Toni Morrison

A Literary Life

L. Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137446701
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.

1

Song of Solomon: One Beginning of Morrison’s Career

Morrison’s immersion in the world of African belief systems and its centuries of lore fueled her decision to attempt a novel about the multi-generational “Dead” family. She kept them American, and African American; she started this third novel, Song of Solomon, with the families of both Macon Dead and Pilate Dead living in Michigan, a state still segregated in the 1940s but (probably) less racist than would have been a state located in the deep South. Reifying the experiences she had known as she grew up close to Lake Erie at the northern edge of Ohio, Morrison created the “better” part of this Michigan town as the site of Macon Dead’s large home, and set it in contrast to “Darling Street,” where Pilate and her unconventional family of women lived a seemingly less stable life. (Pilate did not believe in either paying for, or having, modern technology such as electricity or city water; she was announcing to the world that she was a creature from a different culture, whether a griot, an ancestor, or a witch; her brother Macon, in contrast, had assimilated to the point that he took on the persona of a successful white business man, though he behaved cruelly to his fragile wife and daughters.)

By setting up this visible dichotomy of the siblings, Morrison drew from her principles about creating character. As she had said:

we pretend there was no past, and just go blindly on, craving the single thing that we think is happiness … The ideal situation is to take from the past and apply it to the future, which doesn’t mean improving the past or tomorrow. It means selecting for it … The novel has to provide the richness of the past as well as suggestions of what the use of it is. I try to create a world in which it is comfortable to do both, to listen to the ancestry and to mark out what might be going on sixty or one hundred years from now. (Con I, 112–13)

It would be a much bigger book, Morrison’s third novel, and it would attempt to replicate what she described as the already existing “black mythology … in music, gospels, spirituals, jazz.” She paired this description of information sets with what she called “a kind of village lore. The community had to take on that responsibility of passing from one generation to another the mythologies, the given qualities, stories, assumptions which an ethnic group that is culturally coherent and has not joined the larger mainstream keeps very much intact for survival” (Con I, 112). As the title of this third novel announced, Solomon was to be the primary ancestor – and the primary act of Solomon was his flying back to Africa. Jennings notes about Morrison’s aims here: “Although discredited knowledge that Blacks embraced was unbelievable, Morrison felt it was impossible not to write about their knowledge as an authority and authentication of Blackness” (Jennings 127).

Recent criticism finds importance in the gender differences. Valerie Loichot points to the novel’s offering “a mode of reconstruction of the masculine through a necessary female intervention …. Morrison explicitly rejects a genealogical model based on the legacy of the father or the inverted revenge of the daughter. She calls for horizontal openness in which the foundation is important, but in which also open spaces – windows and doors – demand a relation with the outside” (Loichot 158, 164). Echoing Yaeger’s earlier commentary about the importance of land in African American (and Native American cultures), Loichot sees both subversion and strength in Morrison’s narrative. Yaeger’s commentary stems from this idea: “ownership, in the African American context, often supplants personhood, in a world in which persons turned into things were deprived of the right to possess. Owning becomes ‘not only the right to possess things but of the right to possess personhood’” (Yaeger 210). From an even broader perspective, Craig Werner notes that Morrison’s use of the ancient/the folk “suggests the multiplicity of repressed historical experience. Morrison’s point in Song of Solomon … is that while Afro-American history may be repressed by the reifying myths, it is not destroyed. Where Song of Solomon emphasizes Milkman’s developing understanding of this repressed history, Tar Baby expands the focus to involve a multitude of individuals engaged in similar processes” (Werner 72). In Loichot’s summary, “Morrison romances the feminine shadows in male texts … [Pilate] and her nephew Milkman perform interlocking masculinity and femininity, male and female ancestry, orality and writing, childhood and old age, womb and mind” (Loichot 158).

Much of the positive critical response to this novel rested on the gendered complexity, as well as on the visibility of black folklore. Finally, critics seemed to say, an African American novel that is filled with African American lore – whether stemming from Africa itself or from what Morrison referred to as “the folk” or, in other contexts, the “village.” Reynolds Price, in his New York Times Book Review essay, emphasized that what makes Song of Solomon such a good piece of writing is that it is not basically realistic, but rather that it is memorable for “its negotiations with fantasy, folk, song and allegory.” He calls it a “full novel – rich, slow enough to impress itself upon us like a love affair or a sickness,” and notes that it encompasses many lives and nearly a hundred years of a family. He sees Morrison’s purpose as equally large – “communication of painfully discovered and powerfully held convictions about the possibility of transcendence within human life” (Price). Summarizing that Song of Solomon is “a wise and spacious novel,” Price also points out that “The end is unresolved … (no big, good novel has ever really ended)” (Price).

