Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon Author(S): Susan L

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Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon Author(s): Susan L. Blake Source: MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, Ethnic Women Writers I (Autumn, 1980), pp. 77-82 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/467030 Accessed: 18-01-2017 15:51 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:51:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon

Susan L. Blake

Solomon done fly Solomon done gone Solomon cut across the sky Solomon gone home.

The "song of Solomon" that provides the title of Toni Morrison's third novel is a variant of a well-known Gullah folktale about a group of African- born slaves who rose up one day from the field where they were working and flew back to Africa. In the novel, this tale becomes both the end of, and a metaphor for, the protagonist's identity quest: Macon Dead III, known as Milkman, finds himself when he learns the story of his great-granddaddy Solomon who could fly. From this story he himself learns to fly, meta- phorically: "For now he knew what Shalimar [Solomon] knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it." In basing Milkman's identity quest on a folktale, Morrison calls attention to one of the central themes in all her fiction, the relationship between individual identity and community,2 for folklore is by definition the expres- sion of community-of the common experiences, beliefs, and values that identify a folk as a group. The use of the folktale of the flying Africans in this quest seems to establish equivalence between Milkman's discovery of community and his achievement of identity, but paradoxes in the use of the folktale suggest a more complex relationship and help to define just what Morrison means by the concept of community, a concept which she vigorously endorses. The flight of the transplanted Africans dramatizes the communal identity of Afro-Americans in several ways. It establishes "home" as the place of common origin and dissociates the Africans from the American plantation where their identity is violated. It dissociates them as well from American- born slaves, for only the African-born have the power to fly. At the same time, as the ability to fly distinguishes the Africans from their descendants, it represents an identity that the African-descended tellers of the tale believe they would have if they had not had another identity forced upon them by slavery. The tale thus represents a common dream, a common MELUS, Volume 7, No. 3, Fall 1980.

This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:51:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 78 SUSAN L. BLAKE disappointment, and a group identity. As the object of Milkman's quest, it suggests a multi-leveled equivalence between individual identity and community. Simply as a folktale, it is an artifact of Afro-American history; its content links Afro-American to pan-African history; it is localized to represent Milkman's family history. His discovery of the tale thus represents Milkman's discovery of his membership in ever more inclusive communities: his family, Afro-Americans, all blacks. Furthermore, although Milkman realizes he can "fly" as a result of discovering his flying ancestor, his quest itself parallels Solomon's own flight back to Africa; it, too, represents a return to the origins of the community. In fact, community is not only the end of his quest but the means; Milkman makes progress only as he acknowledges community. In the characterization of Milkman's father, Macon, and his father's sister, Pilate, the novel sets up a distinct conflict between individualistic and community values. Pilate represents the spirit of community inherent in the folk consciousness. She lives without electricity or stockings or table manners, but with "a deep concern for and about human relationships" (p. 150). In her, vestiges of folk culture function in affirmation of kinship and community. Her communication with her father's ghost, for example, demonstrates her belief that human relationships have substance; her use of conjure in Milkman's conception has helped carry on the family; and her song, "Sugarman done fly away," becomes the clue to the family's history. Macon, on the other hand, represents the individualism of "progress." For Pilate, "progress was a word that meant walking a little farther on down the road" (p. 271). He hates his wife, is ashamed of his sister, ignores his children, and teaches his son to "own things" so that he can "own [himself] and other people too" (p. 55). As he travels back from North to South, from his father's home to his great-grandfather's, Milkman progresses from his father's values to Pilate's. He sets out seeking gold, his father's concern, but ends up seeking family, Pilate's concern. He begins by robbing Pilate, violating not only the principles of kinship and community but also the person who epitomizes them. He concludes by seeking reconciliation with Pilate and helping her carry out a sacrament of kinship by burying the bones of her father properly near his home. He begins thinking gold will free him from depen- dence on his father; he finds that he becomes free only as he throws off the influences of his father and absorbs the lesson of interrelatedness that Pilate has been living all her life. His thin-soled shoes fall apart on rough terrain; his three-piece suit labels him a stranger; the sense of superiority these city clothes represent makes the backwoods people whose help he needs want to kill him. But when he trades his suit and shoes for their army fatigues and hunting boots and goes hunting with them in a ritual test of

