Song of Solomon

“The nurse gazed at the stout woman as though she had spoken Welsh. Then she closed her mouth, looked again at the cat-eyed boy, and lacing her fingers, spoke her next words very slowly to him.” 

This is one of the few times in the novel when White characters speak, and when the White nurse speaks to young Guitar, she does so in a condescending way, slowing down her speech because she assumes he isn’t very smart. However, her language shows that she herself struggles to communicate, while Guitar understands everything, even proving her superior, at least in terms of spelling and manners.

“Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name.” 

The issue of naming runs through the novel. Macon feels that he has lost any connection to a past that he can be proud of. He is embarrassed by his name, which was given to his family by a drunk White person. He lives his life determined to create his own future, believing he cannot rely on any pride in the past but must instead focus on the future and what he demands from it.

“During the day they were reassuring to see; now they did not seem to belong to him at all—in fact he felt as though the houses were in league with one another to make him feel like the outsider, the propertyless, landless wanderer. It was this feeling of loneliness that made him decide to take a shortcut back to Not Doctor Street, even though to do so would lead him past his sister’s house. In the gathering darkness, he was sure his passing would be unnoticed by her. He crossed a yard and followed a fence that led into Darling Street where Pilate lived in a narrow single-story house whose basement seemed to be rising from rather than settling into the ground. She had no electricity because she would not pay for the service. Nor for gas.” 

Macon has spent his life striving to achieve success by acquiring more and more property; the keys he carries as a landlord make him feel the weight of his control and power. But at night, he is unnerved by the sight of buildings that no longer confer power. They make him the opposite, like he has nothing. And in a way, this is true: Though he has collected land and property, he has no community of family and friends to welcome him and support him. Striving ever upward has cut him off from all around him.

“He hailed no one and no one hailed him. There was never a sudden braking and backing up to shout or laugh with a friend. No beer bottles or ice cream cones poked from the open windows. Nor did a baby boy stand up to pee out of them.” 

The Deads are cut off from their community. When they go for their Sunday drives in their luxury cars, they are watched by others with jealousy, not with love or affection. Macon’s pursuit of money has put him at odds with his community, where he is known as a heartless landlord. His children also are estranged from others, as they become displays of the family’s good fortune in wealth though not friends.

“He was sitting comfortably in the notorious wine house; he was surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him and who laughed out loud. And he was in love. No wonder his father was afraid of them.” 

In contrast to the bitterness filling his family’s home, Milkman finds nothing but love and comfort in Pilate’s home. This is ironic because she has very few material possessions to provide any sense of comfort, while the Deads have plenty of possessions. But their possessions fail to make them happy, and Milkman has never known happiness except in this house of three poor women.

“‘Catch ’em? Catch ’em?’ Porter was astounded. ‘You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.’” 

The men at the barbershop have just learned of the death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago who was brutally killed by a group of White men for supposedly offending a White woman. The men at the barbershop are shocked; some argue about whether the news will be in the White newspapers, while others wonder if the killers will be caught. Porter responds to these ideas with angry mockery, showing his belief that justice for Black people is unattainable. He anticipates that the killers will be praised for their murderous actions rather than punished.

“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.” 

Milkman believes he is being considerate and generous to Hagar when he gives her this break-up letter along with some cash. Despite being in a relationship with Hagar for 12 years, he has very little sympathy for Hagar’s feelings, and he does not understand the depth of her love for him. When he says farewell with a thank-you letter and cash, it is almost equivalent to the treatment of a prostitute. It is this “gift” that kickstarts Hagar’s madness. But Milkman’s treatment of Hagar shows how he treats people in general: He is not serious but superficial, caring little for others.

“I don’t know what all your father has told you about me down in that shop you all stay in. But I know, as well as I know my own name, that he told you only what was flattering to him.” 

Macon is pleased when his son starts working with him, feeling he is getting Milkman away from his mother’s influence. When he shares his belief about Ruth’s incestuous relationship with her father, he poisons Milkman against his mother. It is only when Milkman confronts Ruth, directly asking her about the past, that she points out that he has received biased and false information. She then shares her own perspective of her life. Ruth also tells Milkman that his father tried to kill him before he was even born. The novel often shifts between male and female points of view to show the gap that exists between them.

“It’s a good feelin to know he’s around. I tell you he’s a person I can always rely on. I tell you somethin else. He’s the only one. I was cut off from people early. You can’t know what that was like.” 

Pilate was isolated from the community after the death of her parents and her estrangement from her brother. Her lack of a naval further isolates her from others. But her father appears to her, even though he is dead, as a source of guidance and comfort. Pilate’s assertion that Ruth “can’t know what that was like” is ironic, for Ruth also looks to her father for guidance and love even after his death.