Nervous as Morrison had been about attempting this book, saddened and for a time numbed by the loss of her father (Song of Solomon is dedicated, simply, to “Daddy”), she knew that writing such a book would stretch her abilities. As she said in an interview,

Writing about male characters when you are female … it takes some relaxed sensibility … Trying to imagine it. I look at my children – boy children – and they are different from me. And they are impelled by different things. Instead of saying something general about it, I would say, “I wonder what that is” and then try to see the world the way they might see it. So that you enter the world instead of hovering over it and trying to dominate it and make it into something. You have to have that kind of absence of hostility – absence of anything. You should do it for every character, and if a character is very old or very young or very rich or very poor or black or white or male or female, your ability to do it is the marked difference between writing on the surface and writing underneath. (Con I, 91–2)

Years later, in the “Foreword” that was published in 2004 with a new paperback edition, she explained that “Writing Song of Solomon … I had no access to what I planned to write about until my father died. In the unmanageable sadness that followed, there was none of the sibling wrangling, guilt or missed opportunities … Each of his four children was convinced that he loved her or him best.” As Morrison tried to envision her father’s life as a boy and man, she felt privy to new knowledge. She mentions that she asked him to tell her what the men he had known were “really like.” She said that he answered, and she followed his advising (“Foreword” xi).

Thinking back to the start of her career as a novelist, Morrison told an interviewer,

the first two books were beginnings. I start with the childhood of a person in all the books, but in the first two, the movement, the rhythm is circular, although the circles are broken. If you go back to the beginnings, you get pushed along toward the end. This is particularly so with The Bluest Eye. Sula is more spiral than circular. Song of Solomon is different. I was trying to push this novel outward; its movement is neither circular nor spiral. The image in my mind for it is that of a train picking up speed. (Con I, 124)

She emphasizes this change again in the “Foreword”: “The challenge … was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work. To travel. To fly. In such an overtly, stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels” (“Foreword” xii).

Because this novel was to be a bildungsroman, to tell the story of Macon Dead the younger (named “Milkman” for his late suckling from his mother’s breast), Morrison consciously drew on what she called “Old-school heroic, with other meanings … A journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air” (“Foreword” xii). In her own family as well as in families of others she knew, the flying African – leaving slavery, leaving modern life – who can return to his ancestral roots through his individual act of flight is omnipresent. More than mythic, the flying Solomon exists – still exists – in imagination and, perhaps, in reality. As novelist Gayl Jones explains, “The African myth was that black people could fly until they ate salt, introduced by the white man … . Flying is wide-ranging topos in African American lore – in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Latin America – as a symbol of freedom” (Jones 172).¹ Jones links the letter of the failed flyer, Robert Smith, whose story – both writing and act – opens Song of Solomon, with the best uses of folklore. She describes it as shaped by “clarity, directness, assurance and double-edge realistic humor,” as if it were folktale (Jones 171).

Song of Solomon begins with the red, white, and blue of the insurance agent’s attempt to fly – beginning from the elevation of the hospital roof and looking down into the red rose petals covering the snowy ground, scattered there by Ruth Foster Dead and her two daughters and marked by the unnamed woman in the crowd singing the “Sugarman done fly away” folk song. Pilate is the singer. When Ruth goes into labor at the start of Milkman’s birth, the young nurse sends Guitar Bains for help. Robert Smith’s flight takes place in 1931, Morrison’s birth year. Under the crushing weight of the Depression, the Bains family can barely rent their living space from Macon Dead (and Guitar, as the adult best friend of Milkman, later points out that his father, Macon Dead, is “a very strange Negro … He behaves like a white man, thinks like a white man”) (Song 223).

Some of the best-described scenes in the novel relate to the friendship between Guitar and Milkman, perhaps a stylistic improvement over the scantily sketched scenes within Sula, where Morrison left unspoken the intimate pairing of the children, Nel and Sula, who grew into womanhood together – their voices speaking as if from one throat. Before Song of Solomon opens in the present time, when Milkman is 32, Guitar and he have gone through various stages of adolescence. As Milkman says to himself as he searches the town for Guitar, “He needed to find the one person left whose clarity never failed him …” (Song 79).

