Wahneema Lubiano, "The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon," in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press 1995, 93-116,

111-113:

The idea of transcendence implied by flight is beloved by many of the novel's critics. In their view, flight echoes throughout the story as a reward, as a hoped-for skill, as an escape, and as proof of intrinsic worth; however, by the end this is not so clear a proposition. The novel does end with it but in such a way that the act allows for multiple and troubling interpretations: suicide; "real" flight and then a wheeling attack on his "brother"; or "real" flight and then some kind of encounter with the (possibly) "killing arms of his brother. ''21 That Guitar places his rifle on the ground does not make him any less deadly - his smile and the dropping of the gun both precede the language of "killing arms" - and his "my man É my main man" is an echo of the same irony that allowed Guitar to call Milkman his friend even after his prior attempt at killing him (298). And Guitar's arms are killing, not just because they want to answer the challenge posed by Milkman's move toward him, but because they are the arms that have killed, that killed white people, that can kill anyone who isn't black, or anyone Guitar can convince himself isn't black: like Pilate. In other words, Guitar can make an "other" of anyone who crosses the boundaries of the definitions he constructs for the group that he purports to love: black people. What Guitar has constructed in his life is a category of political ciphers that does not allow for the existence of the idiosyncratic Pilate or for the existence of the individualistically apolitical Milkman. Milkman's journey forward to flight is a journey into his past; his future is behind him. The text's refutation of the idea of a whole untroubled self is thus crystallized in the final stop on that journey. His climactic leap is a move forward which must also be read as a journey back: back to the behavior of a slave ancestor, back to nothingness, back to death.

That this leap occurs over Pilate's body, whose lack of navel has already established her as a myth or a different reality's possibility, further disrupts any optimistically simple reading of Milkman's action as one of untroubled transcendence. Milkman's response to Pilate's death is personal and somewhat selfish. His immediate concern is that there must "be at least one more woman" like her (336). For him, Pilate is subsumed by his desire for what she has meant in his life. So, although he has learned history, in the end Milkman is unable to take that history past the level of personal need. Milkman remains very much the self-concerned individual whose realization of himself as a human collage of history cannot undo his desire to be shown one "true" path to power and understanding.

Pilate, on the other hand, embodies mediating ground between the polarities of Guitar and Milkman and the political selves they .represent. She has been, throughout the text, the locus for weaving together history, personal connection, and alternative relationships to time and concrete reality. She lived a political life and represented a funky pastiche of the modern and the folk. Pilate represents, in her knowledge of her world, the ability to manipulate that world, to alter, to make fluid, the real. The results of her ability leave communities and individuals better off than she finds them, more capable of acting in an oppressive set of circumstances. She remakes the world relentlessly in terms that mean something to her life whether she is equating the blue of the sky to that of her mother's ribbons or dividing the black of night into different shades according to wool or silk she's seen; she allows her life its own reality - and then manipulates it on her own terms. But Pilate dies too. I suggested earlier that the text does not leave us with an answer, a solution, or even a hope.

Song of Solomon resists the pressure to direct our attention to one answer to the questions what is the truth, what is the real story, and how does one act in the face of history? It relentlessly refuses a straightforward answer. It does leave a strong suggestion that flight is not necessarily an untroubled and transcendent response to history regardless of what an ancestor has done. Nor can flight function as an indication of the political possibilities inherent in human interaction with history. The reader learns from Pilate what Milkman heard but did not remember: "You just can't fly on off and leave a body" (147). When successful as escape, flight leaves people behind mourning. When unsuccessful, it leaves people behind dead. It facilitates a final and lethal showdown between barehanded (but not less inimical) friends; however, it is too simple an act to "speak back" to history. It cannot define the extent of one's political being any more than murder can. Finally, it is not around Milkman or Guitar that political possibilities cohere; it is Pilate who, by defying Macon Dead II and intervening in his marriage, is the political agent responsible for Milkman's life. It is Pilate who teaches Milkman to "read" history. And it is Pilate who represents not only embodied history but the praxis that comes with recognizing history's effects, the willingness to theorize about possibilities in the face of history, and the ability to make concrete alternatives to personal and public inequities. Remaining on the ground of history, then, is a labor of love.