Marilyn Sanders Mobley, "Call and Response: Voice, Community and Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press 1995, 41-68.

42-43:

The spaces that Morrison creates in the text of Song of Solomon for her reader allow her or him to engage in a dialogue with both the text itself and the various dialogic structures embedded within it.³ By "dialogic structures" I mean those places in the text where the reader can hear multiple voices in dialogue or conversation with one another. At any given moment, the language points not to a single meaning but to diverse layers of meaning that grow out of African American culture and African American ways of knowing and speaking. Like Milkman, the reader learns to hear the dialogues and recognize the epistemological significance of multiple voices within the organization of identity and culture. This discussion offers a close reading of the text to uncover some of these dialogic structures and to suggest that they offer alternative possibilities for examining the narrative strategies, cultural resources, and political implications of Morrison's writing. Essentially, I argue that examining the concepts of voice and community in Song of Solomon enables us to recognize the dynamics at the heart of the cultural poetics in Morrison's writing: the desire to enact in fiction the processes by which African Americans routinely disrupt the power of the gaze or how others see them through the language they use to define themselves and to give voice to themselves as subjects rather than objects. More specifically, the novel challenges received notions of manhood that are based on the subjugation of women's voices. What Song of Solomon does ultimately is suggest that a viable sense of African American identity comes from responding to alternative constructions of self and community other than those received from mainstream American culture.

50-52:

Of the various manifestations of voice that participate in the interplay of voices in Song of Solomon, I would like to name three - the narrative voice, the signifying voice, and the responsive voice - each of which is dialogized within itself and in relation to the others.

In the opening scene of the novel, the third-person omniscient narrative voice [emphasis added] informs us that at the time of day that Mr. Smith plans to fly from the roof of Mercy Hospital, "word-of-mouth news just lumbered along" (3). This phrase not only encodes the black vernacular but also immediately directs the reader's attention to the cultural, communicative process by which the community structures itself. Interestingly, the phrase appears in the second sentence after Mr. Smith's note about his planned flight appears in the text. Thus, it abruptly shifts the reader's attention from the spectacle of Mr. Smith to the linguistic community of which he is a part. For this community, word of mouth is both a mode of communication and a category of knowledge upon which its members depend. The phrase also stands in contrast to the written word of Mr. Smith's note and therefore, paradoxically, points to his announcement as a suspension of the normative, just as the description of the community that follows the phrase suspends the reader, along with the curious crowd of onlookers. On the one hand, the narrative voice contextualizes the act of an individual with the attendant communal response; on the other hand, it concurrently informs the reader and abdicates any totalizing ability to do so. Perhaps more importantly, however, in the litany of information about how the black community names Mains Avenue "Not Doctor Street" and names Mercy Hospital "No Mercy Hospital," Morrison gives voices to the community and illustrates how it uses this "word-of-mouth" communication to challenge municipal authorities, to critique and resist their racist practices, and to assert their own identity all at once. Thus, their act of negation is simultaneously a critique of racist politics and an affirmation of their ability to resist these politics through the power of the word, through their collective voice. All of this information prepares the reader for the significance of Milkman's birth at the hospital that had previously had a whites-only policy. To read this phrase dialogically then, is to hear it in the context of the heteroglossic historical, cultural, and political voices that create it.²⁷ The narrative voice creates distance at the same time that it is infused with the same everyday language - the vernacular - that it foregrounds through the voices of the characters in the crowd. But within this crowd is Pilate, who is initially introduced as the "woman who suddenly burst into song" (5). Her voice not only disrupts the gaze of the crowd at the spectacle of Mr. Smith, who is poised for flight, but also introduces her as an alternative narrative voice, whose story in the song prompts the crowd to listen "as though it were the helpful and defining piano music in a silent movie" (6). At this early point in the novel, however, the reader has no way of knowing that this song will become the narrative thread of the novel. It is only near the end of the novel that we know the narrator in the song is, not one, but many, that it is, not one voice that sings of this flight, but a chorus of voices. The four lines of the song that are presented at this point seem both parodic and disruptive. They do not really clarify anything for the reader or the crowd but instead foreground the vernacular, this time through the grammatical construction and rhythm of the blues song:

O Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home.... (6)

The words of the song seem to inform (indicate a connection between the anticipated "flight" of the insurance man and the legendary flight of an African ancestor) and withhold information from the crowd and the reader at one and the same time. Nevertheless, the sniggering response of some and the silent listening of others suggest the crowd's acceptance of Pilate's voice and presence. What the reader bears witness to is the process by which community is created outr of the context of shared experience.