When he finds Guitar, it is in Tommy’s barbershop, where African American men are clustered around the radio, listening to news of the murder of a black boy in Mississippi. Here the reader first learns of Guitar’s involvement with the Seven Days, the radical black organization that takes a white life for every black death that goes unpunished (see the later passages on pp. 155–7). (It is in this context that Morrison’s lament for the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 begins to dominate much of her fiction. As she told an interviewer, “I always felt that the civil rights movement really began with the murder … but nobody could rally around him because there were so many buried and unspeakable issues … One was sexual aggression, the other was violence, the other was black manhood, so that they couldn’t, or they didn’t, organize behind him” [Bigsby 270]. Linden Peach’s description of Till’s murder stresses that the child was only fourteen, that he was “flogged, lynched, shot in the head, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan round his neck” [Peach, Toni 7]. (In this scene, the cause of death is the boy’s being “stomped.”).

No criticism of Song of Solomon includes scenes from Tommy’s barbershop, but it is there that the young African American men are united in their sorrow over the murder of the boy from the North who whistled at a white woman. Dead in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the unnamed black boy is clearly meant to be Till. In Guitar’s purposely crude language, Morrison charts the absence of either attention or mourning: “Dead, aint’ he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”

Freddie jibes, “What’d he do it for? He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”

“So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”

“He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”

“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.

“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”

“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.

“Who?” asked Freddie.

“Till. That’s who.”

“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”

As tempers intensify, the other men crowd into the conversation. Porter interjects, “South’s bad. Bad. Don’t nothing change in the good old U.S. of A. Bet his daddy got his balls busted off in the Pacific somewhere,” reminding Morrison’s readers of the thousands of African American men killed in each war of the twentieth century – disproportionately so.

Questioning the likely outcome for the killers of Emmett Till, Guitar pointedly notes that there will be no punishment – more likely a parade. “You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair.” Freddie answers Guitar, “They say Till had a knife.” But Guitar knows his history as he replies, “They always say that. He could have had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade” (Song 80–2).

As Morrison often does, she writes this scene as originary, serving as an unfolding of both men’s lives – Milkman’s assault on his father for his brutality to his mother teaches him that he cannot return home. He will stay with Guitar. Guitar in turn is frustrated with his aimless life – that life of many African American men whose promise has been stifled through poverty and racism. A turning point for particularly Milkman, this barbershop scene sets the bildungsroman in motion.

Such a scene also reinforces the importance of community. As Justine Baillie notes, Song of Solomon parallels the earlier Sula as Morrison privileges the community as a site of understanding, “its myths, folklore, history and language”

(Baillie 93). Morrison crafts this male story about “the rites of passage,” by juxtaposing many voices, and Baillie adds that Morrison never writes “a monolithic narrative.” She instead tries to show the differences that exist within even a seemingly homogenous group of African American characters (Baillie 95).

Emphasizing the male community, as Morrison does here, allows her to foreground gender. The author acknowledged early, “There’s a male consciousness and there’s a female consciousness. I think there are different things operating on each of the sexes. Black men … frequently are reacting to a lot more external pressures than Black women are. For one thing they have an enormous responsibility to be men” (Con I, 7). From a more personal perspective, Morrison comments later that her own “first responsibility is as a mother to Dino and Slade.” She speaks candidly about the difficulties a single woman has raising two male children: “initially you’re afraid that you’re going to give your children, whether they’re girls or boys, a one-sided education because you can’t be that other parent. Then after a little bit it occurs to you that it wouldn’t make any difference. All you can be in any case is the most complete human being possible, and that not only must suffice, it does …” “A long time ago it occurred to me that I had never been a little boy, so I could never know what that meant, ever. Certainly I could not be a father … So my best shot was to be a person, and then they’d have to take it from there” (Con II, 4).

In the barbershop scene, for example, as Milkman and Guitar leave their friends and walk toward a bar, Guitar tells his younger buddy about the day he inadvertently killed a doe. (His narrative is meant to complement Milkman’s story of his hitting his father, and implies the mistaken action of sometimes faulty male pride.) Guitar rehearses what a natural hunter he was: “I could hear anything, smell anything, and see like a cat … And I was never scared – not of the dark or shadows or funny sounds, and I was never afraid to kill. Anything.” In the boy’s bragging, Morrison also enumerates a number of “male” qualities – but the point is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments and Conventions
• Introduction: Morrison’s Early Years
• 1 Song of Solomon: One Beginning of Morrison’s Career
• 2 Tar Baby and Other Folktales
• 3 Beloved, Beloved, Beloved
• 4 Jazz and Morrison’s Trilogy: New York in the 1920s
• 5 Morrison as Public Intellectual
• 6 The Nobel Prize in Literature and Morrison’s Trilogy
• 7 Morrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love
• 8 Morrison and Various Mercies
• 9 Morrison and the Definitions of Home
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index