Masaryk University Brno

MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

Family Matters – Family Patterns and Milkman´s

Quest for Identity in T. Morrison´s Song of Solomon

Diploma Work

Brno 2009

Author: Supervisor:

Václava Králová Mgr. Pavla Buchtová

I declare that I worked on this diploma work independently, using the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography only. I agree with this diploma work being deposited in the Library of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno and thus being made available for study purposes.

Brno, 10 November 2009 Václava Králová

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mgr. Pavla Buchtová for her patience, kindness and professional advice and competence.

CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….5

0.1 Toni Morrison´s biography…………………………………………………………………7

0.2 Song of Solomon……………………………………………………………………………..13

1. It is all in the family…………………………………………………………………………..15 2.1 Ruth´s family heritage…………….……………………………………………………....19 2.1.1 Pressed small or abusing?...... ………………………………………………………22

2.1.2 Ruth´s possessive maternal love...... 25

3.1 Macon Dead´s family background………………………………………………..…27 3.1.1 Macon Dead´s greedy paternal love……………………………………………….30 3.1.2 Macon manipulating or manipulated - a villain or a recluse?...... 33

4.1 Pilate – prototype of an ancestral woman……………………………………...36

4.1.1 Pilate´s matriarchal family unit……………………………………………………….39

5. Hagar´s suffocating anaconda love………………………………………………….44

6. 1 Milkman´s dull childhood……………………………………………………………….49

6.2 Milkman´s self-indulgent adolescence and manhood……………………..51

6.3 Milkman´s successful quest for identity………………………………………….54

7. Names that bear witness………………………………………………………………..59

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..62

Résumé……………………………………………………………………………………………………….64

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………..65

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………….68

Introduction

The goal of this diploma work is to closely analyze the third of Toni Morrison´s novels, Song of Solomon published in 1977. I have read several of Morrison´s novels and she has gradually become my favourite writer, despite (or perhaps exactly for) the fact that her novels are so culturally specific. Song of Solomon illustrates that Afro-American woman´s experience is author´s key but not sole concern, for in it, contrary to her two preceding works, she decided for the first time in her writing career for a male protagonist. It is at once a fascinating family saga, a powerful romance and a fabulous story of self-discovery of the main hero, Macon (Milkman) Dead. Morrison puts Milkman in the world in which he seemingly lives a comfortable life. Around him, though, the author creates a complicated web of family relationships – his parents, Pilate and his lover – the people who all try to seize him in their own way, enmesh in his life with highly or less commendable intentions. The first chapter of this diploma work intends to provide a brief historical context to the story which seemed to be necessary for better understanding of the novel. The following four chapters are dedicated one by one to the above mentioned key people of Milkman´s life. The sixth chapter examines Milkman´s progress to spiritual freedom and maturity. Finally, the last chapter discusses the importance that Afro-Americans put to their names and naming, possible reasons (even historical) for their doing so, as well as the importance of naming in this work of T. Morrison.

Within these seven chapters I concentrate on answering the question to what extent and why Morrison lets Milkman´s close relations interfere and determine his life, and identify the psychological drives for their behaviour, simultaneously, it traces Milkman´s ultimate progress to self-identification. It also decodes some of Morrison´s personal beliefs concerning Afro-American family functioning she infiltrated into her fictious story and tried to pass to her readers, as well as brings a picture of common Afro- American family patterns in the frame of historical context. In the analysis I also try to stress some of the features typical for Afro-American literature; including the fascinating part of Afro-American folklore, the ancient Afro-American symbol of flight, the free fall; touch on the concept of double conciousness and explore the harmful existence of the false western female standard of beauty, a favourite literary theme of Toni Morrison, and 5

its devastating impact on Afro-American women. I try to set my analysis in context of Afro-American history and attempt to identify some autobiographic features in this novel.

To make the analysis in the main body of the thesis more intelligible, two preliminary subchapters, Toni Morrison´s biography and a concise summary of the plot of Song of Solomon precede it.

0.1 Toni Morrison´s biography

Toni Morrison is one of the key and most respected representatives of Afro- American women´s literature of the past thirty-five years. Over the decades, as a part of the Black Arts Movement, she has become one of the Afro-American writers and artists who “sought to transform the manner in which black people in the USA were defined and treated“ (McKay, 1796). She is the author of nine novels (translated into 26 languages), numerous short stories, essays, plays, children´s books; the first Afro-American woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ever since her first novel she has written about “her world“, because she “perceived the gap between the black experience and the representation of that experience“ (Furman 67). In the 1970s of the past century she became the editor who significantly helped to bring Afro-American literature into the mainstream, so that such a thing as popular Afro-American women´s literature could flourish. During her extensive career she has also become the devoted professor who has inspired hundreds of her Afro-American students and artists. In 1993, to support her followers, she founded The Toni Morrison Society.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, an industrial town in Ohio, the second of four children, Toni Morrison was raised in a working-class family. Though of a modest family background she was, unlike many of her peers, blessed with a complete and functioning family - the parents and grandparents who truly cared about their children. Morrison´s mother sang in a church choir, loved jazz, played the piano well. The father frequently told the children African-American ghost stories and myths, “those classical, mythological, archetypal stories“ (Furman 4). Her grandfather often played the violin and her grandmother even wrote her private dream book. Most importantly, however, Morrison´s mother was a keen reader. As Morrison remembers: “My mother belonged to a book club, one of those early ones. And that was hard-earned money, you know“ (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). Not surprisingly then, when asked what role books played in her childhood Morrison answers: “Major. A driving thing. The security I felt, the pleasure, when new books arrived was immense…“ (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). Needles to say, when she entered the first grade, Chloe was not only the only Afro-American pupil in the class, but also the only one who knew how to read.

During the Depression her father, a shipyard welder, worked three jobs simultaneously to make studies accessible to all his children, and was proud of it. Around 13 Chloe started doing housework in white women´s houses after school, the work that was always available, because the normal teen-age jobs were not. At that time she first experienced discrimination and segregation.

Interestingly, I´ve always felt deserving. Growing up in Lorain, my parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary people within us. I felt like an aristocrat – or what I think an aristocrat is. I always knew we were very poor. But that was never degrading. I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was 12 or 13. He said, “You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.“ And I said, “But, Daddy, no one´s going to see it!“ And he said, “Yeah, but I know it´s there.“ So when I was working in the kitchens, I did good work. Years later I used some of what I observed in my fiction (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus ).

In 1949 Morrison left Lorain to study English at prestigeous African-American Howard University in Washington, “where she was shocked by segregation and a strict hierarchy concerning the tinge of black complexion practised by a whole range of Afro- Americans then“ (Ullmanová: Afterword: in Morrison: Love). The motif of complexion shade became a frequent image later on in many of her novels (including Song of Solomon). Howard was a disappointment for Morrison. “It was about getting married, buying clothes and going to parties“ (Morrison qtd. in Lewis). In 1955 she earned a master´s degree in English at Cornell University with her thesis on the works of W. Faulkner and V. Woolf. After graduation she became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, (1955-1957), then returned to Howard to teach English.

In 1958 she got married to a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, whom she had met at Howard, but the marriage was not contented. When it ended in divorce in 1964, Morrison moved to Syracuse with her two baby boys aged mere three years (Harold Ford) and three months (Slade), and started to support the family as a textbook editor. In two years´ time she moved to New York to work as an editor at the New York City

headquarters of Random House. At that time “major American publishers such as Random House, Doubleday, McGraw-Hill, and William Morrow, sensing market possibilities in a new Black Art, began to sign African-American writers to lucrative contracts“ (McKay 1804). Thus it was at Random House where Morrison first got a chance to support promising Afro-American authors. Simultaneously, she started writing her first work.

Evenings, after putting her children to bed, she worked on a novel about a sad adolescent who dreams of changing the color of her eyes. “The Bluest Eye“ was published in 1970, inspiring a whole generation of African-American women to tell their stories – women like Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor and Toni Cade Bambara

(Dreifus).

Several publishing houses had refused to publish the book and although the title did attract attention of the critics, it was not a commercial success. However, it did not discourage Morrison from further writing because “she realized that she would continue writing until the end of her life“ (Ullmanová: Afterword: in Morrison: Love). As Furman points out Morrison “measures success not by estimates of her critics, but rather by how well her books evoke the rhythms and cosmology of her people“. Furman proves the claim with Morrison´s citation, in which she says: “If anything I do in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn´t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything“ (Morrison qtd. in Furman 3). The key theme of her first work – the reprehensible, white standard of female beauty (of a blue-eyed, fair-haired creature) and its devastating impact on Afro-American females became a recurring one in Morrison´s fiction, as she considers crucial to contradict it. Because no doubt there are, even nowadays, thousands of Afro-american women asking themselves the question that Hagar did in Morrison´s masterpiece Song of Solomon after her lover Milkman had left her: “Why don´t he like my hair?“ (Morrison 340).

With her second novel Sula (1973), which was both a commercial and critical triumph, Morrison became the author for whom Afro-American women and their experiences are a major concern. The book traces the life of a rebel Afro-American girl Sula who decides to live her life against the commonly perceived notion of womanhood; and the response

of the community to her daring. Despite the fact that the Afro-American woman “ is an evolving presence in Morrison´s work“ (Furman 7), Morrison rejects a label of a feminist. As Jařab recounts Morrison in one of her interviews states: “ I do not accept patriarchy and do not suppose it should be substituted by matriarchy. I believe in equality of opportunities and open the door to manifold newly existing opportunities“. He asserts however that “there is no doubt that the pleiad of her female literary characters, strong as well as weak, provided valuable arguments for feminist debates and thus encouraged the feminist movement inside as well as outside the Unied States“ (Jařab: Afterword: in Morrison: Paradise).

Song of Solomon (1977), this work is dedicated to, set in the 1950s and 1960s affluent America is a story about the moral and psychological development of a young, Afro-American upper-middle-class man Macon Dead. The novel was a huge success and brought Morrison national attention when it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In Tar Baby (1981), a fable for our modern times, Morrison discusses the question of community and cultural identity; at the same time for the first time in her work she gives white characters significant roles.

Beloved (1987), the story of an escaped slave, Sethe, who kills her daughter rather than see her live in slavery, crowned Morrison the queen of narrative. Jařab explains: “Beloved is more than a mere novel to tens of critics and hundreds and thousands of readers. Especially Afro-Americans consider the story a kind of a healing ritual designed to lessen the painful remembrance of their historical experience“ (Jařab: Afterword: in Morrison: Paradise). Morrison herself says:

With “Beloved,“ I wanted to say, let´s get rid of these words like ´the slave woman´ and ´the slave child,´ and talk about people with names, like you and like me, who were there. “ Now, what does slavery feel like? What can you do? How can you be? Clearly, it is a situation in which you have practically no power. And if you decide you are not going to be a victim, then it´s a major risk. And you end up doing some terribe things. But the risk of being your own person, or trying to have something to do with your destiny, is one of the major battles in life

(Morrison qtd. in Dreifus).

What makes Beloved even more powerful to perceive is the fact that the author based the plot on a newspaper clipping – a story which actually happened in 1851. Smiley says: “It is clear from Morrison´s dedication (´Sixty Million and more´) that she intends to embrace the social-document potential of the novel, as, indeed, any novel that treats injustice and its effects must do“ (Smiley 539). In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years.

Jazz (1992), Morrison´s sixth novel full of heat and passion is set in the jazz age , Harlem Renaissance New York. Its main character is a young dying woman who sacrifices herself in order to save her married lover. For its innovative narrative technique which echoes the improvisational character of jazz it was, by some critics, accepted with embarrassment. Paradise (1998), Morrison´s first novel after her receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature presents to the readers the ever-existing battle between a man and a woman, sometimes in a raw form, which should not surprise as the novel was originally supposed to be called ´War´. Love then, (2003), author´s penultimate novel, depicts a complicated relationship of two women who used to be friends but become sworn enemies.

In A Mercy published in 2008, the author returns to the issue of slavery, but it is a very different book to Beloved. It focuses on the stories of four women, each in servitude in a different way. “Set in the 17th century northeast when slave trade was in its infancy, the novel provides a detailed look at the social environment of religious persecution and racial hatred, class distinction that allowed the institution of slavery to take root in the US“ (Toni Morrison Society).

One of the aspects for which Morrison has been praised throughout her life-long literary career is the beauty of the language she uses, its ´poetry´. To read Morrison means to have a solid vocabulary store in order to fully understand the message she intends to pass to her reader. For example a reviewer from Chicago Sun-Times on the cover of Jazz wrote that “some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel“ appear in the book. Price in his introduction to Song of Solomon elucidates that “there are indeed moments where words themselves seem to be the point of a passage,

the snake-charmed subject of whole runs of sentences – masterfully lucid English in the hands of a writer whose forebears, short generations ago, were forced to abandon their native languages and learn those same Anglo-American words under the whip and flail of slave owners“ (Price: Introduction: in Morrison: Song of Solomon). Sentences like “We walked down tree-lined streets of soft grey houses leaning like tired ladies…“ (Morrison, The Bluest Eye 81), literally capture readers´ hearts and make them brood over the beauty of English as a language.