“Although she was hampered by huge ignorances, but not in any way unintelligent, when she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn’t want to have to think about anymore. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?”

After losing her family, being rejected by every community she tried to join, and being shunned from all forms of intimacy, Pilate is tired of having to hide her difference, namely the fact she has no naval. She decides to ignore what others think, to shuck conventions and live by what she believes to be true and valuable. Though she is considered eccentric and lives on the outskirts of society, Milkman never feels more comfortable and happy than when he discovers her home and her lifestyle.

“What you’re doing is crazy. And something else: it’s a habit. If you do it enough, you can do it to anybody. You know what I mean? A torpedo is a torpedo, I don’t care what his reasons. You can off anybody you don’t like. You can off me.” 

Milkman argues with Guitar, pointing out the danger of belonging to the Seven Days. Their work dedicated to killing innocent people, and it will kill Guitar’s soul too. Guitar will become merely an agent of death, losing his humanity and becoming an indiscriminate killer. Milkman’s words “You can off me” prove prophetic. Though Guitar claims not to “off Negroes,” he later hunts down Milkman when he thinks Milkman is obstructing his mission, aiming to kill him but accidentally killing Pilate instead.

“You’ll own it all. All of it. You’ll be free. Money is freedom, Macon. The only real freedom there is.” 

When Milkman expresses his desire to leave home and travel to get a sense of living on his own (though still funded by his father’s money), Macon tries to persuade Milkman to stay home and take care of the family business. He urges Milkman to see the value of maintaining a profitable income, which reveals the high value Macon has put on money ever since his father was killed and he and Pilate were penniless. Ironically, when Milkman’s father calls him Macon—he never uses the nickname Milkman, which he abhors—it almost seems as if he is talking to himself, convincing himself that money equals freedom. This is the guiding principle of his life.

“Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man. He couldn’t do it with a piece of wire, or a switchblade. For this he needed explosives, or guns, or hand grenades. And that would take money. He knew that the assignments of the Days would more and more be the killing of white people in groups, since more and more Negros were being killed in groups.” 

The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963, in which four White men bombed a church known for its civil rights activism and killed four innocent Black girls, grounds the novel amid the civil rights protests of the 1960s and the deadly terrorist response from the opposition. It is Guitar who must carry out the Seven Days’ mission to avenge the deaths of the Black girls. The church bombing requires that he must act like the four White murderers: He must find explosives and kill four innocent White girls, simply for the color of their skin.

“Milkman’s eyes opened wide. He tried hard not to swallow, but the clarion call in Guitar’s voice filled his mouth with salt. The same salt that lay in the bottom of the sea and in the sweat of a horse’s neck. A taste so powerful and necessary that stallions galloped miles and days for it. It was new, it was delicious, and it was his own. All the tentativeness, doubt, and inauthenticity that plagued him slithered away without a trace, a sound. […] He felt a self inside himself emerge, a clean-lined definite self. A self that could join the chorus at Railroad Tommy’s with more than laughter.”

When Guitar urges Milkman to stop waiting around for the perfect time to take action, encouraging Milkman to create his own destiny, Milkman suddenly feels a new expansiveness to his formerly constricted world. Breaking through the passivity of his life allows himself to feel both in control of his own life and in communion with others.

“Magdalene called Lena seemed resigned to her life, but when Corinthians woke up one day to find herself a forty-two-year-old maker of rose petals, she suffered a severe depression which lasted until she made up her mind to get out of the house.” 

The story abruptly shifts from Milkman’s hunt for gold to the story of his sisters, particularly Corinthians. While Milkman is lured by travel and gold, Lena and Corinthians are trapped in the domestic world, still sewing the same artificial rose petals they began making when they were girls. While Corinthians has had the advantage of education and travel to make her more marriage-worthy, her advantages have not attracted the men who want wives more suited to “the climbing, the acquiring” of middle-class life, unlike Corinthians and Lena, who are quite comfortable with their material possessions, never having needed to strive for it. Needing an outlet, Corinthians pursues a job, but because her education is out of date, the only role she is qualified for is that of maid, which is something she must hide from everyone.

“It was all mixing together—the red velvet, the screams and the man crashing down on the pavement. She had seen his body quite clearly, and to her astonishment, there was no blood. The only red in view was in their own hands and in the basket. Her mother’s moans were getting louder and she seemed to be sinking into the ground. A stretcher came at last for the doll-broken body (all the more doll-like because there was no blood), and finally a wheelchair for her mother, who was moving straight to labor.” 

