Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, holds an almost mythic place in the annals of American literature, as the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize and only the second American woman to do so. Morrison’s most popular novel is of course the 1987 Pulitzer-Prize winning Beloved, a gut-wrenching book about a woman who escaped slavery but, tracked down by slave hunters, kills her own two-year old child but fails to kill herself as well before being captured and returned to slavery. The ghost of the murdered child, called “Beloved,” returns to haunt her mother and family. Beloved spent 25 weeks on the best-seller list, and appears as number 23 on Time magazine’s famous 2005 list of the greatest English language novels since Time’s creation, as number 25 on Penguin classics’ list or 100 must-read novels chosen by their readers, and also on the Norwegian book clubs/Norwegian Nobel committee’s list of the 100 greatest world novels. And yet Beloved is not the book I’ve chosen for my own top 100 list.
Let me state here the obvious: My list of the 100 most lovable novels in the English language is unavoidably subjective. Though I do take some guidance from the evaluations of other respected critics and scholars and to some extent popular opinion, I am a straight white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant American with Progressive sympathies and a college degree (Ph.D.) in a humanities discipline and the books I love are inevitably viewed through that lens. Toni Morrison’s novels tend to focus most often on a woman’s perspective. In reading her I found myself irresistibly drawn to the male protagonist of Morrison’s earlier great novel, Song of Solomon. About this novel, Morrison herself wrote that in writing the book, she relied on her late father’s voice pervading the language of the text, leading her to “a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one.”
Song of Solomon was Morrison’s third novel, and the one that brought her national attention, winning the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1978. This novel appears on both the Guardian list of greatest novels in the English language and the Observer list of greatest world novels. Song of Solomon also appears as number 25 on the Radcliffe Publishing “rival list” that came out in 1998 as a counter to Modern Library’s famous list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century (Beloved came in as number 7 on that list).
Essentially a Bildungsroman or “coming of age” novel, Song of Solomon follows the life of its hero, Macon “Milkman” Dead III, from birth to maturity as he comes to recognize and understand his true heritage. The novel opens as the Black insurance agent Robert Smith leaps from the roof of Mercy Hospital, falling to his death while trying to fly on a pair of blue silk wings (the image of flight becomes important in the book), as dozens of people watch. One of these is the pregnant Ruth Dead, who goes into labor and in the ensuing turmoil is taken into the hospital where she gives birth the first African American baby ever born there—Macon Dead III.
There is an irony here in that Ruth’s father had been the first Black doctor in this unnamed Michigan city, and Ruth thus came from the richest African American family in town. She marries Macon Dead II, who is an unsympathetic landlord, without compassion and caring only for profit. So the young Macon grows up in middle class comfort, raised in part by his sisters, First Corinthians and Magdalene called Lena, and by his domineering mother who is still breastfeeding the boy when he is four years old. When one of his father’s employees catches sight of this by chance, the boy is tagged with the nickname “Milkman,” which sticks.
Milkman grows up alienated from his family—his parents are often at odds and Milkman finds his father particularly overbearing, though he is himself as lacking in compassion as his father. The adolescent Milkman is drawn to forge a relationship with his father’s estranged sister Pilate, a bootlegger and “conjure woman” born without a navel. Pilate (named from the first name her father had seen when he opened a Bible), Milkman learns, had actually saved his life when she’d stopped his mother from aborting him while he was in the womb. He meets—and has a physical relationship with—Pilate’s granddaughter Hagar (another point-to-the Bible name), and when he later breaks with her, the obsessed Hagar devotes herself to trying to kill him once a month. But most importantly, Milkman begins to learn about his family’s past: His grandfather, the first Macon Dead (a name he was given by a drunken Union soldier after the Civil War), had owned his own land somewhere in Pennsylvania, but one day had been murdered by white men who wanted it for themselves. The children, Pilate and Macon Jr., had fled and hid out in a cave for a time—and had found bags of gold hidden there, though they did not take any of it out of fear.
By the time he is thirty-two and still living at home, Milkman is ready to escape. In Pilate’s house a large bag hangs from the ceiling, in which, Pilate tells Milkman, she keeps her “inheritance.” When Milkman mentions this detail to his father, Macom II is convinced it is the gold from the old cave, and he persuades Milkman and his friend Guitar to steal it. They do so, but find that the bag contains only human bones.
Now Milkman, fixated on the gold, begins a journey into his family’s past, heading first for Pennsylvania and the site of the original cave. He finds no gold, but begins to search instead for his family’s history. He meets an old midwife named Circe, who actually delivered Macon Jr. and Pilate, and who tells Milkman that Macon’s real name was Jake, and his Indian wife was called Sing. He becomes convinced that there is more to learn if he visits the family’s old slave home in Virginia. Arriving in Shalimar, Virginia, Milkman seems closer to his roots, especially when he hears children of the town singing a “Song of Solomon,” a song he had heard Pilate singing in the past:
Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
Solomon went across the sky, Solomon gone home.
While in Shalimar, however, Milkman is invited to go hunting with several of the old men of the town, and in the woods is attacked by Guitar, who believes Milkman has found the gold and run off to keep it for himself. In the struggle, Milkman’s gun goes off, and Guitar runs off.
Milkman, who has become convinced that the bones in Pilate’s bag were those of his grandfather, whose body had been hidden in the cave by his murderers, He decides to head back to Michigan to convince Pilate to return to Virginia to bury her father.
In the interests of keeping away from “spoilers,” I won’t reveal here the relationship of the original Virginia “Solomon” and the Dead family, the truth—or legend—of Solomon’s ability to fly, the result of Milkman’s reconnecting with Pilate, or the fate of Hagar or Guitar. But I will reveal that the ending is a bit enigmatic.
The book is a fascinating read, in part because of the unforgettable characters: There is Pilate, a strong and fearless woman who devotes herself to the care of others, especially her family, including Milkman himself. There is the used and abandoned Hagar, who wants to avenge her abandonment by attacking Milkman, though she can never quite bring herself to finish him off. Less sympathetic is Guitar Bains, who has become convinced that all the evils of society are caused by white people, and is committed to repaying violence against Blacks by randomly killing white victims in retaliation. On the other side of the coin is Ruth’s father Dr. Foster, a self-hating racist who sees himself as far superior to his peers—like Macon Dead Jr.—whom he calls “cannibals,” and who is careful to check his granddaughters’ skin tone when they are born to determine whether it is as light as he would like.
The language and style of the novel, so sharp and so colloquial, rhythmic as speech and profound as revelation, is another of the great joys of the novel. Consider this, for instance, when Milkman’s sister upbraids him:
“Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I’ll tell you where. From that little hog’s gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something… you will need more than that. I don’t know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that…. You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog’s gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don’t have anything else.”
Or this, describing Hagar’s grief:
“In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.”
But beyond this, what makes this novel so fascinating is the archetypal quest motif that structures it. Like the old medieval romances is which a knight leaves the safety of his castle to seek a treasure, or a dragon, or a Holy Grail, but in the course of the journey finds the truth about himself, so Milkman, searching for the gold, discovers where, and whom, he came from, and matures from the self-centered spoiled kid he was into someone who knows who he is and who cares about those around him. The Nobel Academy, recognizing this in their press release announcing Morrison’s award in 1993, wrote of Song of Solomon:
“its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.”