Morrison´s characters, are vividly portrayed, rich in dialogue and they are never ´flat´, that is portrayed in either a favourable or despisable way, but always multi- layered. Furman points out that “there are no easy villains to hate; no predictable behaviors“ (Furman, 18). She indeed finds Morrison´s work unpredictable and challenging for the reader saying: “While her language, metaphors, settings, and themes evoke the familiar and timeless, her characters seldom reinforce the reader´s expectations – not because they are unrealistic, but because they often depict a reality that is too distressing to consider“. They show what “extraordinary and unspeakable acts ordinary people are capable of committing“ (Furman, 5). Needles to say, Morrison´s characters often speak African-American English, with all its specifics, especially those whom the author considers major in passing on cultural knowledge to the reader.

All her life Morrison has been politically conscious. She believes that art and politics should be integrated. ´“In fact, “the best art is political,“ she says not in the pejorative meaning of political as haranguing, but deliberately provocative […], insisting that art can be ´“unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time“´ (Morrison qtd. in Furman 3,4). Thus she certainly did not surprise when as openly as years before she used to support former US President Bill Clinton - whom she had once famously called America´s first black president, she publically endorsed Presidential candidate Barack Obama in her letter of January 2008. In it, she states that she would not support him if race was all he had to offer or because it might make her “proud“ (The New York Observer), and thus she clearly advocates some of her moral values. Therefore, it does not surprise that also in Song of Solomon we can find allusions to hot political issues of the sixties, as will be further examined in the chapter dedicated to Milkman.

0.2 Song of Solomon

The story begins on a cold February day in 1931 in an unnamed town on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan with local insurance agent Robert Smith´s jump off the roof of Mercy Hospital, known among local Blacks as “No Mercy Hospital“ because it does not admit them, attempting to fly. Owing to Smith´s flight, Ruth Foster Dead is allowed to deliver her child inside the hospital and not on its steps, where she occured to be at the time of the incident. Thus Macon Dead, the protagonist, becomes the first Negro child ever born there. Not only was he born in a “priviledged“ place, he and his two older sisters were also born into a materially privileged Afro-American family. With enough means, nevertheless, he was never in his childhood and young adulthood provided with the core that a functioning family should provide to its members, that is unselfish love, common decency and family solidarity.

Although Macon´s, nicknamed Milkman´s, parents´marriage used to be happy once, it can hardly be described as harmonious at the time of his birth. His mother is the only daughter of the first Negro doctor in the town, now long ago dead, his father Macon Dead is a feared, wealthy property owner who never got on well with the doctor. Unlike Milkman´s much older sisters Lena and First Corinthians, who are the children of passion, Milkman is the result of Ruth´s single triumph over her husband, the victory that she won from Macon. The two, now hating each other thoroughly, Milkman becomes a toy in their hands, a toy that they both want to own exclusively. “He became a plain on which, like the cowboys and Indians in the movies, she and her husband fought“ (Morrison 147). In his early teens Milkman befriends Guitar, a grandson of a woman whom Macon previously evicted from his house for nonpayment of rent. One day Guitar introduces Milkman to Macon´s sister Pilate, her daughter Reba and granddaughter Hagar. Macon tries his best to ward his children off Pilate, makes them all believe that she is “ugly, dirty, poor and drunk“. However, during Milkman´s first visit at Pilate´s modest house it soon becomes apparent to him that although “she was anything but pretty, yet he knew he could have watched her all day“ (Morison 46). When Macon realizes that Milkman, at that time twelve years old, met Pilate, he decides to intoduce his son in the rental business, so as to occupy his free time and prevent him from further visits at Pilate´s. Paradoxically, as Milkman works mostly as a messenger and errand runner around 13

Macon´s houses, he finds even more time for the forbidden fruit . Moreover, Milkman falls in love with Hagar and the two later become lovers, despite the fact that they are cousins.

In the years to come, however, under the baton of his father, Milkman inevitably turns into a self-indulgent, spoilt young man, tacitly accepting his father´s way and values. After a decade of his intimate relationship with Hagar he ends it abruptly one day, no more finding exquisite pleasure in it. In return, Hagar in trance, unable to bear her loss, attempts to kill Milkman repeatedly. Milkman, tired of her having become a nuisance, of the ever-present tension between his parents and of a dramatic change in Guitar´s character, decides that he needs to leave the town. He tells his father that he wants to go away for a year and try to live by himself. Macon resists the idea, he needs his son in the business. Nevertheless, as Milkman advocates his plea, he unintentionally mentions a heavy, green sack hanging from the ceiling of Pilate´s house and Macon suddenly becomes all excited. He explains to his son that the sack must hold the gold that he and Pilate had found in a cave near their homeplace shortly after their father´s death and that he believes Pilate seized for herself. Thus Milkman with Guitar secretly steal the sack from Pilate, but find only dry human bones in it.

Milkman sets off to seek the lost gold in the cave only to return back not with the gold, but the fabulous discovery of his family´s fascinating past. During his journey, however, he must mature…

1. It is all in the family

In order to at least partially reveal the secret of Morrison´s key theme in her fiction – that is an Afro-American female, her daily ordinary life with children, Afro- American families and almost exclusively more or less distorted relationships within these families in most of her novels, it seems to be necessary to provide a concise historical frame to an Afro-American family structure and the devastating impact of racism on its functioning. Ever since their first arrival in America, African-Americans had to face injustice concerning their basic human rights. When Africans were first brought to American South four centuries ago, they were “at first indentured servants rather than permanently enslaved from generation to generation. By the late 1600s, however, hereditary slavery had become the rule and Blacks were degraded to the status of property“ (Mauk, Oakland 106), they were not even allowed to keep their own last name. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, new technologies in the cotton industry made slave labour more important than ever before. As the authors in their work American Civilization further explain “With a booming cotton economy (and cheap land available from ´removing´ the Indians), the cotton South expanded westward. This often meant that slave children had to move away from their parents to serve their masters, who were often the younger sons of slaveowners, on newly developed plantations“ (Mauk, Oakland 107). Perhaps that, one can guess, together with absolute reduction of the institution of a black marriage to a means guaranteering the influx of new slaves (the more children in a family, the better), is where the roots of an unstable, often one-parent black family lie. A close reader learns a lot about this phenomenon especially in Beloved – probably Morrison´s most well-known and critically acclaimed work. Paul D (one of the main characters of the novel) uses simple sentences exemplifying how common splitting of families used to be:

“ ‘seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men - brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons – had been picked off one by one by one.“ 15

“ configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men.“ (Morrison, Beloved 52).

Through Sethe, the book´s protagonist, Morrison for example lets the reader experience total degradation of a black wedding in the past with Sethe saying:

“That lady I worked for in Kentucky gave [earrings] to me when I got married. What they called married back then. I guess she saw how bad I felt when I found out there wasn´t going to be no ceremony, no preacher. Nothing. I thought there should be something – something to say it was right and true. I didn´t want it to be just me moving over a bit of pallet full of corn husks. Or just me bringing my night bucket into his cabin. I thought there should be some ceremony. Dancing maybe…“

(Morrison, Beloved 58).

“The denial of a family name, like the denial of marital legitimacy and the breaking apart of families, prevented stable family identities for enslaved Americans“, says Catherine Lee in her work The South in Toni Morrison´s Song of Solomon and confirms the harsh times that Afro-American family as a social unit came through in the remote past. In the less distant past, towards the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Afro-American families in the rural South were separated during the so called Great Migration which involved the movement of millions of southern Blacks to the urban North in search of jobs and freedom. In reality the longed-for new life frequently meant that men, the husbands, went first, leaving the family behind and only later the family (in the better case) followed them. In principle, unfortunately, the material progress that the migration represented, was often marginal and, moreover, many families split up permanently. Gaushia Thao of The University of Minnesota in her biography of T. Morrison states that both of Toni Morrison´s parents came from sharecropping families that had moved North in pursuit of better living conditions in the early 1900s. Memories of their harsh experience certainly must have influenced, to a degree, Morrison´s writing.

No matter how complex the issue is, how oversimplified the above stated theory of Afro-American women being often forced to one-parent households in the past may seem, it remains the fact that in 1984, of all children born in the U.S.A. out- of-wedlock, the figure included 13.4 percent of white babies and 59.2 percent of black babies. Age groups being analyzed, 42.9 percent of single black women aged 18-29 had had babies compared with 7.9 percent of single white women, and 69.6 percent of single black women aged 30-49 had had babies compared with 11.1 percent of single white women. Moreover, about a quarter of all black single women had two or more children (Biracree 117). It also remains the fact that these days the figures have not changed significantly. (One logically finds it hard not to consider the remotest past, hand in hand with other social factors, the aftermath of the current situation). Morrison herself, once a single mother rasing two children, seems to be fully aware of this racial specificity. In 1998 when she famously called Bill Clinton, then the U.S. President, “our first Black president“, she did so, because he in her own words “displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing… boy from Arkansas“ (Morrison qtd. in Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia). Undoubtedly, not only hers, but also her mother´s and especially her grandmother´s raw life experiences of a sole bread-winner have influenced Morrison´s writing, her outlook on family life, and the choice of her key life- long literary theme. “In New York“, she recalls the time when her sons were little in one of her interviews, “whenever things got difficult I thought about my mother´s mother, a sharecropper, who, with her husband, owed money to their landlord. In 1906, she escaped with her seven children to meet her husband in Birmingham, where he was working as a musician. It was a dangerous trip, but she wanted a better life… I thought that what I was doing wasn´t anything as hard as what she did“ (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). Interestingly enough, in many Morrison´s novels there appears a recurring character of an extraordinary, old, wise woman, around whom a whole family and household revolves, a woman who supports the family financially (thus fulfilling the traditional role of a father), and emotionally (fulfilling the role of a mother). How could one not think of an implicit autobiographical link between these women and Morrison´s grandmother? The theme of this strong female character will be further examined in one of the following chapters as well as the term of one´s “people“ that is 17

a wide family circle of distant relatives who, historically, always functioned among Afro-Americans to substitute somebody´s closest family members, should these, for various reasons, become unable to take care personally.

To conclude, the aim of this subchapter was to briefly introduce the focal theme of Morrison´s work, the drives that have possibly influenced her choice of this theme, and also one of the key themes of this work. To provide a brief historical context seemed to be necessary because although Song of Solomon is set in the 1950s and 1960s, much of its action results from events that happened at the turn of the centuries, including the above mentioned Great Migration, during which Morrison´s fictious Deads family progresses from Virginia to Pennsylvania and to Michigan.

2.1. Ruth´s family heritage

Professor Gary Storhoff in his critical essay “Anaconda love: parental enmeshment in Toni Morrison´s Song of Solomon“ states: “Morrison´s view of family relations depicted in her novels is considerably textured, since she is interested in the etiology and the consequences of enmeshment. By emphasizing the contextual dimensions of her family dramas, the interpersonal patterns that develop intergenerationally, Morrison extends her sympathies to all her characters, even the most seemingly undeserving ones“. In order to unveil the original cause of parental enmeshment in Song of Solomon, and this novel of Morrison is, undoubtedly, a paradigm of enmeshment – “the suffocating bond parents occasionally create with their children“ (Storhoff), it seems crucial to start the analysis of the Deads family patterns with mapping relations in Mikman´s parents´ families of origin.

Ruth Foster, Milkman´s mother, was, like her children later on in her life, born into a rather privileged family. At the same time, it is clear from the very first chapter of the book that her childhood was only seemingly happy. On one hand she was born into a truly exceptional family as her father was the first Negro doctor in the town, at the same time the author decides to follow the ´common pattern´ of a single-parent Afro-American family, when Ruth´s mother dies in the girl´s early childhood. Ruth thus grows up only with her father, a man of great honour, importance and gentle manners, whom she totally admired, and, as is further on in the book proved with her own words in a private talk to her son, also largely idolized.

The depiction of doctor Foster´s residence, a mansion of twelve rooms, its “parlor, heavy double doors leading to the dining room with the fine mahagony table, all the bedrooms…“ (Morrison 16), is supposed to symbolize wealth and superiority of the class the family belongs to, the high social status of the doctor. “The bowl filled every day during the doctor´s life with fresh flowers“ set on his expensive dining table is certainly another hidden symbol of this superiority. The narrator makes this clear: “It was for her father a touch that distinguished his own family from the people among whom they lived. For Ruth it (the large watermark left on the table by the bowl) was 19

the summotion of the affectionate elegance with which she believed her childhood had been surrounded“ (Morrison 18). The flowers therefore, are on one hand to present the doctor as a man of exquisite manners, on the other, though, a man who looks down on other members of the Afro-American community that he is a part of. Also, the sentence “the affectionate elegance with which she believed her childhood had been surrounded“ then might indicate author´s intention to reveal the fact that Ruth´s childhood, in reality, was not as affectionate as she herself would love to believe it was and that she, despite all the luxury she enjoyed as a child, grew up into a dependant, lonely, obsessive woman. In fact, many decades later, Ruth herself proves this assumption when she is one day recalling her childhood in a dialogue with Milkman: “I lived in a great big house that pressed me into a small package. I had no friends, only schoolmates who wanted to touch my dresses and white silk stockings. But I didn´t think I´d ever need a friend because I had him. I was small, but he was big“ (Morrison 137). At the same time, this excerpt also alludes to the unnatural tie that existed between her and her father, the mental (and indeed also physical) dependance on the doctor that Ruth suffered from and that the doctor was, evidently, well aware of:

Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife had died, 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.… (Morrison 30).

