Melvin Dixon, "Like an Eagle in the Air: Toni Morrison," in Toni Morrison, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, New York and Philadelphia, 1990, 115-142.
115-117:
In recent interviews Toni Morrison has talked about her midwestern, Ohio background and the possibilities it presents for new settings in Afro-American fiction. "It's an interesting state from the point of view of black people because it is right there by the Ohio River, in the south, and at its northern tip is Canada. And there were these fantastic abolitionists there, and also the Ku Klux Klan lived there . . . So I loved writing about that because it was so wide open" (Chant, 215). On another occasion she remarked, "Ohio offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither plantation nor ghetto" (Tate, 119). From a home that is neither typically North nor South, Morrison, like Ellison, who comes from Oklahoma, freely explores new physical and metaphorical landscapes in her fiction. She envisions space with fewer historically or politically fixed boundaries and endows her characters with considerable mobility. Her play of language upon and from within the land creates areas of symbolic activity for both author and protagonists: house and yard become scenes of psychological dislocation in The Bluest Eye (1970); land gradations and moral codes have inverted meaning in Sula (1973); mountain, farm, and island emerge as stages for enacting dramas of selfcreation, racial visibility, and cultural performance in Song of Solomon (1977) and in Tar Baby (1981).
Starting with her birthplace in Lorain, Ohio, and subsequent transformations of that place into several charged fields in fiction, Toni Morrison has imagined a complex and multitextured world. The symbolic geography in Morrison's fiction emerges from the precise physical details that give her black neighborhoods so much startling character and presence. Medallion, Ohio, or Shalimar, Virginia, fixes firmly in the imagination and shapes either terrestrial or celestial images through which Morrison initiates a dialogue with earlier texts discussed in this study, most notably with Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man. In the three novels that have earned Morrison an indisputable prominence in contemporary American letters, the author enlarges and completes many previous attempts to show the importance of both place and person in the development of Afro-American culture. From the songs her characters sing to transform otherwise dreary households into spiritual havens, and from the journeys they undertake through history and myth as in the early slave narratives (as the author revealed, "You know, I go sometimes and, just for sustenance, I read those slave narratives-there are sometimes three or four sentences of half a page, each one of which could be developed in an art form, marvelous" (Chant, 229) comes the achievement of form and art in Morrison's fiction.
Attentive to the physical and cultural geography of the small black towns that have shaped her and her characters, Morrison constructs familiar yet new dialectical oppositions between enclosed and open spaces, between the fluid horizontality of neighborhoods (shifting, migrating populations, a profusion of character types and changing morals) and the fixed verticality, hence presumed stability, of the house. Morrison calls for an end to Ellisonian inertia and a delight in the free fall. These oppositions produce various exciting results that propel characters and readers toward the principal movement in Morrison's fiction: the leap from land into sky. ... The one character who eventually learns to resist the gravitational pull of social conformity and to grasp what his newly stretched imagination can reach is Milkman Dead. He earns the authority to sing his real name, for he not only has discovered the long sought-for ancestor Solomon, he becomes him when he tries the air. That test of the air the risk, the ultimate surrender to it, and the strengthening ride culminates Morrison's metaphorical triumph over conventional terrestrial frontiers or boundaries to identity, moving up into the celestial infinity of its achievement. Milkman's journey from No Mercy Hospital to the cave in Danville, Pennsylvania, and from a wilderness hunt to a mountaintop discovery in Shalimar, Virginia, offers a more satisfying solution to black homelessness than the reflective yet artificial hibernation Ellison had proposed.
130-142:
SONG OF SOLOMON. YOU SEE? THE FARM SAID TO THEM. SEE? SEE WHAT YOU CAN DO?
Whereas the framing images in Sula are terrestrial enclosures, those in Song of Solomon are celestial flights. The novel opens with Robert Smith's aborted takeoff that brings about his planned suicide, and it ends with the violent reunion between Milkman and Guitar as one of them leaps from the mountain and into the "killing" arms of the other. The difference between the flights, how their angles of ascent exceed or grasp the long-sought-for family treasure, the home and name initially giving these characters wings, is the novel's main concern.