The story returns to the beginning of the novel, with the death of Robert Smith and the birth of Milkman, but this time from Corinthians’s point of view. She does not remember Robert Smith’s “flight,” only the consequence of that flight, the “doll-broken body.” Robert Smith was a member of the Seven Days driven to suicide by the nature of his execution work. Corinthians’s description of his lifeless “doll body” foreshadows how Porter will later describe her, trapped by the rules and conventions of her family.

“They loved this place. Loved it. Brought pink veined marble from across the seas for it and hired men in Italy to do the chandelier that I had to climb a ladder and clean with white muslin once every two months. They loved it. Stole for it, lied for it, killed for it. But I’m the one left. Me and the dogs. And I will never clean it again. Never. Nothing. Not a speck of dust, not a grain of dirt, I will move. Everything in this world they lived for will crumble and rot.” 

Milkman has found the impossibly old Circe, the woman who cared for his father and aunt when they were children, living in the Butler house, which is falling into disrepair. Milkman learned from Reverend Cooper that it was the Butlers who murdered his grandfather. Their murderous acquisition of land and possessions is strikingly ironic because none of them are left to enjoy their spoils. The spoils, which once were “loved” and almost alive with their “pink veins,” are now destroyed by the dogs, and Circe encourages their destruction. Milkman comments that the Butlers were “dumb enough to believe that if they killed one man his whole line died” (236). Ironically, their line is gone while Solomon’s line continues.

“No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn’t they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter. It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for—he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers.”

Milkman finds himself in an otherworldly, primal world, a land before language but still full of signs that the hunters understand and interact with. He is in awe of their abilities to commune with the natural world, and he is overcome with a rush of understanding and love for everyone in the world, even the young men who just attacked him in the store. In this transformative moment, Milkman realizes his selfish ways and renounces them in favor of love, recognizing the love his family has for him and the love he has for them, and even his love for Guitar, who is about to attack him.

“He lifted his wrist to look at his watch and remembered that Grace had not given it back to him. ‘Damn,’ he murmured aloud. ‘I’m losing everything.’” 

Milkman loses much on his journey. His expensive three-piece suit and shoes are destroyed. His watch stops working and seems to have been taken by Grace. But what Milkman gains on this trip vastly outweighs these material losses. He feels a connection to his family and community that he has never experienced before, and he has never been happier.

“And his father. An old man now, who acquired things and used people to acquire more things. As the son of Macon Dead the first, he paid homage to his own father’s life and death by loving what that father had loved: property, good solid property, the bountifulness of life. He loved these things to excess because he loved his father to excess. Owning, building, acquiring—that was his life, his future, his present, and all the history he knew. That he distorted life, bent it, for the sake of gain, was a measure of his loss at his father’s death.” 

After the hunt, Milkman’s outlook on life is transformed. He can see his father’s greedy, grasping actions in a clearer light, which yields more empathy. He understands that Macon’s desire for ever more property was really a distorted extension of his love for his father, who was killed for refusing to give up his farm to the thieving Butlers.

“Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone / Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.” 

This children’s song echoes the one Pilate sang at the start of the novel: “O Sugarman done fly away / Sugarman done gone / Sugarman cut across the sky / Sugarman gone home” (6). When Milkman hears the song now, he hears it with new insight. He can interpret the signs in the song: Solomon has morphed into “Sugarman” and “Shalimar,” showing how language changes with time and distance. With this realization, Milkman finally pieces together the puzzle of his family history. The song is about his own family, specifically his great-grandfather Solomon, who, according to lore, flew from slavery to refuge in Africa.

“Neither Pilate nor Reba knew that Hagar was not like them. Not strong enough, like Pilate, nor simple enough, like Reba, to make up her life as they had. She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it.” 

Hagar cannot break free from conventions like her mother and her grandmother have. All her life she has tried to fit in with “proper” society. When Milkman rejects her, she suddenly feels desperate to fit in. She goes on a frenzied shopping spree for clothes, makeup, and hair, feeling that if she follows beauty standards, then Milkman will accept her again. When Guitar sees her utter desperation, even referring to her as a “doormat woman,” he connects her to many other “colored girls” who need the support of a community of female mentors to remind them of their worth.

“You’ll just have to forgive her otherwise. This is a dull place, Mr. Macon. There’s absolutely nothing in the world going on here. Not a thing.” 

The irony in Susan Byrd’s words is glaring to Milkman, as he has found profound significance in the supposedly “dull” country town of Shalimar, Virginia. Although he has lost everything, including his watch, which Susan’s friend Grace took, he has gained much more. He has been profoundly changed by all he has learned in Shalimar.