Keith E. Byerman, "Beyond Realism: The Fictions of Toni Morrison," in Toni Morrison, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, New York and Philadelphia, 1990, 55-84.

55:

Toni Morrison creates conventionally stable central characters. ... But in fact, she uses the narrative to present disordered, violent, perverse worlds ...These novels present us with murder, incest, necrophilia, child abuse, insanity, terrifying family secrets, and a general sense of life teetering on the edge of dissolution. Such material presented through reliable narration creates a tension that intensifies the emotional impact of the fiction.

70-76:

In Song of Solomon (1977) the quest is explicitly rather than implicitly for a name. Milkman Dead, a central character with very conventional values, comes to a point at which he feels the need to find out his family's true name. The discovery of this name carries with it a sense of his own humanity and also certain magical qualities connected with black folklore. Naming here has associations with African cultures in which the name is the expression of the soul; because of this, the choosing and keeping of the name is a major ritual.⁵ To lose the name or, in Afro-American terms, to be "called out of one's name" is an offense against the spirit. Consistent with these folk beliefs, the Dead family, whose name was given to them accidentally after the Civil War by a drunken white soldier, act out the designation. The father, Macon Dead, has perverted his own father's efforts to acquire and work the land by becoming an exploitative landlord and real estate speculator. He defines himself and others by accumulation of alienated property. Milkman's mother, Ruth, rejects the present by literally embracing only the past and the future. Macon tells the story of seeing her lying naked on the bed with her father's corpse. And Milkman acquired his nickname by being discovered still nursing at his mother's breast when he was four years old. Ruth, as the daughter of the town's first black doctor, displays the values of the old black bourgeoisie by assuming an attitude of hauteur toward her nouveau riche husband. Their daughters, Magdalene and First Corinthians (whose names were selected by the family tradition of choosing names at random from the Bible), despite their names, are adult virgins who have never been permitted to experience love, either because all men in the community were socially beneath them or because these men lacked sufficient property. Milkman's friend Guitar becomes associated with the Seven Days, a secret society of black men dedicated to exacting retribution for the deaths of blacks killed by whites. The murder of a black child must be avenged by the similar death of a white one on the same day of the week.

Milkman, then, is born and reared in a family that is life-denying. As a sign of this, his birth is simultaneous with the suicide of a man who leaps from the roof of the hospital. As he grows up, he acquires the attitudes of his family and friends. He becomes narcissistic and selfish and treats the members of his family with disdain.

The dialectical movement necessary to move him away from this deathhouse begins with his discovery of the home of his Aunt Pilate, a woman his father hates for some yet-to-be-determined reason. Pilate has a history and a true name, which she literally carries with her in a small brass box fashioned into an earring. Inside is the piece of paper on which her illiterate father painstakingly copied the word Pilate, the name he insisted she have despite the objections of relatives. Her mother died while giving her birth, and she and her brother later saw their father killed by whites who wanted his land. Having given birth to herself, Pilate creates a family of women much like that of Eva Peace. She herself makes money by selling illegal liquor, and the attendant disrepute is accompanied by a certain folk status since she has no navel and thus is thought to be a child of the devil. Her daughter Reba (whose proper name is the biblical Rebekkah) is marked by her luck; she wins every contest she enters and even those she accidentally happens into. Hagar is the spoiled child of her mother and grandmother, who spend their money to satisfy all of her whims.

Milkman is initially fascinated with this matriarchal household because of its difference from his patriarchal one. Here stories are told, food is tasty and plentiful, and none of the rigidity of his own home is present. Moreover, here he has his sexual initiation with Hagar. But fascination breeds not understanding but exploitation, which takes two forms. The first is the treatment of Hagar, whom he considers a sexual object to be used at his convenience, but never to be part of his life with his family's and his own respectable friends. Finally, he decides at Christmas to break off the affair, but he chooses to do so in a letter that is the emotional equivalent of his father's eviction notices: "He went back to his father's office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: 'Also, I want to thank you. Thank you for all you have meant to me. For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, of course, but more than that, with gratitude.' "⁶