The novel encompasses three principal organizing structures that enlarge the orbit of cultural performances suggested thus far by several key texts, including Morrison's earlier fiction. These organizational structures include the relationship between Milkman and Guitar as the problematic moral center of the novel, the conflict between family and property ties that fuels tension between Pilate and her brother Macon Dead, and finally Milkman's initiatory "errand" into and out of the wilderness. By discovering his name and performing the song that redeems him and helps him to fly, Milkman completes the unrealized gestures and dreams of Morrison's earlier characters.... Song of Solomon is Morrison's carefully drawn map of ancestral landscape that reclaims and resurrects moribund (the family name is Dead) or hibernating personalities.
Robert Smith, insurance salesman by day and by night a member of the "underground" radical group, the Seven Days, occupies enemy territory when he climbs to the roof of No Mercy Hospital, so called because it had never admitted black patients. Smith appears to act out the words of one Negro spiritual that describes the kind of release he desires:
Some o'dese morning's bright an' fair,
Way in de middle of de air
Goin' hitch on my wings an' try de air
Way in de middle of de air.
Both the foreign, outer terrain of the hospital roof and the artifice involved in the "hitching" on of wings-"his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest" (5)-are ominous. Instead of a smooth and graceful death, Smith loses his balance, reaches for a triangle of wood jutting from the hospital's cupola, and goes "splat" (as one observer described the scene). Robert Smith's "leap" is an undignified, clumsy fall.
Smith's death sends another witness, the pregnant Ruth Foster Dead, into labor. Her son Milkman, the "little bird," whose hour of birth was accurately predicted by his aunt Pilate, who had earlier helped in his conception, becomes the first black child to be born in No Mercy. Milkman now has a more legitimate claim to the space Robert Smith had usurped. As a real "bird," a descendant of the Byrds in Shalimar, Virginia, revealed in the ending, Milkman will not need the artifice of Robert Smith's "blue silk" .... Milkman's maturation in his midwestern hometown and his departure South to discover the land of his ancestors and to sing the song of Solomon-the core subject of the novel-teach him to use his own wings. Milkman's leap at the novel's close is a redeeming flight. His journey is not an easy one; nor is the novel's moral center in the magnetic friendship between Milkman and Guitar without a healthy dose of ambiguity and role reversal. Before Pilate takes over as Milkman's veritable pilot, his first navigator through a difficult childhood and adolescence is Guitar, who as a child had also witnessed Robert Smith's fall. Guitar is best suited to be the kind of friend and adversary who can enlarge the reach of Milkman's leap "way in de middle of de air."
... Although from different backgrounds, [Guitar and Milkman] manage to build a friendship upon mutual interests and a pendular sway of dominant and submissive roles between them as Guitar then Milkman then Guitar takes the upper hand. Older than Milkman, Guitar has the lead at first; he introduces Milkman to Pilate, whose folk conjure aided his conception and birth. Her conjure of a successful aphrodisiac had encouraged Macon and Ruth to conceive after many years of uninterest and celibacy. Pilate, who helped make Milkman's "egg," later teaches Milkman and Guitar how to make the perfect three-minute soft-boiled egg. The recipe indirectly reveals the ambiguity of love and power in their friendship and how a growing estrangement between them will be reconciled, even if in battle. "Now, the water and the egg," Pilate instructs the boys, "have to meet each other on a kind of equal standing. One can't get the upper hand over the other. So the temperature has to be the same for both" (39). In the folk logic of this equation, Milkman is the egg. What about the water? Guitar's last name is Bains, which in French means "bath" or "watering place" or both. Pilate's foolproof recipe thus becomes a formula for reconciliation; Guitar and Milkman need equal matching for either of them to assume the "perfect" control of the leap, which is the only way, as shown in Sula, the free fall becomes flight. Throughout most of the novel, however, Guitar does have the upper hand. In addition to introducing Milkman to Pilate, Guitar is the one who initially guides Milkman away from his stifling, bourgeois upbringing- summers at St. Honore Island, collecting rents for his slumlord father- and Guitar teaches Milkman the novel's core lesson: "Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down" ( 179). Until Guitar's participation in the Seven Days weakens him morally and psychologically (as had happened to mild-mannered Robert Smith) to the point where he assumes the "greed for gold" that Milkman has outgrown, Guitar, as his name suggests, is as instrumental in Milkman's development of character and cultural awareness as McKay's Banjo was for the aspiring writer Ray. That is, until Milkman finds his own voice.