In principle, thus, the doctor finds Ruth´s explicit dependance on him bothering, simultanously, however, she, to his convenience, partially fills in emotional gap opened with his wife´s death. At the same time, he takes full advantage of his daughter´s unstinted filial devotion, her servitude, and apparently, misuses her “usefullness“.

There is little doubt that this pathologically close relationship became the source of equally unnatural relationship, far too strong a tie that develops between her and her only son one generation later, when “she tries to recapitulate childhood patterns in her own family“ (Storhoff), that is the pattern of selfish, possessive love, this time in the direction mother - son.

Interestingly enough, the doctor is portrayed as a man of vital importance for the community on one hand, at the same time, he is easy for the reader to despise as he often seems depicted to elicit distaste and contempt. Macon Dead after one incident of domestic quarrel between him and Ruth tells his son about the doctor:

“He was just about the biggest Negro in the city. Not the richest, but the most respected. But a bigger hypocrite never lived […]. Always calm and dignified. I thought he was naturally that way until I found out he sniffed ether. Negroes in this town worshipped him. He didn´t give a damn about them, though. Called them cannibals. He delivered both your sisters himself and each time all he was interested in was the color of their skin. He would have disowned you“ (Morrison 81).

Ruth, on another occassion confirms her husband´s words and tells Milkman: “He was not a good man, Macon. Certainly he was an arrogant man, and often a foolish and destructive one“. However, she, in one breath, adds: “But he cared whether and he cared how I lived“. Thus, the complicated, supercilious character of Doctor Foster, the town´s ´Negro number one´ who would even insist to be, after his death, for the place of his eternal rest, put in a cemetery “other than the one where Negroes were all laid together in one area“ (Morrison 136), is truly interesting. Apparently, Morrison lets him suffer from the illness of twoness, from what DuBois calls double consciousness, for the doctor is “…an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body“ (DuBois). With creation of this character and the latent symbols connected with it, Morrison evidently follows one of the main goals of her writing that she once revealed in an interview when she

said: “…characters are part of my effort to create a language in which I can posit philosophical questions. I want the reader to ponder those questions not because I put them in an essay, but because they are part of the narrative“ [of what the black condition was and is] (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). This character of hers is, undoubtedly, a proof of Morrison´s endeavour to portray her community and the conditions in it sincerely. Certainly she could have decided to present the doctor exclusively as a professional, successful and caring man. Instead she dared to admit that he was a man of flesh and bones with virtues and vices unable to attain his true self-consciousness. Commenting upon her characters the author herself also declares: “My vulnarability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; villifying whiteness rather than reifying it“ (Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xi). Finally, with creation of two totally antithetical halves of the character of Doctor Foster Morrison presumably intends to present a seemingly superficial thought. The readers should not idolize exceptional individuals, no matter whether within a black, or a white community.

2.1.1 Pressed small or abusing?

Being so much mentally dependant on the doctor, it is no wonder that Ruth marries (with his consent) a similar prototype of a man that her father is, Macon Dead – “a greedy, self-absorbed, unforgiving (and unforgiven) man, incapable of showing love or receiving it“ (Furman 35), who even beats his wife. It is apparent that the marriage is not content and harmonious, but full of fight. The doctor does not respect Macon Dead much and he, in return, is very disappointed in him.

One would feel very quickly sorry for the sixteen-year-old dignified girl, who grew up with her ´big father´ but without her mother and friends, and whom her husband married, but he can´t tell he was in love with her because, as he says “people didn´t require that as much as they do now“ (Morrison 80). Nevertheless, a perceptive reader can almost as quickly find threads in the text leading to a startling revelation - that maybe Ruth Foster Dead is not as much a victim of unfavourable circumstances as she might seem at first glance. What if she is possibly, despite “her shoulders hunched under the burden of housework and care of others“, a strong, grown up, complicated 22

woman “given to deviousness and ultra-fine manners“ (Morrison, 85), used to get and keep what she desires with a mind as cold as ice?

According to Storhoff, Ruth “outwardly conforms to the stereotypical image of a devout housewife, and she adheres to the ´separate spheres´ doctrine […], occupying herself with the duties of the household while he maneuvers in the larger world outside the family“, but she intuitively uses her “smallness as a mask to disguise her own efforts for control“. He claims that she demonstrates this tendency of hers to exercise control especially when the doctor falls ill. And indeed. In this Morrison might have intened to present the dark side of Ruth. As the narrator elucidates to the readers “although she had always believed that her father wanted to die, she was denying him, keeping her father alive even past the point where he wanted to be alive, past the pain on into the disgust and horror of having to smell himself in his next breath. Past that until he was […] lingering in absolute hatred of this woman who would not grant him peace“ (Morrison 155, 149). This situation clearly shows Ruth´s abuse of the doctor and her stubborn selfishness to keep for her “someone who belonged to her“, someone who, as she believes, “chose a more provocative companion than she was – and deliberately followed death when it beckoned“ (Morrison 149, 73). How could one perceive this frantic attempt of hers as a commendable effort to save her father, and not a selfish deed of an obsessed, possesssive woman who does not love him enough to let him pass away with decency and is jealous even of death?

Unquestionably, Morrison really intended to shape Ruth, like her father, a bit of both – ostensibly a “pressed small“ abused woman and, simultaneously, a person herself able of abuse - to give a clearer vision of Ruth than as a simple victim. In her own family, as Storhoff claims “she receives his [her husband´s] abuse, but also renders him impotent before his children and consolidates their sympathy for her“. This Storhoff´s critical look on Ruth might be startling to some extent and definitely feminist critics can hardly accept his theory, to me, however, it appears to be plausible. For without any doubt, Ruth, apart from really being a victim of physical and psychological abuse, is certainly also the abusing wife who tends to make her husband inadequate for example when she (together with her father) looks down on Macon´s 23

background and ridicules him and his property business. Macon once tells his son: “Where I´d come from, the farm we had, that was nothing to them. And what I was trying to do – they didn´t have any interest in that. Buying shacks in shacktown, they called it. ´How´s shacktown? That´s the way he´d greet me in the evenings“ (Morrison 81). The most straightforward association with such behaviour is, not surprisingly, reprehension, and not sorrow for Ruth.

And finally, but not least importantly, even Milkman´s very conception can be seen as one of Ruth´s acts of abuse or manipulation directed towards her husband. When Macon, on the day of doctor´s death sees his wife laying naked in bed with doctor´s dead body he at first intends to smother her, later he swears never ever to have any physical relationship with her since that moment. But Ruth is twenty, their two daughters are toddlers at that time. “By the time I was thirty…I think I was just afraid I´d die that way“, she says. And thus Pilate, gives her “some greenish-gray- grassy-looking stuff to put in his food“ (Morrison 139), Macon comes to Ruth for four days and she gets pregnant with Macon (Milkman) Dead. Already at that instant, totally unwillingly and unfortunately for him, Milkman becomes her “wished-for bond between herself and Macon, something to hold them together and reinstate their sex lives“ (Morrison 145). When her husband, however, “came out of his few days of sexual hypnosis in a rage and later when he discovered her pregnancy, tried to get her abort“ (Morrioson 145), Ruth, at the beginning, willingly tries to do so. With this behaviour of hers toward the unborn baby, she only proves her condemnable, manipulative tendencies. Against the odds, and with Pilate´s help, the baby survives; ever since his birth, though, he becomes a part of an uncontrollable game between his parents, a toy that they both want to keep for themselves only, in order to hurt the partner, and, consequently, becomes the basis of the triangular relationship that develops between them.

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[Considering autobiographical features possibly incorporated in the novel, it might be – with much wariness - stated at this point that Morrison divorced her husband when pregnant with her second son (Wilfong).

2.1.2 Ruth´s possessive maternal love

“The triangular relationship, “triangulation,“ is a central tenet of family systems theory. In contrast to the dyadic conceptualization of marital relationships, triangulation involves a third party (often the child) – a three-person emotional configuration – as an essential means of stabilizing the relationship between the spouses. When the third member is called into play, the conflicts between the first two are somewhat lessened, but also frozen into place. Thus, the third member has a homeostatic function in preserving the marriage, but the conflictual issues are never solved because of the presence of the triangulated member“ (Schultz qtd. in Storhoff).

Apparently, the Deads family, as created by Morrison´s artistic imagination, is a typical family suffering form triangulation “symptoms“. Both parents, Ruth and Macon, perceive their son as a weapon which can be (and is) used to one´s convenience, against the opposite partner, showing little consideration for Milkman´s emotional health. “Her son had never been a person to her, a separate real person. He had always been a passion“ (Morrison 145), the narrator divulges about Ruth. Therefore, in order to keep Milkman for herself as long as possible, she breastfeeds him long past the time when it would be necessary, when he is “old enough to be bored by the flat taste of mother´s milk“, sittting in her lap with “his legs dangling almost to the floor“ (Morrison 24,25). When a passing by old neighbour sees the breastfeeding scene one day, he nicknames Macon Junior ´Milkman´, a name that the boy hates thoroughly, as on its basis he quickly gains a reputation of being a “Mommy´s boy“. Equally, she pampers him endlessly, unnecessarily “worries him about galoshes, and colds and food“ (Morrison 73), to demonstrate to her husband how dependant the boy is on her. Another example of Ruth´s enmeshment with her son (and manipulation of her husband) can be seen in her attempts of talking Milkman into studying medicine and becoming a doctor and not a partner in Macon´s business, because she “had as little respect for her husband´s business as Macon had for college graduates“ (Morrison 79).

She feels that that would hurt her husband fatally - making his only son follow in his father-in-laws´ (and not his own) footsteps, having him pursue the career of a doctor and not the owner of a property dominion! During their conversation on the topic Milkman confesses to his mother that he would not completely object the idea, then, in a joke (and a brilliant pun) asks her: “How would that look? M.D., M.D. If you were sick, would you go see a man called Dr. Dead“? In reply “she laughed but reminded him that his middle name was Foster. Couldn´t he use Foster as a last name? Dr. Macon Foster. Didn´t that sound fine? He had to admit that it did“ (Morrison 79). When reading this passage of the book, the scheme of Ruth´s revenge on her husband, the reader is captured by the story completely and forgets that he is reading fiction, so real and imaginable the situation, as invented by the author, is. And finally, a further proof of Ruth´s bias towards possessing Milkman, even as an adult thirty-year-old man, is evident from an incident in Pilate´s house when Ruth comes to confront Hagar after one of her attempts to kill Milkman. Desperate Hagar tries to justify the righteousness of her crime and exclaims to Ruth: “He is my home in this world“. To that Ruth replies: “And I am his“. At that moment Pilate enters the room and interrupts them saying: “And he wouldn´t give a pile of swanshit for either one of you. 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“ (Morrison 152). This Pilate´s statement not only demonstrates the foolishness of the two women, but also reveals the fact that Milkman grew up into an indifferent, self- indulgent young man; for without doubt, Morrison chose precisely this nickname for Milkman, (the name that everybody but his parents call him not only in his childhood, but also in his ripe adulthood), as a symbol, in order to fix an image of an immature, emotionally dependant and inauthentic personality that Milkman, despite his age is. What a wonderful aptness of the name, “one old man´s idea of humour“ (Furman 46).

3.1 Macon Dead´s family background

Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, 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 (Morrison 17).

However, Macon Dead II has not always been a cruel, insensitive, brute who regards himself the one who gives his family order and manipulates his son and people all around. Once he was a lovable, considerate, hard working boy - in his childhood and early adulthood. Apparently, if Morrison aimed to present in Song of Solomon also a paradigm of a functioning, happy and contented Afro-American family (despite the fact that again a one-parent family), she unquestionably did so, as most critics agree, with creation of Jake´s, that is first Macon Dead´s, family of origin.

