed-up women talkin ‘bout a man like he was a house or needed one. He ain’t a house, he’s a man, and whatever he need, don’t none of you got it.”

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

After the tension, the anger, the bravado of her earlier state of mind, followed by the violence of Pilate’s words to her granddaughter, this quiet social-tea tone disarmed her, threw her too soon and too suddenly back into the mannered dignity that was habitual for her. Ruth pressed her hands together in her lap to stop the shaking.

“The people themselves. Some folks want to live forever. Some don’t. I believe they decide on it anyway. People die when they want to and if they want to. Don’t nobody have to die if they don’t want to.”

“They freight trains,” they told her. Only two passenger cars, and no colored allowed. “Well, how do colored people get where they want to go?” “Ain’t supposed to go nowhere,” they said,

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

“There is a society. It’s made up of a few men who are willing to take some risks. They don’t initiate anything; they don’t even choose. They are as indifferent as rain. But when a Negro child, Negro woman, or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done about it by their law and their courts, this society selects a similar victim at random, and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hang; if a Negro was burnt, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder. If they can. If they can’t do it precisely in the same manner, they do it any way they can, but they do it. They call themselves the Seven Days. They are made up of seven men. Always seven and only seven. If one of them dies or leaves or is no longer effective, another is chosen. Not right away, because that kind of choosing takes time. But they don’t seem to be in a hurry. Their secret is time. To take the time, to last. Not to grow; that’s dangerous because you might become known. They don’t write their names in toilet stalls or brag to women. Time and silence. Those are their weapons, and they go on forever.

White people are unnatural. As a race they are unnatural. And it takes a strong effort of the will to overcome an unnatural enemy.”

if Kennedy got drunk and bored and was sitting around a potbellied stove in Mississippi, he might join a lynching party just for the hell of it. Under those circumstances his unnaturalness would surface. But I know I wouldn’t join one no matter how drunk I was or how bored, and I know you wouldn’t either, nor any black man I know or ever heard tell of. Ever. In any world, at any time, just get up and go find somebody white to slice up. But they can do it. And they don’t even do it for profit, which is why they do most things. They do it for fun. Unnatural.”

“You can prove this, I guess. Scientifically?” “No.” “Shouldn’t you be able to prove it before you act on something like that?” “Did they prove anything scientifically about us before they killed us? No. They killed us first and then tried to get some scientific proof about why we should die.” “Wait a minute, Guitar. If they are as bad, as unnatural, as you say, why do you want to be like them? Don’t you want to be better than they are?”

“The earth is soggy with black people’s blood. And before us Indian blood. Nothing can cure them, and if it keeps on there won’t be any of us left and there won’t be any land for those who are left. So the numbers have to remain static.”

“Maybe. But if I’m caught I’ll just die earlier than I’m supposed to—not better than I’m supposed to. And how I die or when doesn’t interest me. What I die for does. It’s the same as what I live for.

“It’s not about you living longer. It’s about how you live and why. It’s about whether your children can make other children. It’s about trying to make a world where one day white people will think before they lynch.”

But she was growing roots where she stood,

The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter hymn.

Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man.

WOAH

“Has he done it? Has he really killed somebody?”

Beginnins and endinvs man

when somebody out-insulted them, or ignored them, or sent them running, they wisecracked and name-called until the sweat of embarrassment evaporated from the palms of their hands.