The attraction of opposite social classes ... initially brings Milkman and Guitar together.... Morrison's characters appear to find stability in kinship ties and bonds of friendship that cut across class barriers and generational differences. Note the strong ... generational patterning among Pilate-Reba-Hagar. These ... historical relationships anchor Sula and Pilate in a culture and family they use for support, particularly when the larger society rejects them as pariahs. Their hearths are comforting and inviting to Nel and Milkman, who are fleeing the stultifying middle-class repression that renders them marginal and homeless. Morrison's use of class differences as one element of mutual attraction suggests that economic conditions alone do not alienate lower or middle classes from a common culture. In Song of Solomon this idea is explored further when members of two different social classes represent the same family.
Macon and Pilate are brother and sister, separated after their father's murder; each inherits something different from him. Macon turns his father's love of the land and talent for farming into an obsessive ownership of property, reducing land and people to mere commodities. He advises his son Milkman: "Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too" (55). Pilate, just the opposite, already owns herself -- the physical evidence of her self-possession and self-creation is her stomach without a navel. She interprets the one word uttered by her father's ghost, a regular visitor, as an admonition for performance: "Sing." Instead of acquiring property, Pilate creates song, transmitting the family lore unconsciously. The history and culture voiced here first draws Macon, then Milkman and Guitar into the charged orbit of Pilate's single-story house on Darling Street, "whose basement seemed to be rising from rather than settling into the ground" (27). Pilate's home thus moves us up out of the underground and to the mountaintop. The wings of her song first attract, then encourage full surrender to that upward motion, even for Macon, who listens surreptitiously:
They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the other two were taking up and building on. Her powerful contralto, Reba's piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl, Hagar, who must be about ten or eleven now, pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet.
Surrendering to the sound, Macon moved closer. He wanted no conversation, no witness, only to listen and perhaps to see the three of them, the source of that music that made him think of fields and wild turkey and calico. (29).
As Macon peers unseen into the lives of these women, he becomes a version of ... Ellison 's invisible man. Lacking Daniels's cynicism, Macon secretly yearns to come out of hibernation and to accept fully the family he had denied in his "drive for wealth" (28): "Near the window, hidden by the dark, he felt the irritability of the day drain from him and relished the effortless beauty of the women singing in the candlelight.... As Macon felt himself softening under the weight of memory and music, the song died down. The air was quiet and yet Macon Dead could not leave. He liked looking at them freely this way" (29-30).
Macon is the kind of invisible man Milkman refuses to be. Without ever learning all that his nickname means (the prolonged "'sexual" nursing from his mother and the demands of nurture he places on other women), Milkman will develop any trait, any device, to differentiate himself from his father, even to the point of affecting a limp. "Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared" (63). Unlike Macon, who listens from outside, Milkman penetrates Pilate's house and there learns the magic in the perfect meeting of egg and water. Macon and Pilate vie for a controlling influence over Milkman. They also compete over their relation to the dead father and to the farmland that was as fertile as it was generous, "See? See what you can do?" The father had made it the best farming in Montour County, earning him the adoration of blacks and the enmity of the whites who eventually killed him. The land and the family heritage become battlegrounds for the continuing struggle between Pilate and Macon. While Macon is an owner of land and of people (his assistant Sonny, his tenant Porter), or so he thinks, Pilate..., is a "renting" black. Their different relation to the land inversely determines how they function in the novel to help or hinder Milkman. Macon remains dead to the past, which is celebrated and possessed unselfconsciously by Pilate. Macon, defeated by his father's murder, has leased his identity to fluctuations in the real estate market and in the whims of bank lenders out of desperation to prove his worth. Pilate, on the other hand, a restless wanderer, owns only those objects that implicitly direct her search for place (and for refuge from pariah status): rocks, a sack of human bones, and a geography book-her only legacy until she nurtures Milkman. Instead of washing her hands free of the past, she fills them with such common objects, burdens really, until Milkman's discovery shows them to be the family treasure they always were. By identifying the invisible ancestor in Pilate's song-"reading and re-reading" Pilate's oral poetry-Milkman lifts the burden of those bones from Pilate's shoulders and allows her to experience a surrender to the air that prefigures his more complete flight.