This male domination through words has the effect of driving Hagar crazy. She sets out to kill him but repeatedly cannot do so. While this insane quest goes on, Morrison introduces other stories of the suppressed humanity and creativity of women. The effect is to provide a sense of a folkloric and historical tradition of oppression. In the barber shop a recent killing is said to be the work of Winnie Ruth Judd, a white woman who kills and dismembers her victims and periodically escapes from the state hospital. For these black men, she senses as a sign of the lunacy of whites who can kill for no good reason; her private torment and motivation is irrelevant to her symbolic usefulness. More pertinent to Milkman is his dream about his mother, which he is not at all certain is in fact a dream. In it, Ruth plants tulip bulbs which immediately emerge as plants and flowers; Milkman expects her to be frightened, but her response is very different: "She leaned back from them, even hit out at them, but playfully, mischievously. The flowers grew and grew, until he could see only her shoulders above them and her flailing arms high above those bobbing, snapping heads. They were smothering her, taking away her breath with their soft jagged lips. And she merely smiled and fought them off as though they were harmless butterflies" (Song of Solomon, 105). The chaos of creation, which the male fears, is embraced by the female. His mother, who is passive and serious, has a secret garden where she generates and plays with life.

It is in this context that Milkman receives a revisionist version of family history, one that reveals the importance of female creativity to his own life. He follows his mother one night on a long journey to the cemetery where her father was buried. Upon her exit, he confronts her with her monumentalizing tendency, including the incident of necrophilia told him by his father. She responds by expressing the feeling that the doctor was the only one who ever loved her and that she had reacted to his death by kneeling to kiss his hand, not by any perverse sexual gesture. More important, she explains to her son that she was the one who saved his own life. Her husband desired no more children, and insisted that she abort him. She appealed to Pilate, who helped her to defeat Macon's attempts. Thus, Milkman owes his existence to the life-affirming efforts of the two women.

He responds to her story by seeking a way to escape the entire family. In this second act of exploitation, he conspires with his father to steal a green sack from Pilate, a sack which they believe contains gold. Macon tells his son about hiding out with his sister after their father's murder, in a cave where they find buried treasure. They are discovered by a white man whom Macon kills. They flee, but the brother believes that Pilate later returned and took the gold, which is now in the green sack. Milkman and Guitar, who needs money to carry out an assassination, steal the sack, only to discover that it contains human bones.

Still obsessed with the idea of getting money and thereby power, Milkman sets out to find the cave near the old family property. He is at this point also evading both the knowledge that the women have offered and the responsibility that accompanies that knowledge. Just as his father distorted the values of the first Macon Dead by emphasizing possession over creation, so Milkman distorts his father's values by taking on his greed without any sense of responsibility and seriousness. And when he arrives in the family hometown, the folk recollections reinforce this idea. His grandfather and father are remembered, but he hears in the memories a respect for material possession and manipulative energy that validates his self-image.

Only when he encounters the incredibly old woman Circe does he begin to question the object of his quest. Circe was the servant of a white family, the head of which was responsible for the murder of Milkman's grandfather. She recalls the relationship of his ancestors and the real name of his grandfather. She is also the voice of a larger history, for she tells him of the injustices committed by whites throughout the past and implicitly questions his identification with white middle-class values. She also shows him one way to act: she lives in the house of the white family with an ever-increasing pack of dogs, which she intentionally keeps inside so that they will destroy all of the objects that were purchased through the exploitation of black labor. She has willfully outlasted the whites so as to destroy everything they found precious. But she knows the price of revenge; she fully expects the dogs to eat her when she is no longer strong enough to feed them. She has reached the time envisioned by the Invisible Man's grandfather in his admonition to "agree 'em to death and destruction,"⁷ but she also accepts full responsibility for her action. Her vengeance contrasts with that of Guitar in that hers is embedded in a concrete history and not an abstract, dehumanizing concept of justice.