Macon was born into a family of Jake (Macon Dead I), an extraordinarily successful and respected farmer, on a farm called Lincoln´s Heaven in Montour County, Pennsylvania. At his point it seems to be necessary to mention the most explicit autobiographical feature to be found within the novel and that is definitely hidden in the form of the Lincoln´s Heaven farm. It is clear that with its creation Morrison pays tribute to her ancestors – when as a model for Lincoln´s Heaven she used a farm previously owned by Morrison´s family, which was given to her great-grandmother by the government during Reconstruction, and which, unfortunately, they lost due to legal entanglements. As Morrison herself clarifies: “It was like the old man in The Song of Solomon. Those people didn´t really know what was happening. All they knew is that at one point they didn´t own the land anymore and had to work for the person who did“ (Morrison qtd. in Storhoff). Morrison deeply admired her courageous ancestors, similarly, Jake, as shaped by the author in the novel, is the character to be admired. The passage in which Morrison depicts Jake´s transformation from a freed man to a farm owner is probably one of the most powerful and most poetic passages in the whole novel, the

passage which literally fills the reader with all – energy, hope, awe, joy and visionary force. Especially its second part markedly resembles traditional African oral praise poetry, contains the typical features of signifying and call and response, is full of rhythm and music and it would certainly have sounded well in a public performation during the black liberation movement of the 1960s:

Jake had come out of nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing but free papers, a Bible and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year he´d leased ten acres, the next ten more. Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like a paint brush and spoke to them like a sermon. “You see?“ the farm said to them. “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can´t tell one letter from another, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,“ it said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage and if you can´t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county, right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don´t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home, you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on! (Morrison 256).

The farm, true to its name - Lincoln´s Heaven - proudly bearing the name of the very man who enabled its existence, becomes, as the above quoted passage partly suggests, a heart, a centre of the neighbouring Afro-American community and Jake, Macon´s father, its natural leader. Other boys and men wish they were as gifted as he is “the clever irrigator, the peach-tree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time and sing like an angel while he did it“ (Morrison 256). The farm prospers, becomes an unshakeable proof of Jake´s splendid victory. Moreover, ownership, as Storhoff points out, offers Jake and his children the opportunity for self-giving within the family circle, and for extending generosity and

joy to African Americans (Storhoff). Jake´s farm thus becomes a place where folks enjoy “Sunday break-of-dawn parties in a fish pond that was two acres wide […] and real peaches like they had in Georgia“ (Morrison 256). His children, Macon and Pilate grow up without their mother, who dies at childbirth with Pilate, Jake, though, is their certainty. Likewise, the farm is the anchor. There the children work together with their father, cooperate and also learn reciprocal give and take care. Macon is four years older and looks after Pilate with affection, carries her to the fields, protects her: “For a dozen of years she had been like his own child […], the person who had been his first caring for“ (Morrison 35, 36), the narrator says. Sadly, Jake´s fulfilled dream comes tragically to an end, when he is murdered in front of his own children´s eyes by white people, who own much of the county land, and Jake´s farm is in their way. The crime of the influential family, who are never punished by authorities, but ultimately only by their own greed, is apparently a means of the author to draw attention to the depth of racial injustice of the past when “white folks didn´t care, black folks didn´t dare“ (Morrison 252). Jake´s illfortune is even strengthened as his children witness the murder, and the horror of the experience and the brutal ending to the harmony they had experienced before, fatally influence their emotional life forever. “As a vanished psychological space, rather than as the literal theft of land, the farm´s loss and the trauma of Jake´s murder will plague Macon and Pilate throughout their lives“ (Storhoff). Macon turns his frustration into hoarding money, develops his vicious philosophy of “owning things“, Pilate, on the contrary, becomes totally indifferent to possessions and for many years becomes a land wonderer. “Something went wild in me when I saw him on the ground“ (Morrison 64, 256), Macon tells Milkman one day when recalling the horrifying scene, trying to justify himself for his often violent behaviour. Furman too agrees that:

Macon´s greedy obsession with owning things and people is a mutuated version of his love, as a child, of the land and his family. Belonging to earth, working with his father, caring for his sister, and earning respect and admiration from the black community define Macon´s childhood. His father´s violent death at the hands of

powerful white men who take the land change love to obsession (Furman 40).

Sadly too, and strikingly differently from Jake, Macon in his adulthood does not use his material attainment to benefit the African-American community around him. On the contrary, he is cruel to his tenants, never refrains to evict black folks from his houses, should they be unable to pay the rent in time. Naturally then and deservingly, what he earns from the community is not respect, but merely fear (and disdain), which, nevertheless, negatively influence all his family members, as can be exemplified on a brief episode from a local bar. Upon their arrival, Milkman and Guitar must face embarrassment when the bartender frowns and says to Guitar:

“Get him out of here.“

“He´s with me,“ Guitar said.

“I said get him outta here.“

“He can´t help who his daddy is.“ … “He ain´t like his daddy.“

“He ain´t got to be like him – from him is enough.“

(Morrison 66).

This quoted passage was supposed to conclude the chapter dedicated to Macon´s transformation from a lovable, considerate boy to a cold businessman, and to demonstrate not only hatred felt towards Macon within his neighbouring community, but also the difficulties Milkman must bear on the ground of his father´s behaviour.

3.1.1 Macon´s greedy paternal love

Over the years Macon amasses huge capital. His hard work, intelligence and ambition of becoming a wealthy man pay off and he becomes a rich owner of a rental dominion. The fact of attaining such a fortune gives him a feeling of power and superiority. “Owning, building, acquiring – that was his life, his future, his present, and all the history he knew“ (Morrison 325). Regrettably, “family for Macon is just another

category of personal wealth […]. Hating his wife Ruth, ignoring his daughters Lena and First Corinthians, and disowing his sister, Pilate, are the sum of Macon´s family connections.“ There is, however the one relationship, which “promises to humanize him“ (Furman 35), the relationship with his son, Milkman. Unfortunately, for Milkman it means that on one hand he is loved by his father, on the other, however, he is simultaneously, being misused.

As it has been previously stated and exemplified, Milkman has involuntarily become an inseparable, third party of his parents´ hateful marriage. In response to Ruth´s excessive possessiveness, Macon too, longs to usurp Milkman for himself, and overinvolves in his son´s emotional life. He does his utmost to get Milkman involved in his property dominion to lessen Ruth´s influence on Milkman, and at last, when Milkman is twelve years old, he succeeds. As Storhoff suggests “Macon too uses Milkman as a weapon for dominance and control of Ruth“, uses him to get his revenge on his wife, for which this extract provides clear evidence: “Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over the town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified“ (Morrison 72). At the same time, Macon has other reasons why he insists on having Milkman every day after school in his office. One of these reasons is Macon´s sister, Pilate, of whom Macon is ashamed, and who, to him, lives an improper and impractical lifestyle, totally different from his. Most importantly, however, she pursues diametrically different values, values Macon despises, and it is most probably this clash of values that he fears most. Thus as Milkman started seeing his aunt, Macon calls her “a snake“ and feels the urge to cut his son off her influence in order to instill his own life philosophy into Milkman´s head: “Pilate can´t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell you the one important thing you´ll ever need to know: Own things. And let other things you own own other things. Then you´ll own yourself and other people too“ (Morrison 64). This imposing of “the right values“, can be viewed as another example of Macon´s harmful enmeshment in Milkman´s life which “interferes with his independence, autonomy and growth“

(Minuchin qtd. in Storhoff). As a result, his son “both loves him and fears him“ (Morrison 78). To Macon´s credit, it is necessary to mention also the understandable, obvious paternal reasons why he longs for his son´s company – because he misses the time when he himself worked together with his father Jake, as he once explains to Milkman, “Right alongside him. Just the two of us“ (Morrison 60). Nevertheless, in Milkman´s early childhood Macon has difficulties with communication between them and can speak to him “only if his words hold some command or criticism“, as this dialogue illustrates:

“Hello, Daddy.“

“Hello, son, tuck your shirt in.“

“I found a dead bird, Daddy.“

“Don´t bring that mess in this house…“

(Morrison 36).

On the day when Milkman first sees his aunt Pilate, Macon rages and forbids any further visits. Milkman demands explanation why but his father refuses to explain anything. All he says is: “You´re my own son. And you will do what I tell you to do. With or without explanations. As long as your feet are under my table, you´ll do in this house what you are told“. It is explicit, therefore, that Like Ruth, Macon too infantilizes his son: “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!“ (Morrison 59), unhappy Milkman answers.

However, as Milkman grows older, working with Milkman fills Macon with pleasure and pride. And with passing time, the bigger and more successful his business becomes, the more he feels at ease with his painful past. “It´s not the money, it´s you being here, taking care of this“, he tells Milkman when the latter, at the age of thirty- two, tired of Hagar and the ever-present tension between his parents, asks for a year off. “Taking care of all I´m going to leave you. Getting to know it, know how to handle

it. You´ll own it all. All of it. You´ll be free. Money is freedom, Macon. The only real freedom there is“ (Morrison 179,180). This extract clearly divulges Macon´s honest effort to pass the dominion on Milkman, in a similar way that Jake had intended to pass his land and the farm on Macon, and his true paternal affection felt towards his son.

3.1.2 Macon manipulating or manipulated – a villain or a recluse?

Thus the question whether Macon is indeed the villain of the novel, as most critics and scholars see him, emerges. Could not it possibly be that more than a villain, a man who “acquired things and used people to acquire more things“ (Morrison 325), Macon is a lonely recluse, who, paradoxically, though manipulating people is and was manipulated himself?

Ruth´s tendencies to gain control in the family have already been mentioned. In my opinion, there was, nevertheless another person who in fact manipulated, misused Macon, without him instantly realizing it. This person is Dr. Foster, Ruth´s father, as Macon unveils to readers through his memories of the past.

One day sitting over account books in his office, he is thinking about the first time he decided, as Ruth´s social inferior, to call on Dr. Foster. He remembers the time when “he had only two keys in his pocket“, owned only two houses. He believed that “It was because of those keys that he could dare to […] and approach the most important Negro in the city“, because he could tell him not only “that his intentions were honorable“, but also that “he himself was certainly worthy of doctor´s consideration as a gentleman friend for Miss Foster since, at twenty-five, he was already a colored man of property“ (Morrison 29). What Macon did not know was the fact that in those days the doctor was already worried about his father - daughter relationship. Worried because of “the ecstasy that always seemed to be shining in Ruth´s face when he bent to kiss her [good-night kiss] – an ecstasy he felt inappropriate to the occasion“. Macon was not aware of the fact that the doctor already knew much about him as a prospective son-in-law and “was more grateful to this tall young man than he ever

allowed himself to show“. The narrator concludes this “misused suiter“ episode: “None of that, of course, did [the doctor] describe to the young man who came to call. Which is why Macon Dead still believed the magic had lain in the two keys“ (Morrison 30). Only later, after the wedding, when Macon considers a loan from the doctor to expand the business for the family, and expects support from his wife, he becomes jealous and begins to doubt the reality of her and her father´s relationship, as Ruth stands by her father who is opposed to the idea (for he generally condescends Macon´s property activities): “Then I began to wonder who she was married to – me or him“ (Morrison 82), Macon says. Some scholars also claim that Macon is often violent and aggressive towards Ruth out of frustration when she acts helpless, because he has worked hard to get where he is, whereas she has always been “daddy´s little girl“. Moreover, to Macon´s disgust, she still behaves like Doctor Foster´s daughter for whom after her father´s death their residence (now the Deads´ residence) seems to be “more a prison than a palace“ (Morrison 16), and not like the wife of an influential businessman. Ruth lives in the past, with her father, not present with her husband.

As a result, a close reader can perceive, despite all his money and power, Macon doubts himself; and feels dissatisfied at home and lonely, as the narrator recounts on the episode of Macon walking home one evening from work, passing his houses. “His houses stretched up beyond him like squat ghosts with hooded eyes […]. He felt as though the houses were in league with one another to make him feel like the outsider, the propertyless, landless wanderer“ (Morrison 34). Picturing his own home he sees “his wife´s narrow unyielding back; his daughters, boiled dry from years of yearning“ and hears “no music there“ (Morrison 36). While walking on, Macon reaches Pilate´s house, hides by the window in the darkness and standing there he can hear three women. “They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the other two were taking up and buiding on“ (Morrison 36). As Macon listens to their singing, he feels “the irritability of the day drained from him and relished the effortless beauty of the women singing in the candlelight“ (Morrison 37). This passage makes the reader emphatize with Macon missing the old days and his father´s singing, and manifests his isolation.

Other hints scattered throughout the novel make clear the fact that the character of Macon Dead is not (and was indeed never intened by the author) to be seen as completely despicable. Most importantly Morrison´s own words then prove the fact. In an interview with Nellie McKay Morrison resists any reductivist interpretation of Macon by defending his complexity as a character:

Q: [We] don´t admire Macon.

A: Why not? The people in these novels are complex. Some are good and some are bad, but most are bits of both. I try to burrow as deeply as I can into characters. I don´t come up with all good or all bad. I don´t find men who leave their families as necessarily villainous… I don´t come up with simple statements about fathers and husbands, such as some people want to see in the books (Morrison qtd. in Storhoff).