Cursed with endless wandering because the lack of a navel relegates her to pariah status in whatever community she finds herself, Pilate and her smooth stomach ... are objects of interpretation. ... Pilate has her bootlegging business, her conjure, and most importantly, her song-the same song that announced Robert Smith's presence on the hospital roof and that cushioned his awkward, suicidal descent; the same song that drew Macon to her part of town and partially out of his preferred invisibility. ... Like the Negro spiritual encoding messages for escape or resistance, it contains the riddle and the answer to the question of survival; it is a mystery to be unraveled, like the enigmatic advice of the grandfather in Invisible Man. This is the poem Milkman will hear again and again until he recites it by heart; his performance in the land of his ancestors reveals the hidden family name:
O Sugarman done fly away
Sugarman done gone
Sugarman cut across the sky
Sugarman gone home .... (6)
When Milkman learns the full text of the song and the history transmitted through it-"Jake the only son of Solomon"-recognizes the ancestor and the homeland Pilate perhaps had been reading about in her frayed geography book. She can now let go of the burden of bones. She buries them and her earring locket, containing her name written by her father, in a mountaintop grave. The interment of the bones also signals Pilate's end, for she is killed by a bullet intended for Milkman. Once again, she gives him life, if only for the time it takes Guitar to exchange his gun for his fists. More important, however, Pilate's death concludes her terrestrial wandering. When a bird, attracted by the glittering earring near her crumpled body, swoops down and soars away with the locket, Pilate achieves symbolic flight. She experiences the full meaning of her ancestry among the Flying Africans and of her name, no longer Pilate but pilot (a fulfillment that eludes LeRoi Jones's Air Force gunner and Ellison's flight trainee). The meaning of the novel's epigraph also comes clear: "The fathers may soar I and the children may know their names." In addition to wholeness of identity, Pilate achieves at last her rightful, celestial place.
Macon Dead, on the other hand, remains grounded in his lust for gold and in his accumulation of property. He has misread the lesson his father had learned from the land and its harvest, as heard in Morrison's thrilling rendition of the sermon the land itself delivers:
"You see?" the farm said to them. "See? See what you can do? .... 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 country right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in the 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 . . . own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on-can you hear me? Pass it on!" (235)
This land, its voice full of the language and cadence of Negro spirituals and rich with sources of identity, should offer prosperity to any family willing to use it in the ways suggested above, not merely acquire more and more of it. The land is to be used for procreation and harvest, not hibernation and greed. Thus, in many respects, Macon remains invisible to the land, to the community, to his family, and finally, to the culture that commands him to perform, not just to listen secretively. In the conflict between Macon and Pilate over the land, over history, and over Milkman, Pilate wins because she has shown Milkman a way out of the hibernation advocated by Macon's inertia. In this way, too, Milkman's struggle enlarges the orbit of geography for Afro-American identity and cultural performance beyond the cave of hibernation promoted in Ellison's Invisible Man.
Song of Solomon signals a major break from Ellison 's territoriality in Afro-American letters, yet Morrison's thematic and imagistic challenge to Ellison begins with interesting points of comparison to his novel. These common areas of concern suggest Morrison's careful reading of Ellison and the detour she takes from his "highway," and from the theme, setting, language, and literary form he enshrined. Morrison's break becomes all the more bold, startling, and significant because the comparisons suggest that she has explored Ellison 's terrain and found it lacking in the kind of cultural mobility her characters and their experiences demand.
Morrison completes the groping for avian imagery and the search for redemptive flight first articulated in slave songs and narratives .... Morrison's aviators, the Air Force men who frequent a local bar, inspire Milkman's envy only until he discovers that he can fly without the encumbrance of military obligations. ... Morrison undercuts the hegemony of Ellison 's preferred narrative strategy, what Robert Stepto has called "the narrative of hibernation" (193), by enlarging the structure to encompass multiple lives and points of view as her characters aim for motion, not stasis. The multiplicity of perspectives and situations in Morrison's fiction requires protagonists writ large; her novels are Bildungsromanen of entire communities and racial idioms rather than the voice of a single individual. What central protagonist exists develops only through the interplay between the community and the individual. Even Milkman is admonished by his father to "know the whole story" before taking sides. "And if you want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth" (70). Morrison's novels require us to read the life of a community as the text and context of an individual's articulation of voice. Milkman needs the play of the children of Shalimar to help him hear Jake's "narrative" in the song and to "close" the story of his own self-possession. Milkman's cultural performance when he sings the song of Solomon makes him a successful man-of-words.