55-57:

Whereas the narrative voice introduces the individuation process and the cultural, ideological context of language operating in the Dead family, it is through the signifying voice that the reader hears the implications of this process for Milkman's voice as he interacts in the community outside his family. Drawing on the vernacular theory of signifying developed by Gates, I define the signifying voice [emphasis added] as the double-voiced mode of discourse in the text based on African American rhetorical strategies of repetition, the play of difference, insult, naming, indirection, circumlocution, "loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens, and so on."³³ Although there are instances of female characters who speak in the signifying voice, it appears most often in Song of Solomon in male discourse at predominantly male gatherings. The importance of this voice is not only that it reveals the play of multiple voices in dialogue with one another within the African American community but that it reveals Milkman's alienation from his own voice and his inability to hear his connection to the language of others. In other words, the intertextual relationship between his discourse and theirs eludes him.

One of the best examples of the signifying voice appears in Railroad Tommy's Barbershop, where Milkman is an outsider to the ritualistic swapping of stories, name-calling, and verbal banter in which most of the other men are engaged. In the words of the text, Milkman tries to "focus on the crisscrossed conversations" (80). The fact that the dialogue seems "crisscrossed" to him emphasizes his status not only as an outsider to his own gender group but as an outsider to the collective knowledge inscribed in its discourse. Moreover, because he is self-absorbed, he attempts to "focus on" - that is, "see" - their discourse rather than actively listen to and participate in it. While one mode of experience - seeing - reifies the boundaries between self and other, the other mode - hearing - facilitates the intersubjective growth into consciousness by both establishing boundaries and blurring them. As the men listen to the news on the radio about the murder of Emmett Till, their dialogue begins:

"It'll be in the morning paper."

"Maybe it will, and maybe it won't," said Porter.

"lt was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!" said Freddie.

"They don't put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody." (80)

In this exchange, Morrison gives voice to more than what we literally read or hear. She gives voice to black vernacular speech, to differences of opinion, to communal knowledge of how racism and sexism operate in America, to communal speculation, to collective memories, and to historical realities within the community. Moreover, the speaker who signifies on the term "news" by implicating the selectivity of the white-controlled print media illustrates his knowledge of the politics of language and race.

Thus, a kind of multiple signifying occurs. As author, Morrison signifies on the novel as a fictional genre by incorporating the historical allusion to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an act of racism that ignited racial tensions in the North and South, and by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.³⁴ She further signifies on the injustice of this historical event deeply ingrained in African American cultural memory by imagining a group - the Seven Days - that avenges such acts within the community created in the novel. In a sense, the historical allusion has an intertextual connection to Richard Wright's character Bigger Thomas, whose murder of his girlfriend, Bessie, in the novel Native Son, elicits no response in comparison to the outcry over the murder of Mary Dalton, the daughter of the wealthy white family for whom he worked. The allusions not only open up discourse in the novel but indicate that the text contains an endless play of signifiers that preclude the possibility of closure and that allow us to hear a multiplicity of voices, interpretations, and intertextual echoes.³⁵

In addition, the narrative voice signifies - that is, implicitly comments on - Milkman's cultural/linguistic ignorance and naiveté by drawing attention to his position outside the conversation as an observer rather than a participant. The men signify on one another and on the hegemonic media that make distinctions about what is newsworthy along racial lines. In a sense, they engage in a form of metalinguistic signifying: they use language to talk about how others misuse language to marginalize them. Milkman's preoccupation with himself, and his inscription, despite his efforts to resist, into his father's either/or thinking and bourgeois values, cause him to discount the men's barbershop talk, not to hear the various levels of meaning embedded in it, and ultimately to feel just as alienated from them as he does from his father. Thus, the signifying voice not only illustrates male constructions of identity in the African American community but reveals and critiques Milkman's estrangements both from that community and from his own voice.

Although I have stratified these voices and their functions for purposes of illustration and clarification, none is mutually exclusive in actuality, because they are all dialogized and contain echoes and reverberations of one another within themselves. If the narrative voice primarily informs, and the signifying voice primarily critiques, then the responsive voice [emphasis added] completes the dialogic interaction between the speaker and the listener. In a sense, however, the responsive voice is the larger context from which the signifying voice is derived. It requires the active participation of speaker and listener, just as the signifying voice enables both the speaker and the listener to exchange roles and become speaking subjects. Perhaps the best definition of the responsive voice can be found in the definition of the African American vernacular tradition of call and response, which Geneva Smitherman defines as an African- derived communication process of "spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker's statements ('calls') are punctuated by expressions ('responses') from the listener."³⁶

62:

In reading dialogically, the reader gains an appreciation for the said and participates in the dialogue of the text by giving voice that is, by "hearing" - the unsaid... Just as Milkman's listening to his ancestral song evokes memories which in turn produce both knowledge and meaning, so too does the reader's "listening" to the text evoke memories that draw him or her into the meanings of the text. In other words, out of the context of memory or shared experience, what is heard takes on significance to the listener.

By paying attention to how identity is constructed dialogically rather than monologically, the reader hears and celebrates the voices that Toni Morrison both directly and indirectly enacts in the text. But this process also enables the reader to critique those cultural hegemonic forces that have silenced some voices in the first place. A dialogic reading not only encourages the reader to relinquish interpretations which reduce the African American community to a monologic, manageable entity but discourages the reader from coming to closure too easily.