To conclude the chapter on the character of Macon Dead, as the above quoted excerpts exemplify, it appears that DuBois´s theory of double consciousness might probably be applied on this character too. On one hand, Macon does his utmost to become a paradigm of a prosperous, independent American and wishes to be seen so by his white business partners and the white community. “Macon seems to have relinquished all ties to his roots. Having lost his heritage, his history, and even his name, he has assimilated the dominant culture of the North“ (Atkinson, Page). On the other hand, unconscious of the fact, he painfully misses his own Afro-American community. “The singing ritual reminds Macon of what he has given up by disassociating himself with the traditions of his past“ (Atkinson, Page). Singing and music are inseparable components of oral African-American heritage and tradition. Macon longs for “the music that made him think of fields, and wild turkey, and calico“ (Morrison 36). It is evident that he is not as dispossessed from his original culture as even he thinks he is.

4. 1 Pilate – prototype of an ancestral woman

Song of Solomon is the narrative crucially connected to the American South. The problem for Milkman and his family concerns not just the relationship to the past (and the deprivation arising from it), but to a past that is specifically caught up with the history of slavery in the South. According to Lee, “Morrison suggests that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the South, destroys spiritual and moral identity“, and “signals the importance of the South with the very name of the section of town where Milkman´s aunt Pilate lives. Just as ´Southside´ serves as a reminder of the southern origins of the Black people who populate the novel, so Pilate offers Milkman an emotional connection to his southern ancestors“ (Lee), and, “as her name suggests, Pilate is Milkman´s spiritual guide throughout his passage“ (Furman 45). Like the characters of Baby Suggs in Morrison´s Beloved, or Eva in Sula, Pilate, speaking pure African-American English, represents the old wisdom and the mythic of Afro- American ancestors. When Macon Dead on the occasion of Milkman´s first visit at Pilate´s has a rare, intimate conversation with his son, he tells him about her: “If you ever have a doubt we from Africa, look at Pilate. She look just like Papa and he looked like all them pictures you ever see of Africans. A Pennsylvania African. Acted like one too“ (Morrison 63). Like Macon, she resembles her tall, dark father, and “because she never knew her mother, her personality characteristics derive solely from Jake“ (Storhoff). Likewise Jake, Pilate is intimately connected with nature, makes wine for a living, smells like a forest, and by men in her birthplace is “remembered as a pretty woods- wild girl that couldn´t nobody put shoes on“ (Morrison 255). And like Jake, Pilate is the other heroic character in the novel. Nevertheless, strikingly differently from both, Jake and Macon, Pilate is totally indifferent to possessions, and in extreme contrast with Macon´s greedy lifestyle she lives and acts according to her unshakeable conviction that money and material world are unnecessary for contented living. Thus Pilate and Macon can be seen as two “binary characters“ who think and have opposing actions, similarly to Sula and Nel in Morrison´s second novel, Sula (Thao). Similarly, Morrison also puts Pilate in sharp

contrast with Ruth: “They were so different, these two women. One black, the other lemony. One corseted, the other buck naked under her dress. One well read but ill traveled. The other had read only a geography book, but had been from one end of the country to another. One wholly dependant on money for life, the other indifferent to it“ (Morrison 154). Thus Pilate can be portrayed as a woman who lives quite against the commonly accepted norms and mores, “refuses to adopt the meaningless rituals that occupy most people“ (Furman 45). She gives no importance to money, lives in the midst of her community in Southside in a modest “lean brown house set back from the unpaved road“, she has short hair, “cut regularly like a man´s“, and she long ago “gave up, apparently, all interest in table manners or hygiene“ (Morrison 145, 153, 165). At the same time, however, she is depicted as a woman, whose “equilibrium overshadows all her eccentricities (Morrison 153). The questions to be asked, are, why Pilate behaves so “strangely“, what her drives for such behaviour are. Apparently, Pilate´s outlook on life and her life wisdom, result from her painful life voyage and experience. Simultaneously, for many reasons, Pilate resembles a mythic character, given supernatural powers. She was born without a navel “which evidences common birth of one human from another, Pilate seems ageless, immortal“ (Furman 46). When people that she meets or works with realize this anomaly of hers, they mostly fear her or abandon her completely as these extracts prove:

They thought she might hurt them in some way if she got angry, and they also felt pity along with their terror of having been in the company of something God never made. Even if you weren´t frightened of a woman who had no navel, you certainly had to take her very seriously (Morrison 159, 153).

Ruth too realizes, that at sixty-eight Pilate has “smooth smooth skin, hairless, scarless, and wrinkleless“ (Morrison 153). And similarly Pilate´s neighbours share Ruth´s suspicion about Pilate´s out-of-this-world abilities and see her as a woman who “never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody, but who also was believed to have the

power to step out of her skin, set a bush afire from fifty yards, and turn a man to a ripe rutabaga – all on account of the fact that she had no navel“ (Morrison 105). Pilate is a natural healer, and, at the same time, a person who can mediate peace among people because she “aquired a deep concern for and about human relationships“. But most importantly, she experiences posthumous communication with her mentor – her father “who appeared before her sometimes and told her things“ (Morrison 165), and Pilate abides by his advice. Interestingly, this quality of hers can probably be seen as the only one that she shares with Ruth, who, likewise Pilate, often speaks to her dead father on his grove. Her name - Pilate, “the name of the man who killed Jesus“, given to her at birth purely accidentally by her father who “thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees“ (Morrison 25), is largely symbolical. Pilate is a man´s name and it seems that Jake, as created by Morrison´s imagination, could not have chosen a more appropriate name for his daughter, for in her life Pilate will love trees (grows many around her house), will protect three smaller trees (her daughter Reba, Hagar and Milkman) and will become a woman as tall as a man. And earlier than others, at twelve, she will be conscious about her name enough to take the tiny paper on which it is written out of the Bible, fold it in a tiny knot, put it in a little brass box and set it in her ear, as the narrator explains (Morrison 26). Furman in her analysis on Pilate claims:

Pilate, of course, is one of Morrison´s ancestors, one of the timeless people who dispatch their wisdom to others, who consciously or unconsciously initiate others to the ways of African-American culture that give life continuity and intent and she bears a major share of the novel´s work in passing on cultural knowledge to Milkman and to the reader (Furman 45, 46).

Morrison wrote Song of Solomon in the seventies of the past century, at the time when African American writers of The Black Arts Movement had already

“turned to Africa for inspiration, wisdom, and a sense of black origin“ (Baker 1800). Unlike before, in the sixties, “no longer was Africa a dream deferred or a sign of shame […]. It became among African Americans a linguistic badge of honor: a source of artistic, intellectual, and cultural pride“ (Baker 1803). Pilate in Song of Solomon becomes Morrison´s central mediator of this pride and spreads around her the language, music, traditional customs, tales and wisdom of ancestors, the African American folklore and heritage.

4. 2 Pilate´s matriarchal family unit

As a grown up woman, Pilate is frequently asked by the people, who do not fear her but trust the supernatural abilities she possesses, for support and advice concerning their human relations, health and troubles of all kinds. Ruth, for example, seeks Pilate´s help first when she longs to reinstate her marital life with Macon, then again, when pregnant, when she needs Pilate´s protection from him, and even much later when she asks Pilate to protect adult Milkman from the killing arms of desperate Hagar. Despite the fact, however, Pilate´s own private and family life is not completely functional. One of the causes, as it has already been mentioned, can be traced in her childhood.

For twelve years of her childhood Pilate could enjoy the peace and quiet of her family, growing up on a farm with her father and brother. Ever since her father´s death and the break up with her brother, nevertheless, she had to rely – totally, only on herself. At twelve she had to leave her homeplace and headed to Virginia, looking for “her people“, her distant relatives, for all she remembered about her mother is that she had come from Virginia. After seven days of walking she was taken in by a family of a preacher. “A nice place except they made me wear shoes […]. But then the preacher started pattin on me“ (Morrison 156), Pilate recalls to Ruth one day, how she was forced to leave. Later she joined a group of pickers, further south, with whom she stayed for three years, and among whom she much admired an old woman, a root worker, who taught her a lot about healing, nature and “kept her from missing her own family, Macon and Papa“ (Morrison 157). This character of a “root woman“ 39

apparently also represents Morrison´s prototype of an ancestral woman who in Furman´s words “values community traditions and rituals that seem to abridge the individual´s freedom“ (Furman 64). At fifteen Pilate found a lover in the group too, however once he had learnt about her stomach he told other men about it, they subsequently told the women, and Pilate was soon after forced to leave again. At that time, for the first time in her life, she experienced a feeling of alienation from people of her own race but looked for another migrant group:

Now she knew how to harvest in a team… and did not want a steady job in a town where a lot of colored people lived. All her encounters with Negroes who had established themselves in businesses or trades in those small midwestern towns had been unpleasant. Their wives did not like the trembling unhampered breasts under her dress, and told her so. And though the men saw many raggedy black children, Pilate was old enough to disgrace them. Besides, she wanted to keep moving (Morrison 160,161).

She washed clothes in a hotel for a short time, still looking for another migrant group that she might join, or a group of women “who had followed their men to some seasonal work as brickmakers, iron workers, shipyard workers. In her three years picking she had seen a number of these women, their belongings stuffed into wagons heading for the towns and cities that sought out and transported black men to various crafts“ (Morrison 159), and longed to join them. When depicting these women, whom “the companies [which employed their husbands] did not encourage to come – they did not want an influx of poor colored settlers in those towns – but the women came anyway“ (Morrison 159), in her novel Morrison clearly remembers (and pays respect to) tens of thousands of real women who once, during the Great Migration, followed their men wherever they found means to live on, thus trying to keep their families together. When Pilate finally got to Virginia itself, she realized that she did not know in what part of the state to look for her people. “There were more Negroes there than she´d ever seen“, the narrator elucidates, and “the comfort she felt in their midst she

kept all her life“ (Morrison 161). Soon after her arrival she learned about “a colony of Negro farmers on an island off the coast of Virginia. They grew vegetables, had cattle, made whiskey, and sold a little tobacco“ (Morrison 161). All reminded her of her childhood farm. Now sixteen years old Pilate was happy that they took her in. She made sure to hide her stomach at all times and she soon found a lover and got pregnant. To the amazement of the island women however, Pilate refused to marry the man, “who was eager to take her for his wife“. On the ground of her previous experience she “was afraid that she wouldn´t be able to hide her stomach from her husband forever“. And she was convinced that as soon as he would see “that uninterrupted flesh, he would respond the same way everybody else had“ (Morrison 162). In my opinion, the author uses the teenage, prejudiced Pilate, who as a result of her prejudice deliberatelly deprives herself of a happy future family life, as a symbol - she tries to draw readers´ attention to the danger of prejudices (and prejudiced society). What Morrison also probably intended to pass to her readers is the fact, that if we are afraid of something, it is unimportant if it is a prejudice, or a real threat - both can harm us equally and fatally. Pilate, much wiser, and many decades later in her life, explains this belief of hers to a twelve-year-old Milkman saying: “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? (Morrison 49). Among the island farmers Pilate provided Reba, her baby daughter, with a family. Though never married to her father she lived with him and his mother, and the whole wide family took care of the little child. She stayed on the island for three years but then she was seized with restlessness:

It was as if her geography book had marked her to roam the country, planting her feet in each pink, yellow, blue or green state. She left the island and began the wandering life that she kept for the next twenty-some-odd years, and stopped only after Reba had a baby. No place was like the island ever again. Having had one long relationship with a man she sought another, but no man was like the island man ever again either“ (Morrison 163).

From the above quoted extract it is clear that Pilate did strive for a standard family unit, however her circumstances, her prejudice, she unfortunately belived in, denied her partnership in marriage and she felt isolated. Slowly, it appears, she stopped searching a male companion and came to a conclusion that she had to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. She cut her hair short, and it seems that with this, at that time unconventional act, she finally freed herself and stopped worrying about her exceptionality. Pilate´s daughter Reba felt comfortable with her mother´s wandering way of life. Like her mother she grows up into a woman indifferent to money; differently from Pilate, though, she is of a rather simple thinking and the only real interest she has is men. She loves staying in their presence, gives them presents and the way the author depicts Reba it seems that she would give them her last money and breath - she lives, as the narrator says, “from one orgasm to another“. Nevertheless, Pilate is at that time already well aware of how important “respect for other people´s privacy“ is (Morrison 165, 166), and she loves Reba unconditionally, tolerates her obsession with men and protects her. Pilate´s maternal love can be best examplified on an incident between Reba and her new boyfriend. When he asks Reba for more money, hits her with his fist and kicks her while she is telling him she indeed does not have any money at all, Pilate approaches the man from the back, throws her arm around his neck and positioning the edge of a knife on his heart she says (in fact as if on behalf of all mothers):

You see, darlin, that there is the only child I got. The first baby I ever had, and if you could turn around and see my face…you´d know she´s also the last. Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all. And you know how mamas are, don´t you? You got a mama, ain´t you? Sure you have, so you know what I´m talking about. Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don´t like their children. First real misery I ever had in my life was when somebody – a little teeny tiny boy it was – didn´t like my little girl. Made me so mad, I didn´t know what to do. We do the best we can, but we ain´t got the strength you men got. That´s why it makes us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us. You know what I mean? I´d hate to pull this knife out and have you try some other time to act mean to my little girl. Cause one thing I know for sure: whatever she done, she´s been good to you. Still, I´d hate to push it in more and have your 42

mama feel like I do now. I confess, I don´t know what to do. Maybe you can help me. Tell me, what should I do? (Morrison 105,106).

