Song of Solomon

The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I began reading Song of Solomon in the airport. Stranded there for hours and having finished the only book I’d brought along with me, I resorted to checking out the first thing that caught my eye from my library’s e-reader. Instantly I was enraptured, as the drama of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promising to fly from the rooftop unfolded in a shower of red velvet petals, the populace of Not Doctor Street gathered about to watch. Even with this aspirationally skyward beginning, I didn’t fully realize until the book’s end how uncannily appropriate it was that I’d met with this book in a place of flight.

Song of Solomon is the story of many attempts to fly. To fly, as Morrison herself phrased it in an interview with Visionary Project “out of the cultural prison [one] finds [oneself] in.” To fly backwards into time and memory through songs, stories, and traditions. To fly in power and vengeance against forces of racism and oppression. To literally fly, as Black American stories tell of ancestors and the spirituals tell of the righteous. These flights and attempts at flight are braided through the bildungsroman of a young man, Macon “Milkman” Dead: his fateful birth, his gothic upbringing, his passionate first love, his rowdy but relatively privileged adolescence as the son of one of the wealthiest black families in the fictional Southside, Michigan. The novel culminates in the journey of discovery Milkman makes back to the South, but such a spare outline hardly represents the intricate and shadowy richness of characters and plot tangles that caught at me, bloody and funny, dreadful and dear, alarming and disarming.

The language Morrison uses is tempered and shining. Each sentence reads like a poem, balanced in lushness and precision, and the way the novel unspools reminded me of a magical line of thread: caught up in knots one moment and then perfectly straight the second I examined it more closely. The novel also appears to be the story of one young man-- Milkman-- but is more truly about an entire family and community, and many women especially. Milkman’s mother, his sisters, his first love Hagar, and his Aunt Pilate are each realized with stunning specificity and power. Morrison is equally effective at portraying Black communities in both Northern US America and Southern US America, a crafting she does with both incisiveness and tenderness.

An epic story where each line is a work of art and incantation in and of itself, Song of Solomon is a book I could’ve turned around and started over as soon as I finished it.