Other parallels are at work and play between Morrison and Ellison. Both their protagonists struggle against an identity imposed by others. The nameless invisible man must end his passivity and willingness to be named by others, from the letters sent by Bledsoe to the slip of paper revealing the Brotherhood's name for him. Morrison's protagonist must come to terms with a nickname whose origin he never knows and with people who want to "use" him: "Somehow everybody was using him for something or as something. Working out some scheme of their own on him, making him the subject of their dreams of wealth, or lobe, or martyrdom" ( 165). Sonny, when he discovers Ruth's prolonged nursing of her son, announces, "A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come" ( 15). Milkman feels his name to be "dirty, intimate, and hot" (15) as he grows up to fulfill, unwittingly, Sonny's double-edged prophecy: he will take from women, but he will also be a passive, bleached, colorless (invisible?) personality until he takes charge of himself, with others. When Milkman learns through his journey to the South that names can bear witness, indeed "had meaning," he can give up his old self more easily (he loses his fine clothes and jewelry and car while on his journey) and reciprocate in lovemaking with Sweet more than he had done with any other woman ("He washed her hair.... He made up the bed.... He washed the dishes.... She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I'll see you tonight" {285}). Milkman's increased awareness of the mutual responsibilities in love and self-discovery brings about his visibility.
Both novels also share a figuration of geography that shapes the protagonists' journeys. Ellison 's narrative (apart from the frame) moves from the South to the North; Morrison moves from the North to the South. She alters the direction of cultural history away from simple chronology and toward a single, charged moment of multiple discoveries by emphasizing Milkman's embrace of cultural and familial geography. He arrives at the ancestral ground to become rooted in it as deep and as high as Pilate's father's bones. The protagonists in both novels also confront a riddle that invites interpretation and subversion of the nameless condition of Afro-Americans: one proffered by Ellison 's protagonist's grandfather, the other by Morrison's "Sugarman" or Milkman's great-great-great grandfather, whose identity could save his life. Both narratives or novels are framed or enclosed; one by the static posture of telling a story through the device of prologue and epilogue, the other by dual actions that are dynamic performances: Smith's suicide is revised in Milkman's flight.
Although Ellison 's protagonist's writing of Invisible Man in his underground retreat can be seen as an active deed (since it creates the space and action of the novel), Morrison offers an effective contrast: She replaces the cellar-basement environment for the invisible man's written performance with the mountaintop height of Milkman's oral performance. Also significant is their different treatment of flight. Ellison offers the folk rhyme "They picked poor robin clean" as a warning about the protagonist's grounded predicament. Morrison counteracts with the myth of the Flying Africans to show Milkman the reach and promise of the air, if he can ride it . Milkman becomes a true descendant of Jake, the only son of Solomon, whereas Ellison 's protagonist fails to become a true blood following Trueblood's example of storytelling and rhetorical flourish. When Milkman actually sings the song of Solomon, he assumes the name that had been denied the invisible man, without which Milkman would be colorless and the land of his culture invisible to all. Milkman can now nurture others: Pilate, Ruth, Sweet, Jake, and himself. From that exchange of emotional commitment, Milkman gains the strength he needs to meet his adversary Guitar and gain an equal if not upper hand.
Above and beyond these various points of comparison between Song of Solomon and Invisible Man lies Morrison's most significant achievement. She extends the geographical imagery and enriches the acts of deliverance established so far in Afro-American letters. Her novel encompasses the three principal landscapes of retreat and regeneration already present in black American culture: the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop. Taken as part of Morrison's assessment of geography and identity in fiction, they exceed earlier attempts to fix or promote one region over another. Song of Solomon not only returns us to landscapes suggested in the slave songs and narratives, it also plays upon the fundamental contrast between underground and mountain stages of self-achievement, thus exposing the limits of a Wright- Ellison geography and moving us forward to other heights of self-awareness through action.
Macon and Pilate Dead, for all their successes and failures, are still connected to figures of spatial enclosures, even the imminent grave suggested by their unfortunate family name. They are also prisoners of a haunting guilt in having killed a miner at the mouth of a cave in the wilderness through which they wandered aimlessly after their father's death. Once overcoming the menacing miner-a digger of undergrounds probing for hidden treasures below-the two children are prepared to conquer other spaces, such as houses, later on. Pilate's single-story dwelling appears to rise from the basement or underground, and Macon's acquisition of property represents his rise in society. Yet both are still tied to either material goods or to the alternate meaning they can convey, which is how Fred Daniels reacted to the bank notes and diamonds in his cave. It is Milkman who eventually develops a more effective relation to the land when he confronts the wilderness. There he not only searches for the cave where the miner's gold is presumably hidden, but he is prepared for the strenuous encounter with the Shalimar woods during the nighttime hunt of the bobcat with Calvin and King Walker and the other men of the town. They hate him at first ("They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken" (266)), but Milkman's participation in the hunt gains their fraternity and friendship. He secures his own place in the ancestral territory apart from the claims of Pilate or Macon.