A close reader will certainly spot another fundamental proof of Pilate´s considerate maternal love. When Pilate suspects that Reba´s daughter Hagar is not quite content with the life her mother and grandmother live, she decides to make peace with her brother, give up her wandering life and settle permanently, for the sake of the little girl. “The child, Hagar, needed family, people, a life very different from what she and Reba could offer“, Pilate contemplates, “and if she remembered anything about Macon, he would be different. Prosperous, conventional, more like the things and people Hagar seemed to admire“. Unfortunately, upon their meeting Pilate finds her brother “truculent, inhospitable, embarrased, and unforgiving“ (Morrison 166, 167).

To conclude the chapter dedicated to the character of Pilate, her family and her maternal love, it seems to be obvious, why majority of critics see Pilate as the hero of the novel. Some critics, nevertheless think that Pilate, like her brother Macon “too seeks but ultimately fails to recreate the relationships of her family of origin“ (Storhoff), strives to overcome the deprivation locked in the experience of her father´s violent death. The peaches that Pilate grows in her garden, and the singing, ever- present in her house, Morrison offers as symbols of Pilate missing Jake and the farm and its stability. And it becomes more and more apparent that despite her outspoken effort, Pilate, like Macon and Ruth, is unable to provide emotionally solid family background to her daughter Reba and granddaughter Hagar (as it will be analysed in the following chapter). Storhoff supposes that “Morrison does not privilege Pilate´s uconventional, matriarchal, marginalized family unit over Macon and Ruth´s conventional, patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family, as critics often claim“, because he means that neither Pilate´s nor Macon´s family is functional as “both sets of parents seek to fuse with their offspring to satisfy their own emotional cravings“. Pilate tolerates Reba´s countless lovers, for she herself had few in her life; and she spoils her granddaughter Hagar, despite the fact that she herself has all her life lived modestly.

5. Hagar´s suffocating anaconda love

Hagar, Pilate´s granddaughter, is the most peculiar girl. She was prissy, the narrator reveals, from her early age: “She hated, even as a two-year-old, dirt and disorganization. At three she was already vain and beginning to be proud. She liked pretty clothes. Astonished as Pilate and Reba were by her wishes, they enjoyed trying to fulfill them. They spoiled her, and she, as a favor for their indulgence, hid as best as she could the fact that they embarrassed her“ (Morrison 166). As a grown-up woman then Hagar becomes, apart from Milkman´s parents, another person who has a tendency to selfishly possess Milkman, suffocate him with her love. From the above quoted extract it would be easy to condemn the character of pampered Hagar, full of her anaconda love who looks down upon her own mother and grandmother, but as always in Morrison´s prose, even Hagar can simultaneously be seen from a slightly different angle – as a hurt, obsessed and dependant woman. “Crime and punishment do not concern Morrison“, Jan Furman states in her analysis of Morrison´s characters, “but people and motivation do […] they are good people who do bad things“ (Furman 86). Indeed, Hagar can not be perceived only as a spoiled young woman who, when she is turned down by her lover Milkman, attempts to kill him, as she can not bear the thought of him living without her, nor being with another woman. She might also be viewed as a young, insecure Afro-American woman who was as a child deprived of the presence of men in her family, and thus does not know how to interact with them; and as a young girl and woman is hurt by the false, western standard of beauty, feels dissatisfied with her appearance and is convinced of her ugliness. When Milkman first meets his five years older cousin Hagar, it is a meeting of two spoiled, pampered young people and Milkman falls in love with her instantly. Pilate, upon Hagar first meeting Milkman, as if foreseeing the future, warns her granddaughter and reminds her that she should act to him like to her brother. However, Hagar is irreparably spoiled. As a result, she is used to do what she wants: “I just don´t let people tell me what to do, I do what I want“ (Morrison 107), she says; and have what she desires - “a navy-blue satin bathrobe (that for a woman who lived in a house that had no bathroom); a chubby; a rhinestone bracelet with earrings to

match…“ (Morrison 103). A few years later she takes Milkman for her lover in a similar way, that she takes a new present from her family. “She babied him, ignored him – did anything she felt like, and he was grateful just to see her do anything or be any way“ (Morrison 103). At that time Milkman perceives her as “odd, funny, quirky company, spoiled, but artlessly so and therefore more refreshing than most of the girls his own age“ (Morrison 109). Pilate and Reba knew about the change in their relationship, but they never made any reference. For about three years Hagar plays with Milkman – she sees him frequently, then forgets him for months. Later, however, as he grows older and starts seeing other girls, Hagar becomes jealous, possessive and finally obsessed with Milkman. “She began to wait for him, and the more involved he got with the other part of his social life, the more reliable she became. She began to pout, sulk, and accuse him of not loving her or wanting to see her anymore. And although he seldom thought about his age, she was very aware of hers“ (Morrison 109). She tries to win his affection with all means, gives him all her devotion, nevertheless Milkman decides to leave Hagar, and when he finally leaves her for good, after twelve years of their relationship, she can not bear the loss and goes insane. Subsequently, once a month, she goes out into the streets, searches Milkman and attempts for his life.

The calculated violence of a shark grew in her […] and when any contact with him was better than none, she stalked him. She could not get his love (and possibility that he did not think of her at all was intolerable), so she settled for his fear. Women watched her out of their windows. Men looked up from their checker games and wondered if she´d make it this time. The lengths to which lost love drove men and women never surprised them (Morrison 142).

Guitar, after her last attack, feeling deep sorrow as well as anger with Hagar, tries to explain to her that she can not love so possessively, and should, above all, love herself more than she does. He tells her:

You can´t own a human being. You can´t lose what you don´t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don´t, do you? 45

And neither does he. You´re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can´t value you more than you value yourself (Morrison 331).

Unfortunately, Hagar is already in a deep trance, unable to think nor act logically. Shortly before her death, in her last crazy attempt to win Milkman back she decides to change her appearance for him totally, as she is persuaded, that her look is the main reason why Milkman does not want her anymore. Reba and Pilate give her all their money. She walks to the town, has her hair done, buys the latest cosmetics and fashion, decided to present her new self to Milkman. On her way back home, however, she is hit by a terrible storm and rain which spoil her hairdo and all. The rain that soaked Hagar to the bones, clearly symbolizes futility of her trying to become somebody, she can never be… A few days later Hagar dies.

Considering the causes of Hagar´s unbalanced life, possessive love and tragic death, several hypotheses come into account. Firstly, as a result of their matriarchal household, Pilate and Reba center all their love on Hagar, and spoil her irreparably. Guitar too thinks that women “who wanted to kill for love, die for love […] were always the women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved“ (Morrison 331). Pilate and Reba also do not know Hagar well, as the narrator reveals: “Neither Pilate, nor Reba knew that Hagar was not like them. Not strong enough, like Pilate, nor simple enough like Reba, to make her life as they had“ (Morrison 332). Secondly, and not less importantly, another consequence of their matriarchal family arrangement, I suppose, is that Hagar lacks interaction and experience with men.

“Some of my days were hungry ones“, said Hagar on the first day when Milkman and Guitar visited Pilate´s house. “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.“ Then Pilate spoke. “Reba. She don´t mean food“ (Morrison 57,58).

Apparently, Hagar all glistens and shines in the presence of the two young boys and what she means with her “hungry days“ are the days when she lacked the company of men, rarely present in her family. Morrison herself comments on the absence of men as a loss within the family when she says: “Hagar does not have what Pilate had, which was a dozen of years of nurturing, good relationship with men. Pilate had a father, and she had a brother, who loved her very much… her daughter Reba had less of that… Hagar has even less“ (Morrison qtd. in Storhoff). Thirdly, Milkman is, unquestionably, to blame. As Lee, for example, supposes Milkman “exploits Hagar for twelve years, long after she has become the third beer…the one you drink because it´s there“ (Lee). Then he abandons her abruptly and, as a result, she goes insane. And finally, Hagar is also fatally harmed by the false western standard of female beauty, as the reader learns shortly before her death. Like Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye who believes that if she had blue eyes her parents would not quarrel and would love her, Hagar too believes that if she were more beautiful, that is looked more like white girls, Milkman would still love her:

“Mama.“ Hagar floated up into an even higher fever. “Hmmm?“ “Why don´t he like my hair?“ “Who, baby? Who don´t like your hair?“ “Milkman.“ “Milkman does too like your hair,“ said Reba. “No. He don´t. But I can´t figure out why. Why he never liked my hair… He loves silky hair.“

“Hush, Hagar.“ “Penny-colored hair.“ “Please, honey.“ “And lemon-colored skin.“ “Shhh.“ “And grey-blue eyes.“ “Hush now, hush.“ “And thin nose.“ “Hush, girl, hush.“ “He´s never going to like my hair.“ “Hush. Hush. Hush, girl, hush.“ (Morrison 340, 341).

6. 1 Milkman´s dull childhood

Macon Dead III, nicknamed Milkman, is born, as it has already been mentioned, in 1931 (the year Toni Morrison was born), into a prosperous, upper middle-class Afro- American family. He is born under peculiar circumstances - in racially segregated hospital (the first black baby ever born there) - on the day of a local insurance agent´s suicidal attempt to fly off the roof of the hospital. Therefore Milkman, unlike most of his contemporaries, is born in a privileged place, and a privileged family. In his early childhood his mother Ruth takes excessive care of him and enjoys private moments in the attic of their luxurious house breastfeeding him long past the time when it would be necessary. On the ground of the fact Milkman gains the nickname that he is thoroughly ashamed of, the name “that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it“ (Morrison 21). Moreover, being probably influenced by the circumstances of his birth, little Milkman seems obsessed with flying and when at four he finds out “that only airplanes and birds can fly – he lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother“ (Morrison 15,16). He has two twelve and thirteen years older sisters Magdalena and First Corinthians “sitting like big baby dolls before a table heaped with scraps of red velvet“, who make roses for a specialty buyer in the afternoons - “bright, lifeless roses that lay in peck baskets for months“ (Morrison 16), until the specialty buyer sends somebody over for them. The author clearly uses the dead roses as a symbol – Milkman´s sisters are, since their teens, though alive, dead too - spiritually. Moreover, unlike the roses, they remain, as we learn, unwanted - in their forties they are spinsters – and keep waiting in vain for the right (special) husband not for months but decades.

Both parents then, Ruth and Macon, use Milkman and his sisters, as the narrator elucidates to the reader, as a part of their show-off game. Every Sunday afternoon Macon drives his big, new, luxurious Packard around the neighborhood with all his family sitting neatly inside. “For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man. It was a less ambitious ritual for Ruth, but a way,

nevertheless, for her to display her family. For the little boy it was simply a burden“ (Morrison 39). Some people in the community “who saw the car passing by sighed with good-humored envy at the classiness, the dignity of it. In 1936 there were very few among them who lived as well as Macon Dead. Others watched the family gliding by with tiny bit of jealousy and a whole lot of amusement, for Macon´s wide green Packard belied what they thought the car was for“ (Morrison 40). Nevertheless, as Macon uses the car only on these Sunday occasions and never for drives to work, nor shopping, all the people call it Macon Dead´s hearse and the image of the car, misnamed by the people – a hearse – is, as Furman points out, “a looming symbol of the dead relationships and feelings of the people inside“ (Furman 35).

No wonder that when Milkman later in his life, as an adult, recalls his childhood before he met Pilate, he believes that it was “sterile“ (Morrison 197) and once he tells Guitar: “I´ve never in my whole life heard my mother laugh. She smiles sometimes, even makes a little sound. But I don´t believe she has ever laughed out loud“ (Morrison 116). Therefore, it can be said that the decisive change in Milkman´s life only comes when he is twelve and Guitar introduces him to Pilate.

Paradoxically, in Pilate´s modest house Milkman feels far more comfortably than in his parents´ luxurious mansion and although he thinks to himself “she was anything but pretty, yet he knew he could have watched her all day“ (Morrison 46). As Lee claims, Pilate acts like a parent for Milkman too: “Pilate is the only person to provide Milkman with what feels emotionally like a home“ (Lee), the fact that can be illustrated with the excerpts depicting Milkman´s feelings during his first visit at Pilate´s:

Milkman was five feet seven but it was the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy. He was with his friend, an older boy – wise and kind and fearless. He was sitting comfortably in the notorious wine house; he was surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him and who laughed out loud. And he was in love. No wonder his father was afraid of them.

Today he saw a woman who was just as tall [as his father] and who had made him feel tall too (Morrison 56, 59).