This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:51:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MORRISON'S SONG OF SOLOMON 79 fellowship, these same men give him the clue that leads to his discovery of his family history and an introduction to the woman (significantly, one whom social convention might label a commodity) with whom he has the first truly reciprocal relationship of his life. The same newly-awakened sensitivity to other people that he exercises in his relationship with Sweet allows him to see the parallel between the song "Solomon don't leave me here" that he hears children singing and the story he has heard of his own grandparents and realize at last that the characters in the song are real people, in fact, his own ancestors. In short, Milkman finds his connection with his ancestors as he acknowledges his connection with his contem- poraries; he finds community through community. The multiple ways of seeing Milkman's discovery as a discovery of community suggest that Song of Solomon is an elaborate, and entertaining, expansion of the equation between identity and community. In fact, however, the end of Milkman's quest is not the discovery of community, but a solitary leap into the void. And its mythical foundation is not the typical tale of the Africans flying as a group to their common home, but a highly individualistic variant. Milkman's discovery does not result in any of the conventional indications of community. Although Milkman is recon- ciled with Pilate and the two of them return to Shalimar to bury the bones of her father, Pilate dies (as she has lived, protecting Milkman's life) as soon as the burial is accomplished. Although he calls her "Sugargirl" and whispers wishfully, "There's got to be at least one more woman like you," Milkman does not so much unite with her as succeed her. What his discovery does is to provide Milkman with the examples of Solomon and Pilate. "Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly" (p. 340). This perception enables him to take the leap toward Guitar and the death that gives him life. Although Milkman leaps in acknowledgment of brotherhood-"It did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother" (p. 341)- brotherhood here is a dangerous void, which one can brave only through personal heroism. The importance of the gesture toward brotherhood is no resultant community-one of the brothers is expected to die-but the personal transcendence behind it. Milkman's leap does not dramatize his relationship with his friend-turned-enemy-turned-brother so much as it does his relationship with risk. The gesture is not communal but existential. Although Milkman cannot achieve identity without recognizing community, the identity he achieves is individual. Milkman's flying ancestor is also characterized individualistically. In twenty-two of the twenty-seven variants of the story in Drums and Shadows, the Georgia Writers' Project collection of folklore from Georgia Coastal Negroes, the flying Africans are a group-a "crowd," a "boatload," all the

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African-born on a plantation.3 In three variants, they are a couple; in only two, an individual. In the novel, not only does Solomon fly off alone, but the story about him emphasizes not where he is going but whom he has left behind-twenty-one children and a grieving wife. Since it is clear, from names and "nonsense" words in the song, that Morrison has used Drums and Shadows as a source, it is equally clear that she has chosen the least common and least communal variants of the story and changed the tale's emphasis.4 Thus, the significance of both Milkman's quest and the folktale his search is founded on are paradoxical. On the one hand, his quest leads Milkman to his kin, close and remote; on the other, it sets him apart, like the quest hero of myth and fairy tale (whom he also resembles) as one who overcomes obstacles and plumbs mysteries with the help of magical guides (like Pilate), but who ascends the throne or transcends mortality (as Milk- man does when he dares to fly) alone. On the one hand, Solomon is clearly Milkman's hero and model: "He could fly! You hear me? My great-granddaddy could fly! Goddam!" (p. 331). On the other, he dramatically violated the principle of responsibility to other people that Milkman has to learn in order to discover him. These apparent contradictions make us question the relationship between individuality and community in Song of Solomon and help to define both Morrison's concept of community and her sense of the relationship of present to past. The meaning of community in the abstract depends on the definition of the group recognized as a community in practice. Most of the variants of the tale of the flying Africans affirm a politically defined community based on national origin and political condition, which may be reduced, in this case, to race. The range of variants of this tale, however, reveals a conflict between this political definition of community and a more personal one: family; for, as three of the variants in Drums and Shadows emphasize, to repudiate slavery and affirm their African identity, the flying Africans must also desert their American-born kin. In making Milkman's flying ancestor a single individual and focusing his story on the wife and children he left behind, Morrison refers not to a community unified by its political experience, but to a conflict of identification between political and personal communities. At the end of the novel, this same conflict divides Milkman and Guitar, who, for the sake of his sense of the political community of black people, is out to kill his "brother" Milkman. Milkman and Guitar move in opposite directions in the novel. In the beginning, Guitar is the one who introduces Milkman to Pilate and the humane values she lives by. Later, Guitar's racial awareness represents a sense of community that contrasts favorably with Milkman's utter selfishness, one measure of which is his reaction to

