What’s In a Name?

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.  Plume.  337 pp.

I wrote some weeks ago that I didn’t think Toni Morrison became a great novelist with Song of Solomon; she was great from the start.  Song of Solomon was nevertheless a definite step forward, with a larger theme, a richer backdrop, and a more complicated story than her previous work.  I say that despite the fact that I’m not sure what the hell it’s all about.  The Bluest Eye, as Morrison said in the documentary, focused on black girls, Sula on female friendship.  Song of Solomon—despite the fact that its most fascinating characters are women—seems to be about African American men.

It focuses eventually on two, Milkman and Guitar.  It’s no accident they go by nicknames; naming is a major theme.  Guitar got his nickname because he once wanted to play that instrument, Milkman because his mother nursed him much too long, up to the age of four, and a neighborhood snoop caught them in the act.  Milkman went by that name for years without knowing why.

Maybe the reason he prefers Milkman is that his real name—like his father and grandfather before him—is Macon Dead.  The first Macon was being registered as he came out of slavery, and some functionary filled out the form but put the words on the wrong lines; he meant to indicate the man’s father was deceased.  But Macon kept the name as if in spite, and passed it down through subsequent generations.

Other children in the family are named from the Bible; the father puts his finger blindly on a name and that’s it.  There’s a woman named Pilate, a girl named Lena—for Magdalene—and one named First Corinthians.  At first these names seem whimsical.  The debt to Faulkner—mentioned by Henry Louis Gates–is apparent.  But I gradually came to think the whole book is about names, and tracing one’s ancestry, and where one comes from.

The current Macon Dead—Milkman’s father—is a real estate developer in Mercy, Michigan, one of the most successful black men in town.  He doesn’t get along with other men; he’s cold and unfeeling and superior.  He’s obsessed with acquiring land because his own father owned a large tract of rich farmland and was murdered by white men who took it away from him.  He and his sister Pilate fled and eventually separated.  As if to get back the land his father couldn’t keep, he went into real estate and is a huge success.  But he’s a cold, hard, sometimes brutal man.

Pilate is in some ways his opposite.  She’s a mysterious human being, born after her mother had already died in childbirth and emerging without a navel.  She now lives in the same town as Macon and is fiercely devoted to his children, including Milkman, but her brother will have nothing to do with her.  She’s actually a moonshiner, makes and sells wine.  She lives what looks like a slovenly existence, but it’s emotionally rich; she’s as indifferent with acquiring things as her brother is obsessed.  If Macon is the financial center of the family, she’s the spiritual heart.

When Macon first moved to town, hoping to advance himself, he married the daughter of the town’s most successful black man, a doctor.  He too was superior and aloof, but much admired, and his daughter Ruth adored him.  The man insisted, in fact, on attending Ruth as she gave birth—a fact which disgusted Macon—and Macon came to believe father and daughter were lovers, something he tells Milkman in a man to man conversation but that Ruth herself denies.  Father-daughter incest was at the center of The Bluest Eye and haunts this novel as well.  The important fact is that Macon believes it happened and is therefore brutal to his wife.  He beats her physically until the day Milkman stands up and stops him

Sex is somehow central to this novel, though it is definitely a mixed bag.  Macon and his wife don’t have relations, though they both miss it.  Pilate exudes sensuality and sexuality, though she seems completely self-sufficient (the fact of not having a navel seems to define her).  Milkman engages in a long relationship with Pilate’s granddaughter Hagar, his own cousin, who repeatedly tries to kill him—once a month, like clockwork—when he breaks things off.[1]  When Milkman goes first back to Pennsylvania, then Virginia, in search of his heritage, also some gold that got left behind, he has a brief sexual relationship with a woman named Sweet, and the description of it is haunting.

“Sweet brought him soap and a boar’s-bristle brush and knelt to bathe him.  What she did for his sore feet, his cut face, his back, his neck, his thighs, and the palms of his hands was so delicious he couldn’t imagine that the lovemaking to follow would be anything but anticlimactic.  If this bath and this woman, he thought, are all that come out of this trip, I will rest easy and do my duty to God, country, and the Brotherhood of Elks for the rest of my life.  I will walk hot coals with a quart of kerosene in my hand for this.  I will walk every railroad tie from here to Cheyenne and back for this.  But when the lovemaking came, he decided he would crawl.”

Milkman’s friend Guitar, in the meantime, has enlisted in a secret society of black men who have resolved to kill a white in retaliation for every unjust murder of a black.  If four black girls are killed in the bombing of a church, they will kill four white girls, perhaps by bombing.  Milkman objects because he sees that violence only begets violence; there’s no real retribution in killing.  The two friends become estranged, and eventually Guitar comes looking for Milkman, trying to kill him.

I must admit that, by this point in the novel, perhaps much earlier—there are major chunk of plot I haven’t mentioned—I was unsure what the point was, but was nevertheless riveted to the book.  I loved Pilate, at least liked Milkman, and wanted to find what he was looking for, though I wasn’t sure what it was (I’m not sure he was either).  I think he wanted to know where he came from, not in some deep existential way—though perhaps that too—but in a simple human way, but there’s a place, not far back, where that ancestry stops, because it disappears into slavery.  The answer Morrison seems to offer is that black man find meaning in the lives they create for themselves.  In this novel in which names make no sense—how can somebody keep the name Macon Dead?—she has a paragraph at the end that might be my favorite in the whole novel, about names.  The roll call of names in the Iliad is intended to name the heritage of all the heroes so we will know where they came from.  This list has a purpose that is quite the opposite.

“He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood Bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops.  Their names.  Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses.  Names that bore witness.  Macon Dead, Sing Byrd, Crowell Byrd, Pilate, Reba, Hagar, Magdalene, First Corinthians, Milkman, Guitar, Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State (he just stood around and swayed), Small Boy, Sweet, Circe, Moon, Nero, Humpty-Dumpty, Blue Boy, Scandinavia, Quack-Quack, Jericho, Spoonbread, Ice Man, Dough Belly, Rocky River, Gray Eye, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, Cool Breeze, Muddy Waters, Pinetop, Jelly Roll, Fats, Leadbelly, Bo Diddley, Cat-Iron, Peg-Leg, Son, Shortstuff, Smoky Babe, Funny Papa, Bukka, Pink, Bull Moose, B.B., T-Bone, Black Ace, Lemon, Washboard, Gatemouth, Cleanhead, Tampa Red, Juke Boy, Shine, Staggerlee, Jim the Devil, Fuck-Up, and Dat Nigger.”

Seems like an impressive heritage to me.

[1] That’s the kind of detail in this novel that keeps me scratching my head.  She tries to kill him once a month?  What’s that all about?