Therefore, in his aunt Pilate teenage Milkman sees a woman who takes him seriously, unlike his father and mother who have a tendency to infantilize him; and visits at Pilate´s bring immense pleasure to Milkman. More importantly, however, “meeting Pilate makes Milkman feel for the first time that his name is important, that it joins him with someone to whom he wants to belong“ (Lee). When Pilate tells Milkman during his very first visit that there "ain't but three Deads alive" (Morrison 46), Milkman screams out: “I´m a Dead! My mother´s a Dead! My sisters. You and him ain´t the only ones“ (Morrison 47). At the same time, he feels embarrassed and does not yet fully understand why he is suddenly “so defensive – so possessive about his name he had always hated“ (Morrison 47). Clearly, he must grow up and mature to grasp his feelings completely.

6.2 Milkman´s self-indulgent adolescence and manhood

Morrison shapes the character of adult Milkman in a way so as to provide a typical representative of the consumer society of the 1950s America, and casts him in a role of a wasteful, empty, dull, self-oriented man. Having been confronted with both contradicting versions of his parents´ past, he finds the pressure on his person unbearable and shuts down from the outside world. “He´d always believed his childhood was sterile, but the knowledge Macon and Ruth had given him wrapped his memory of it in septic sheets, heavy with the odor of illness, misery, and unforgiving hearts“ (Morrison 197). Milkman feels alienated, and, as Lee points out his “alienation originates, in part, in his lack of awareness and insight and his ability to empathize with others. At the age of 22, he is still trapped emotionally in the symbiotic state of an infant; for, as Morrison writes, he had never “thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own“ (Lee). He works hard in the office, plays hard at weekends in Honoré Club, sees Hagar when he feels like that and does not really care much about other people´s feelings, as the narrator reveals:

His life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn´t concern himself an awful lot about other people. There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, inconvenience himself for

He avoided commitment and strong feelings, and shied away from decisions

(Morrison 119, 197).

Milkman can not even feel excited about money, hoard it like Macon, because “no one had ever denied him any, so it had no exotic attraction“, and “he gave his away“ (Morrison 120, 73). At about thirty, however, he ponders his personal life, and realizes that there is indeed nothing that he can get excited about. He meets Guitar less and less. Proud as he is of the fact that he “had stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years“ (Morrison 109) he even contemplates marriage, as his relationship with Hagar is becoming untenable. Finally, he concludes that he is thoroughly bored with his own life:

There were lots of women around and he was very much the eligible bachelor to the Honoré crowd. Maybe he´d pick one – the readhead. Get a nice house. His father would help him find one. Go into a real partnership with his father and… And what? There had to be something better to look forward to. […] Politics – at least barbershop politics and Guitar´s brand – put him to sleep. He was bored. Everybody bored him. The city was boring. The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all. He wondered what they would do if they didn´t have black and white problems to talk about

(Morrison 120).

From the above quoted passage it is obvious, that as a young man Milkman is lost to himself and to his community and that his origin and the wealth of his family slowly but for sure finally create a boundary between him and his best friend Guitar. As Baker explains, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which banned “discrimination because of a person´s race, color, national origin, religion, or sex opened up the racialized society of the United States, and one of the most significant effects in the 1970s and 1980s was the increasing separation of the middle-class professional blacks from working-class African Americans, a subject that would be a central issue in African

American writing of the time. More and more, middle-class blacks lived in different communities and went to different schools, churches, and the like from working class and poor blacks“ (Baker 2012). Morrison in Song of Solomon seems to present this social problem on the example of gradual transformation of Milkman and Guitar´s relationship, as it is clear from the excerpt. While Guitar is eager about problems of his community, Milkman is indifferent to them. Originally, in their teens two inseparable friends finally start to follow totally different paths in their lives. The clash of classes Guitar and Milkman belong to and the distinct difference in attitudes the two young men hold towards social problems of their community can be also illustrated on the following excerpt in which Milkman argues with Guitar about what is wrong with Afro- Americans becoming rich: “What´s wrong with Negroes owning beach houses?“, Milkman asks his friend. “What do you want, Guitar? You mad at every Negro who ain´t scrubbing floors and picking cotton. This ain´t Montgomery, Alabama“ (Morrison 116). Finally, their paths almost definitely divide when Guitar joins a secret radical society called ´Seven Days´ which kills innocent white people and one day reveals the fact to Milkman. The philosophy of ´Seven Days´ is to ´keep the ratio´: “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“ (Morrison 170), Guitar explains to shattered Milkman. It is probable that with her fictional ´Seven Days´ organization Morrison alludes to some real militant organization such as Black Panthers existing in America in the sixties when “young black America was fed up with sitting in“ and “the time had arrived for militant, outgoing, radical activism and revolt“ (Baker 1794). Morrison even hints to Malcom X - when Milkman tells Guitar: “You sound like that red-headed Negro named X. Why don´t you join him and call yourself Guitar X?“ (Morrison 176). Thus unequivocally Morrison proves how she tries to infiltrate political issues of the time into her fiction and pass them to her readers.

At the age of thirty-two Milkman finally decides to leave the town and asks his father for a year off, to try to live independently. “New people. New places. Command. That was what he wanted in his life. […] 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.“ (Morrison 197). As he explains his reasons to Macon he mentions a heavy, green sack hanging from the ceiling of Pilate´s house and Macon suddenly becomes all excited. He tells his son that the sack must hold the gold that he and Pilate had found in a cave near their homeplace shortly after their father´s death and that he believes Pilate seized for herself. Macon asks Milkman to get the sack and Milkman with Guitar secretly steal it from Pilate. To their surprise however, they find only dry human bones in it. Consequently, Milkman sets off to seek the lost gold in the cave, which, as he hopes and tells Guitar, will enable him independent life:

I just know that I want to live my own life. I don´t want to be my old man´s office boy no more. And as long as I´m in this place I will be. Unless I have my own money. I have to get out of that house and I don´t want to owe anybody when I go. My family´s driving me crazy. Daddy wants me to be like him and hate my mother. My mother wants me to think like her and hate my father. […] And Hagar wants me chained to her bed or dead

(Morrison 242).

The fact that Milkman breaks into the house of his beloved aunt and steals there is apparently meant by the author to illustrate Milkman´s smallness, indifference and immaturity; however, from his journey to the South a completely new and revived Milkman returns. He brings no gold, but a startling revelation of his ancestors´ past.

6.3 Milkman´s successful quest for identity

Hand in hand with Milkman´s (successful) quest for identity Morrison connects the old Afro-American oral tradition symbol of flying and flight, with which she both begins as well as terminates her story. “The black folktale that some slaves could fly back to Africa“ is “the basis of Toni Morrison´s Song of Solomon“ (Meally 2017). Several slightly different versions of this folktale exist, nevertheless its core as well as its symbolism remain the same. Robert G. O´Meally in his Folktales for example includes the folktale All God´s Chillen Had Wings which starts: “Once all Africans could fly like birds; but owing to their many transgressions, their wings were taken away.

There remained, here and there, in the sea islands and out-of-the-way places in the low country, some who had been overlooked, and had retained the power of flight, though they looked like other men.“ Some enslaved Afro-Americans could, according to this tale, escape the yoke of their white masters by flying away. The symbolism of flight is therefore that of release, liberation, and not only physical but also spiritual. The latter is the case of Milkman in Song of Solomon.

When Milkman sets off on his “search for gold journey“ he first heads for Danville in Pennsylvania, to find the cave that (supposedly) hides the gold and to get there he goes for the first time in his life by plane. On the board he, ever keen on flying, feels free. “In the air, away from real life, he felt free“ (Morrison 240), however physically free only. He is unaware of the fact yet that in order to be really free he must free his soul, his spirit, not only his body. He goes all beautifully dressed up, with solid cash in his pocket and a space in his trunk for the gold he hopes to find… In “his beige three-piece suit, his button-down light-blue shirt and black string tie, and his beautiful Florsheim shoes“ (Morrison 247) Milkman can be compared to a peacock, the peacock that he and Guitar once chased in a parking lot. Milkman then asked Guitar how come that it can not fly better than a chicken. “Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Wanna fly, you got to give up all the shit that weighs you down“ (Morrison 196), Guitar answered.

Searching the cave in the woods in Danville Milkman experiences the so far unknown – physical pain, hardship and hunger - “Dust, tears, and too bright light were in his eyes“ (Morrison 274); in the creek and woods he tears and spoils most of his ´finery´ and learns that there are indeed places where his look and money are meaningless. Above all, however, in Danville he meets Circe, the old woman who saved his father and Pilate and who reveals to Milkman real names of his grandparents – Jake and Sing. He speaks to Reverend Cooper and men who remember his family, “his people“ and that is where the beginning of Milkman´s transition to his maturation and self-identification can be traced. When Milkman speaks to Reverend, and every old man in Danville who personally remember both Macon Deads, his father and his grandfather, when he hears them all talking about his grandfather “with such rheumy eyes, such awe and affection“ (Morrison 254), he experiences a completely new feeling of belonging and 55

realizes that he misses his grandfather too. That he misses “his people“. His own father´s words ´“I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or five we worked together. Just the two of us“´ (Morrison 60), also come back to him, in a new light, and, as the narrator clarifies, he admits ashamedly to himself that he wronged his father in the past, thinking that he was simply boasting of his masculinity as a child:

Now he knew he had been saying something else. That he loved his father; had an intimate relationship with him; that his father loved him, trusted him, and found him worthy of working “right alongside“ him. […] He could not recognize that stern, greedy, unloving man in the boy they talked about, but he loved the boy they described and loved that boy´s father (Morrison 255).

It is evident that Milkman begins to value his father “who, [the men] agreed, outran, outplowed, outshot, outpicked, outrode them all“ (Morrison 255) and his family, when he “felt a sudden rush of affection for them all“ (Morison 302). Still though the gold that he fails to find in the cave is on his mind and he decides to continue his searching further down in the South, in Shalimar, Virginia, where Circe told him Pilate had left decades ago and where he believes she must have taken it.

In Shalimar, Milkman experiences more hardship when local men talk him into a night hunting in the wilderness during which, moreover, Guitar, who thinks that Milkman already has the gold and tries to hide it in Shalimar, attempts to kill him. Soon he gets lost and in borrowed clothes and boots, with only his broken watch Milkman is suddenly in a place “where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use“, and realizes again that “there was nothing there to help him – not his money, his car, his father´s reputation, his suit, or his shoes“ (Morrison 300, 301). Thus the horrid experience during the hunt becomes another step to Milkman´s maturation. What is more, it also makes Milkman admire and appreciate ordinary, local black men whom he, on his arrival, considered primitive and looked down upon. When he hears the men and their dogs talk to each other in the woods he thinks to himself: “If they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn´t they know about human beings? Or the earth itself for the matter“ (Morrison 302).

All around Shalimar he can hear children sing that ‘“old blues song Pilate sang all the time“: “O Sugarman don´t leave me here,“ except the children sang, “O Solomon don´t leave me here“ (Morrison 324)“‘, and he thinks to himself wearily: “Everybody in this town is named Solomon“ (Morrison 326). Slowly then, bit by bit he solves the riddle hidden in the text of the song and realizes that it holds his ancestors´, and, therefore, also his fabulous past. He learns that the song is about his great-grandfather Solomon who could fly, and pride overflows Milkman:

He was as excited as a child confronted with boxes of gifts under the skirt of a Christmas tree. Somewhere in the pile was a gift for him.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the plate-glass window. He was grinning. His eyes were shining. He was as eager and happy as he had ever been in his life (Morrison 329).

Clearly, a transformed Milkman now puts Solomon´s ability to fly above the material attainment of his father and grand-father when he wishes he could tell the men in Danville about Solomon: “You think Macon Dead was something? Huh. Let me tell you about his daddy. You ain´t heard nothing yet“ (Morrison 354). It is evident therefore, as Lee points out, that Milkman´s “journey into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family“. She further claims that “Morrison uses knowing one´s name as a metaphor for knowing one´s past“ (Lee). A thirty-two year old Milkman now fully understands what he, as a twelve-year old boy, could not understand at all – why he instinctively screamed out loud that he was a Dead too after Pilate had told him that there “Ain´t but three Deads alive“ (Morrison 47). He fully understands why, such a long time ago, “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“ (Morrison 47).

Most importantly, In the South Milkman reconciles with his past and finally learns to value his closest family:

Milkman smiled, remembering Pilate. Hundreds of miles away, he was homesick for her, for her house, for the very people he had been hell-bent to leave. His mother´s quiet, crooked, apologetic smile. Her hopeless helplessness in the kitchen. The best years of her life, from age twenty to forty, had been celibate, and aside from the consummation that began his own life, the rest of her life had been the same. He hadn´t thought much of it when she´d told him, but now it seemed to him that such sexual deprivation would affect her, hurt her in precisely the way it would affect and hurt him […]. His mother had been able to live through that by a long nursing of her son […]. What might she have been like had her husband loved her? And his father. An old man now, who acquired things and used people to aquire more things. As the son of Macon Dead the first, he paid homage to his own father´s life and death by loving what that father had loved: property, good solid property, the bountifulness of life […]. That he distorted life, bent it, for the sake of gain, was a measure of his loss at his father´s death […]. Hating his parents, his sisters, seemed silly now

(Morrison 324,325).