Milkman leaves in search of the original home of his grandfather, but his quest is now ambivalent. On the one hand he wants the gold, which he still believes Pilate has hidden; on the other, he wants to know the story of his family. He has worked through concentric relational circles from himself to his parents to his grandparents. At each level the more he has probed the more he has found difference rather than the expected identity. In Shalimar he will move through one more circle, but in the process he will find a new definition of himself.

In the village he for the first time is the alien, for here his city clothes, city talk, and city values are not privileged. He is taken not as one returning to his roots, but as a threatening "white-hearted" presence. To succeed in his quest, he must undergo rituals that will strip him of his false culture and prepare him for authentic knowledge. He hears the children reciting ancient rhymes that are vaguely meaningful to him. But in order to decode them, he must become a member of the community. This happens first with a fight that demonstrates his alien status but also tests his courage, then through the opportunity to participate in a hunt. This serves as the male initiation rite that Milkman has never had and thus his possibility of moving out of his perversely extended, narcissistic childhood. He is stripped of all the symbols of the dominant culture, much as Ike McCaslin is in Faulkner's "The Bear." Though inept, he survives the test, including an unexpected murder attempt by- Guitar, who feels he has been betrayed in the pursuit of the gold. Milkman discovers that he wants to live and thus is not truly Dead. He endures and thereby receives the symbols of his success: the throbbing heart of the bobcat killed in the hunt and a woman he can truly enjoy without dominating.

Most important, he begins to decipher the children's song and finds in it the narrative of his family. It is the folktale of the flying African, Solomon, who one day discovers his magical power and uses it to fly from slavery back to his African home. He left behind a wife Ryna and twenty-one children, including Jake, Milkman's grandfather. Ryna, like Hagar, goes crazy over the loss of her man, and her children are cared for by Heddy, an Indian. The random elements of the past become a coherent family story. The men (Solomon, Jake, Macon, Milkman) seek power, either magical or material; the women (Ryna, Sing, Ruth, Hagar) must suffer for this pursuit; the children are abandoned because of it, but they are saved by a surrogate mother (Heddy, Circe, Pilate) who keeps alive the history for whoever might later need it. It is also preserved as a functional part of the community, in children's songs. Thus the narrative of power and suffering and love dialectically becomes play. He also learns the relation of the story to identity:

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, it will die when you do.... He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood Bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. (Song of Solomon, 329)

Names have a concrete history; they keep alive the complex, painful, disorderly, creative reality of human experience that dominant, logocentric structures seek to suppress. They register the hidden expressions of life in defiance of the controlling Word. They are also liberating and magical. They free Milkman from his death-wish and thus make it possible for him to die if necessary. And he frees Pilate, knowing as he now does that the sack of bones belongs not to the white man Macon murdered but to her own father. Aunt and nephew return them to the cave for proper burial. As part of the ritual of purification, Pilate rips off the earring containing her name; it is unnecessary in the presence of the body of the man who gave it to her and who now himself has his right name. At this moment, she is killed by Guitar, who, like the white man who murdered her father, values possession over human life. With the elimination of these two generations, Milkman can achieve identity with Solomon/Shalimar the flying African:

He could just make out Guitar's head and shoulders in the dark. "You want my life?" Milkman was not shouting now. "You need it? Here." Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees-he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. (Song of Solomon, 337)

This act of identification is simultaneously an act of differentiation, for unlike Solomon, Milkman flies into history and responsibility rather than out of it. And in the process he creates the meaning for his own name. From being the one who sucks nourishment and life from others. he becomes the provider, giving Jake his name and home, Pilate freedom from guilt, and Guitar the life he needs to take. His riding the air implies both play and control, or perhaps control through play, and is thus life-affirming even in the moment of death. The magic word, the true name, conquers for a moment of history, the Word.

While The Bluest Eye shows us the victimization that comes in a black community without a sustaining folklore and Sula shows us the oppressive nature of a community that uses its folk material as a means of control and evasion, Song of Solomon reveals the power that can be achieved through the embrace of a folk history.

84:

⁵ See Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture, translated by Marjorie Grene (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 125.

⁶ Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977), 98-99. All futther references to this work will be cited in the text.

⁷ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. (New York: Random House, 1952), 13.