This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:51:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MORRISON'S SONG OF SOLOMON 81 the murder of Emmett Till: "Fuck Till. I'm the one in trouble" (p. 88). But the ways Guitar and the Seven Days act on their sense of political community become increasingly perverse. By the end, when Milkman has learned to value people over things, Guitar is the one ready to murder for the mythical gold. The kind of community Milkman learns and Guitar forgets is not political but personal-kinship, or even more generally, brotherhood. Milkman learns to think of his mother as a person, to be grateful for Pilate's sacri- fices, to treat the people of Shalimar as persons instead of commodities. Like the fairy-tale hero who learns to share his crust of bread with a dwarf or make love to a crone, he learns simply to be kind. The crone becomes "Sugargirl" in the end, as she would in a fairy tale, but Emmett Till is forgotten. Community as it is thus defined is closely related to individuality, for it depends on individual relationships, which in turn both produce and measure decency in individuals-as his relationship with Pilate both educates and tests Milkman. The opening story of Robert Smith's flight from No Mercy Hospial at the end of Not Doctor Street, on the day before the hospital admits its first colored patient, the account of Jake's name change and murder, and the tradition of the flying Africans establish a sense of political community in Song of Solomon, from which the novel, in the progress of its plot and the variation of its folklore base, then turns away. Why, one wonders, does Toni Morrison, writing about the discovery of a black community, reject a political definition of that community? The answer may lie in another of the novel's paradoxes. As Milkman retraces the path of his ancestors' migration northward, he finds, when he stops in Danville, Pennsylvania, that his grandfather Jake, a prosperous farmer, is venerated for the same qualities his father, a prosperous landlord, is resented for-wealth, ambi- tion, the will to have the biggest and best of everything. To the people of Montour County two generations back, Jake's success is evidence that they can make it too. It says to them, "We got a home in the rock, don't you see! . . And if I got a home you got one too! . . . Grab it ... own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on-can you hear me? Pass it on!" (pp. 237-38). The old men of Danville, associating Macon with Jake, respond to Milk- man's enumeration of his father's assets-the daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town, a Buick two-twenty-five-as they do to Jake's achievements: "That's him! That's Macon Dead! . . . Bet he worry them white folks to death" (pp. 238-39). But to the Southside residents of the Michigan town who live in his houses and pay him rent, Macon's big car is "Macon Dead's hearse." It appears that, in Morrison's view, times have changed and changed the significance of actions. Jake achieved his success at the expense of the white

This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 15:51:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 82 SUSAN L. BLAKE folks; so his success was a source of community pride for blacks. His son Macon, whom we see evicting a widow with children and extorting rent from a man threatening suicide, achieves his success at the expense of black folks; so his success testifies to his alienation from the black community. Jake's individualism served the community and Macon's serves only himself because the nature of the community has changed. In Jake's time, the black community was united-thus defined-by white opposition. By the mid-twentieth century, the black community has survived white opposition-"Not Doctor Street" has prevailed over the Post Office -and it can and should turn its attention inward, to interpersonal rela- tions within itself. Where Jake was shot by white men, Macon is ignored by them, and Milkman is stalked by his so-called "brother," Guitar. By Milk- man's generation, Morrison seems to be saying, the concept of political community has become not only irrelevant but perverse, because it violates the concept of personal community, the relationships of kin, friends, neighbors. Milkman finds himself by going back into the past, but he does not stay there; he takes what will serve him and leaves. In the same way, Morrison has gone back to a folk story but taken from it only what suits her sense of contemporary reality. The part she has taken is small, and the difference between the song of Solomon and the common components of the story of the flying Africans dramatizes the difference between the world of the black folk consciousness and Toni Morrison's fictional world, which owes more, perhaps, to the need for interaction here than to the folk tale of African slaves flying to freedom. Lafayette College

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: NAL, 1977), p. 341. All further quotations will be cited within the text. 2. Discussed by Barbara Christian in "Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison," The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 7, 4 (Winter, 1980), 65-78, and by Barbara Lounsberry and Grace Ann Hovet, in terms of "traditional and 'new' perceptual modes," in "Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison's Sula," Black American Literature Forum, 1, 3 (Winter, 1979), 126-29. 3. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. 4. Drums and Shadows suggests the names Solomon (p. 63) and Rena (Ryna, p. 137) and provides the refrain of the song (pp. 74, 154) as well as other names that appear in it.

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