Storhoff claims that “During his trip South, Milkman looks back. In doing so, he learns the wisdom to understand and forgive his parents, and in this way frees himself from his enmeshment“ (Storhoff). Now Milkman knows that although his parents have always loved him possessively he was wrong when he often “wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him; liked him for himself alone“ (Morrison 89). His parents loved him truly. The transformed Milkman finally understands that knowing one´s name is a blessing, having a family is a gift and belonging to his community is a fortune.

7. Names that bear witness

Discussing the topic of names and naming in Song of Solomon, it is clear that both are in the book fraught with significance. The novel emphasizes “the importance of names in traditional societies of West Africa – the origin of most Africans enslaved in North America, where names are identified with the individual´s essence, the core of one´s being“, as Lee points out (Lee). Lee further suggests that for American slaves, names provided a link with the African past and in the new world they conducted secret naming ceremonies and used their African names whenever they could avoid the presence of Whites.

The novel also stresses traumatizing experience of freedmen, in the novel represented with the character of Jake, concerning “the complicated status of surnames for African Americans in the United States“ (Lee). By incorporating this issue into her novel Morrison proves, once again, how she uses her novels to serve not only artistic purposes, but political as well.

As Historian Leon Litwack points out, many slave holders did not want Blacks, be it before or after the Civil War, to take their own last name, and former slaves in turn rejected the surnames of their White owners as signs of illegitimate claims to ownership. Upon emancipation, when to be a citizen meant to possess both a first and a last name, all former slaves had to register at the Freedmen´s Bureau and get a surname. There they either accepted the name suggested by the Bureau officials (as in case of Jake), chose their own surname, or “claimed the name of the earliest master they could recall, in order to retain a sense of family and identity“ (Litwack qtd. in Lee). Morrison with the very epigraph of her novel – “Fathers may soar and the children may know their names“ draws attention to this painful past experience, the fact that African-Americans often did not know the names of their ancestors, or did not know them at all. “But neither one of them knew their own father, Jake, nor Sing. And my own father didn´t know his“ (Morrison 347) Susan Byrd, his relative in Shalimar, tells Milkman. Similarly, Milkman tells Guitar about Hagar: “Sweet Hagar. Wonder what her name is“. When Guitar replies that he had just said it Milkman continues: “I mean her last name. Her daddy´s name“. And when Guitar suggests that Milkman asks Reba,

Milkman concludes: “Ask anybody but Reba. Reba don´t know her own last name“ (Morrison 100).

Macon too, feels troubled when thinking of names, pondering the real surname of his ancestors, remembering his father who was deprived of his original family name by a drunk Yankee soldier from the Freedmen´s Bureau.

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 man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name. His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide by naming done to them by somebody who couldn´t have cared less (Morrison 24).

It is also explicit that the book is saturated with names which are to be found in the Bible. The first male child in the Deads family is, traditionally, named after their father, the daughters of the family are, as a rule, “named by putting a pin in the Bible“ (Wikipedia The free Encyclopedia). Thus Macon, the narrator tells the reader, follows the tradition when “cooperated as a young father with the blind selection of names from the Bible for every child other than the first male. And abided by whatever the finger pointed to, for he knew every configuration of the naming of his sister“ (Morrison 25). Needless to say, every single one of these names seems to have been carefully chosen by Morrison to denote just the right qualities for the character that she had imagined for it. As Judy Pocock confirms: “The title of the novel and the names of almost all the women and some of the men come from the Bible. Each one of these names evokes complex biblical characters, allusions, metaphors, and narrative cycles that resonate back and forth throughout the text“ (Pocock). Logically therefore, as some scholars point out, the one who knows the Bible well, gains far more from Song of Solomon than the one who is not much familiar with it.

Numerous critics have been fascinated with naming in Song of Solomon, some of them come with startling revelations, such as Judy Fletcher, for example, who in her study on Song of Solomon compares it, on the ground of a profound concern with naming in both, to Homer´s Odyssey. “Names are obscured, replaced, and eventually revealed in both epic poem and novel. They possess a transformative power at times: Odysseus does indeed become No Man, the name he uses to trick the Cyclops, when he arrives home as a nameless beggar; in Morrison´s novel the man whose name is changed to Macon Dead is murdered, and his descendants transfixed in spiritual death“ (Fletcher). She, however, fully agrees with Pocock that few names in Song of Solomon are not derived from the Bible; one of these very few being the name of Circe, which, like Odyssey, comes from Greek mythology.

Furman, with her elucidation of Morrison´s fascination with names in this novel is, in my opinion, closest to the author´s original intention when she claims: “In Song of Solomon, Morrison nudges cultural memory by examining the importance in the black community of names and naming. Names of places and people are routinely appended, denoting some exploit or episode or special skill or talent or notoriety“ (Furman 46).

Milkman, looking out of the window when sitting on the bus on the way back home from his discovery voyage of the South and his family´s fabulous past, contemplates the importance of black man and women knowing their names – “names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness“:

He read the road signs with interest now, wondering what lay beneath the names. 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 places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as “Macon Dead,“ recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do

(Morrison 354, 355).

Conclusion

Having spent so much time on a detailed analysis of Song of Solomon, this masterpiece of Toni Morrison, I proudly admit that now I view and value her literary mastery even more than ever before. I above all appreciate the beauty of language she uses, the complexity of her characters and pure wisdom she hid in her fictitious story. In my work I have, hopefully, achieved the goals set in its introduction.

In the first chapter of my thesis I attempted to provide a brief historical context to an Afro-American family structure. I discussed the issues of racism and its impact on an Afro-American family functioning, the issues of a one-parent family, splitting of families in the past and the Great Migration with one reason only – all these are more or less incorporated by the author in Song of Solomon and even a limited knowledge of these problems enables the reader, in my opinion, a better insight into the novel.

To conclude the four chapters dedicated to the analysis of family patterns in the novel, it is evident that both Milkman´s parents´ families of origin strongly influenced their behaviour as parents themselves. Similarly it influenced Pilate´s perception of her parental role. Ruth´s one-parent family left bad emotional marks on her. Macon´s family too, although often idealized by critics, missed the mother and especially Jake´s violent death traumatized his children forever. Inevitably then, neither Ruth, nor Macon are able to form a complete, functioning family which would provide a solid background for their children. The same is true for Pilate´s family, no matter how diametrically different from the Deads family hers is. “Because Macon, Pilate, and Ruth could not face the suffering of their childhoods directly, they were incomplete as adults and looked for their emotional completion in their children“ Storhoff claims. I illustrated that Milkman´s parents and Hagar acted the way they did towards Milkman not so much out of malice, but above all on the ground of their own childhood deprivation; and this was clearly the author´s intention, when she neither of the mentioned characters depicted black or white but always the mixture of both.

Hagar´s tragic behaviour and fate was, moreover, strengthened by her conviction of her own unattractiveness for Milkman in comparison with white girls and Morrison uses the character of Hagar, like the character of Pecola in the Bluest Eye to 62

discourage her (not only female) readers from the publically often proclaimed and widely accepted western perception of beauty.

Against the odds, as I proved in the penultimate chapter, Milkman does succeed on his voyage for maturation and definitely finds his place in his family and community. Through his discovery of the story of Solomon and his ability to fly, Milkman learns to take pride in his ancestry and to value his connections to family and community. The author closely connects Milkman´s liberation from his fixed state of being with the old symbol of flight representing transcendence.

In the last chapter of the work I analyzed the issue of names and naming that Morrison uses in her novel and the persistency with which she insists on the importance of knowing one´s name for Afro-Americans. I also tried to identify some historical reasons for her doing so. I tried to set the whole of my analysis in the context of Afro-American history, enrich it with historical events and find allusions to these events that the author incorporated in her work. Within my analysis, in general, I succeeded in tracing several autobiographical features, as well as features typical for Afro-American literature, such as those of signifying, or call and response. Simultaneously, I identified passages where the author clearly blends her literary art with her political beliefs. Possibly my work could have been enriched with some theoretical background of psychoanalytic criticism and yet deeper analysis of DuBois´s concept of double consciousness.

Resumé

Tato práce analyzuje rodinné poměry a cestu hlavního hrdiny Milkmana za nalezením vlastní identity v románu Toni Morrisonové Šalamounova píseň.

V úvodu jsem se věnovala životní a literární dráze Morrisonové a pro lepší porozumění práci jsem zařadila stručný obsah knihy. První z kapitol poskytuje obraz afroamerické rodiny na pozadí historie. Milkman je ve svém životě zásadně ovlivněn čtyřmi lidmi, každému z nich je věnována jedna z kapitol. V nich se snažím odhalit důvody, jež tyto postavy přivádějí k jejich specifickému vztahu k hlavnímu hrdinovi. Šestá část mé práce je věnována Milkmanovi a jeho proměně v dospělého, uvědomělého muže. Závěrečná kapitola potom významu, jež Afroameričané a Morrisonová v tomto románu přikládají svým jménům a příjmením a historickým důvodům, jež je k tomu vedou.

V analýze se také snažím vysledovat prvky a symboly typické pro afroamerickou literaturu, autobiografické prvky, které Morrisonová zakomponovala do knihy a poodhalit její snahu propojit světy umění a politiky.

Résumé

This diploma work analyses family relationships of the book´s protagonist Milkman and his quest for identity in Toni Morrison´s novel Song of Solomon.

In the first two pre-chapters I introduce literary style and life of Toni Morrison and, for better comprehension, include a summary of the plot of the story. The first chapter provides a concise historical frame to an Afro-American family structure. Milkman is fundamentally influenced by four people, each of whom is analysed in one chapter, as well as the drives that form their specific relationship in respect to the protagonist. The sixth chapter depicts Milkman´s transition to a mature man. The last chapter discusses historical reasons to the importance that Afro-Americans and Morrison put to knowing one´s name.

In the analysis I also try to trace symbols and features typical for Afro- American literature, some autobiographical features Morrison encoded in her novel and try to reveal the author´s effort to blend her literary art with politics. 64

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“Toni Morrison.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 18 November 2008. .

Appendix 1: A list of names that bear witness:

Macon Dead, Sing Byrd, Crowell Byrd, Pilate, Reba, Hagar, Magdalene, First Corinthians, Milkman, Guitar, Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State, Small Boy, Sweet, Circe, Moon, Nero, Humpty-Dumpty, Blue Boy, Scandinavia, Quack-Quack, Jericho, Spoonbread, Ice Man, Dough Belly, Rocky River, Gray Eye, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, Cool Breeze, Muddy Waters, Pinetop, Jelly Roll, Fats, Leadbelly, Bo Diddley, Cat-Iron, Peg-Leg, Son, Shortstuff, Smoky Babe, Funny Papa, Bukka, Pink, Bull Moose, B.B., T-Bone, Black Ace, Lemon, Washboard, Gatemouth, Cleanhead, Tampa Red, Juke Boy, Shine, Staggerlee, Jim the Devil, Fuck- Up, and Dat Nigger

(Morrison 355).

Appendix 2: Song of Solomon – lyrics

Jake the only son of Solomon Come booba yalle, come booba tambee Whirled about and touched the sun Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

Left that baby in a white man´s house Come booba yalle, come booba tambee Heddy took him to a red man´s house Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

Black lady fell down on the ground Come booba yalle, come booba tambee Threw her body all around Come konka yalle, come konka tambee

Solomon and Ryna Belali Shalut Yaruba Medina Muhammet too. Nestor Kalina Saraka cake. Twenty-one children, the last one Jake!

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 (Morrison 328).

Appendix 3: Toni Morrison´s work

Novels

The Bluest Eye (1970) Sula (1974) Song of Solomon (1977) Tar Baby (1981) Beloved (1987) Jazz (1992) Paradise (1999) Love (2003) A Mercy (2008)

Children's literature (with Slade Morrison)

The Big Box (2002) The Book of Mean People (2002)

Short fiction

"Recitatif" (1983)

Plays

Dreaming Emmett (performed 1986)

Libretti

Margaret Garner (first performed May 2005)

Non-fiction

The Black Book (1974) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (editor) (1992) Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (co-editor) (1997) Remember: The Journey to School Integration (April 2004) What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (April 2008)

Appendix 4: Awards and nominations

Nobel Prize for Literature 1993

Jefferson Lecture 1996

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988 for "Beloved"

Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 1988 for "Beloved"

UUA: Frederic G.Melcher Book Award (named for an editor of Publishers Weekly), 1988 for "Beloved". A remark in her acceptance speech that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” led the Toni Morrison Society to begin installing benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America; the first “bench by the road“ was dedicated July 26, 2008 on Sullivan´s Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to British North America.

National Book Critics Circle Award 1977 for “Song of Solomon”

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Toni Morrison on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Nominations

Grammy Awards 2008 Best Spoken Word Album for Children - "Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?"