Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air Author(s): Dorothy H. Lee Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 64-70 Published by: African American Review (St. Louis University) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904138 Accessed: 18-01-2017 18:07 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms African American Review (St. Louis University) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Black American Literature Forum This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 18:07:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SONG OF SOLOMON: TO RIDE THE AIR DOROTHY H. LEE* Myth unfolds in a series of outwardly connected actions what the symbol that is, literally to transcend bondage. With a magical embodies in a unity. realism that disregards conventional verisimilitude in its -J. J. Bachofen, "Symbol and Myth"' blend of the fabulous with carefully delineated historical circumstances, she evokes a specific past and present black experience. The novel's mythic structure, additional allusions, The world's great myths continue to be relevant to man's and its network of symbols also suggest a meaning broadly questions about his nature and his relationship to self, applicable to any person who seeks to emerge from the dark society, and the universe. Beneath their myriad details, both labyrinth of the past into an illuminating knowledge of thematic content and structural patterns recur. Moreover, identity. Morrison constructs for her protagonist a lonely as we know, the myths are recreated in varying times and pilgrimage that encompasses elements of the universal cultures. The essential stories reappear, their meanings often monomyth: initiation, renunciation, atonement, and release. consciously enhanced by image and symbol recalling older Throughout, the liberating goal of the pilgrimage is empha- versions, but revitalized by a new grounding in the concrete sized by symbols and images related to flying. The quest is particularities of a specific time and place. In Toni Morrison's for the self-knowledge that leads to transcendence, as the Song of Solomon, for instance, we encounter once more the protagonist finally discovers how to ride the air. story of man's archetypal search for self and for tran- scendence. Simultaneously, we find the unique and imagina- The novel opens with the imminent birth of the central tively realized specifics of a black American experience. character "Milkman," actually named Macon, born Dead. The improbable naming immediately signals both the In Song of Solomon, Morrison draws on specific Afro- author's disregard for total verisimilitude and the fact that American legends of Africans who could fly and who used the options ahead for this child can be only reaffirmation of this marvelous ability to escape from slavery in America; death or rebirth. Milkman's birth is triggered by the excitement of the opening action, the failed attempt of *Dorothy H. Lee is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Dearborn Icarus-like Robert Smith to fly on artificial wings from the campus of the University of Michigan. roof on an urban Mercy Hospital. This sequence calls 64 This content downloaded from 128.228.173.43 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 18:07:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms attention to the book's central motif of flight, to other minor Milkman's family dwelling is, literally and figuratively, a ones, and to some of the most important supporting house of death. The Dead sisters pass their days in making characters. Present are Milkman's sisters; his mother Ruth; artificial roses. The atmosphere is heavy with the fear of the boy Guitar, who will be both friend and enemy; and his their father Macon, who "mangled their grace, wit, and self- aunt, the marvelous Pilate. The latter is unforgettable as she esteem" (p. 11). For the mother, Ruth, an ugly, spreading sings the lines which will become the story's refrain: watermark on the dining room table is the only confirma- tion of her existence: "That she was alive somewhere, inside o Sugarman done fly away . she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she Sugarman done gone knew intimately was out there, outside herself" (p. 11). The Sugarman cut across the sky mark was made by a crystal bowl which had, in the past, Sugarman gone home....2 been filled daily with fresh flowers. This elegant object is associated with her dead father's pride in a caste which he The date of 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, defined by light color and possessions, and is an external and the ironically humorous references to the racial dis- proof of her blemished life. We learn that the nickname crimination of "No Mercy" charity hospital ground the Milkman derived from her nursing the child too long in her fantastic episode in the familiar realities of time, class, and desperate need for human contact. We hear of necrophilia, race. Morrison thus achieves definition of a specific milieu her adoration of her dead father's body. And we also hear of while at the same time she suggests both a specific myth and Macon's parallel worship of money and property-of his a timeless pattern of aspiration. The blood-red velvet roses threat to evict a poor tenant and of his wish to "own people" scattered by the sisters symbolically stain the snow, and in so (p. 4). In addition to the death of feeling, another kind of doing they underline the artificial lives led by Ruth and her dying is clear in Macon's sense of lost identity: ". he and girls. More significantly, their graphic allusion to blood his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with suggests Robert Smith's failure to "go home," to transcend onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name his troubled life. As readers, we recurrently have occasion to that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and remember him. We never totally understand his failure to seriousness. A name that was not ajoke, nor a disguise, nor a soar, either literally or figuratively, because Morrison does brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where not allow us to do so. Yet, we must assume that he lacked his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to could never be something which Milkman later acquires and which enables known. No. Nor his name" (pp. 17-18). flight. Clues lie in the many variants of Afro-American As the epigraph to the novel tells us, however, folktales about escaping slaves. Their flight seems always to have been accomplished by newly arrived Africans and The fathers may soar facilitated not by artificial wings but by the knowledge of a And the children may know their names secret, usually indicated by the enunciation of a secret word. In one version told by the slaves and their descendants of the This possibility opens for Milkman in his aunt's home, Sea Islands, it is the oldest man who helps a younger to rise, which contrasts significantly with Macon's. Pilate's is a defining the proper time for flight and crying at the last home where naturalness is valued. Filled with music, it is set moment the special words "Kuli-ba! Kuli-ba!" as he gives a amid pine trees. It smells of the forest and blackberries, of sign in the Master's face.3 An analogous story suggests that apples and wine. Reigning in thejoyous atmosphere is Pilate it was enslaved former witch doctors, carrying the secrets herself, who carries her name with her always in her strange, and powers of their African people, who could initiate brass-box earring. Milkman first sees her posed like some escape. Here again a strange word is uttered and an exact ancient mother goddess, one foot pointing east and one west moment defined for the leap. "No one remembers the word," (p. 36), suggesting in the directions her connection to both says the narrator.4 There are innumerable versions of the life and death. Her lack of a navel reinforces this sense of legend which contain the constants of special knowledge divinity, testifying to her miraculous birth and suggesting and many which speak of Africa as the destination of flight.5 even the original earth mother. Her "pebble voice" seeming In the light of the legends, one may theorize that Mr. Smith to rise from the earth itself, she offers knowledge (apples) is too far removed from his heritage, that he has lost the and rebirth (eggs); and she volunteers to be a literal pilot for secret-sign, word, timing-which would have allowed him Milkman. Macon has insisted she is a snake (p. 54), meaning to go home on his own power. He is unprepared for flight. it negatively, ignorant as he is of the serpent's mythic role as Gradually, Milkman will, in the course of the novel, have to facilitator of rebirth.7 In her home, Milkman moves beyond learn the secret-something internalized and clearly more his metaphorically blind and dead father, whose character is potent than externals such as Smith's cloth wings.