It is not enough, however, for Milkman simply to arrive in Shalimar, or to lose his material possession while there (the vanities that weigh him down). He has to walk that lonesome valley, as the slave songs required, by himself:
There was nothing here to help him-not his money, his car, his father's reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact, they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone.... His watch and his two hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch-and some other sense that he knew he did not have: an ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on. (227)
Milkman has to earn kinship by enduring the woods, the wilderness. Like the fugitive in slave narratives, he has to renew his covenant with nature to secure passage out of the wilderness that had invited him in. Only through this initiatory trial in the woods of Blue Ridge County will he encounter those figures of the landscape that will give definite meaning to the otherwise confusing names and places in the children's song:
Jay the only son of Solomon
Come booba yalle, Come booba tambee
Whirl about and touch the sun
Come booba yalle, come booba tambee.. . (264)
Each step of his way puts Milkman "on land that sloped upward" (274). Only by surviving the wilderness-which is not a foregone conclusion since he is caught off-guard by the now crazed, nightseeing, cat-eyed Guitar, who, with this unfair advantage, cannot "kill" Milkman yet because the water and egg need equal matching-does Milkman learn the historical meaning associated with two figures of landscape that lie beyond the vision and experience of Macon or Pilate: Ryna's Gulch and Solomon's Leap, a valley and mountaintop. These contrasting, gender-related spaces extend from Morrison's earlier survey of cultural territory used as the framing images in Sula: the hilltop Bottom leading to the collapsing tunnel. Here the movement is reversed. Ryna's Gulch (as well as the bodies of the women Milkman has exploited through sexual conquest) points him to Solomon's Leap, but only after Milkman has bent his ear to the ground to hear the land's sermon or "anything the earth had to say" (279). Milkman's discovery of these new spaces and new territories, makes him the pilot to guide Pilate to the resting place for her father's bones.
In this wilderness, Milkman earns friendship with the men of Shalimar, with himself, and with the earth. Milkman discovers that he can be his own man, based on his proven skills of survival. Walking on the earth like he belonged to it, Milkman no longer needs the artificial device, the dutchman, of his limp to distinguish himself from his father. Nor does he need material possessions to differentiate himself from the kinsmen of Shalimar. Sharing at last a good-hearted laugh with them, Milkman becomes exhilarated "by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there-on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp" (281). Here Milkman becomes rooted. "Back home he had never felt that way, as though he belonged to anyplace or anybody" (293). This belonging enables him to decode the children's rhyme that gives meaning to the landscape and to Milkman's ancestry. Caught without pencil or paper, Milkman cannot write the song down, as Ellison 's protagonist could do with his narrative. Milkman "would just have to listen and memorize it" (303), internalize it.
When Milkman leads Pilate to Shalimar, he brings her similar homelessness to an end: she "blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn" (355). Together they advance to the higher ground of Solomon's Leap, both to bury the bones and to meet their separate fates. Pilate will fly without ever leaving the ground, comforted by Milkman's rendition of the song, which Morrison leaves unindented and without italics on the page to suggest that it has been refashioned in Milkman's voice and fused into the uninterrupted flow of the narrative: "Sugargirl don't leave me here / Cotton balls to choke me / Sugargirl don't leave me here / Buckra's arms to yoke me" (336). Now Milkman can ride the air. His leap of surrender is his ultimate performance, a flight he has earned by doffing his vanities and passing the test of the wilderness. His leap transcends the rootedness and the freedom he has gained. Milkman and Morrison's flight, their ride out of the wilderness, demonstrates self-mastery and perfect control.
REFERENCES
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Random House, 1982.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.
Interview by Pepsi Charles. Nimrod 21 and 22 (1977): 43-51.
"Intimate Things in Place': A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Interview by Robert B. Stepto. In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, 213-29. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Sula. New York: Knopf, 1974.
Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.