Song of Solomon (novel)

Based on Wikipedia: Song of Solomon (novel)

The Man Who Tried to Fly

A man stands on a rooftop in Michigan, convinced he can fly. Below him, a crowd gathers to watch. He jumps. He falls. And in the chaos that follows, a pregnant woman goes into labor, delivering the first Black child ever born inside that hospital's segregated walls.

This is how Toni Morrison opens her 1977 novel Song of Solomon. It's a beginning that announces everything that will follow: the impossible yearning for flight, the weight of history, and the way one person's desperate act ripples outward to shape lives they'll never know.

The child born that day is Macon Dead III, though almost no one will call him that. He'll become known as Milkman, a nickname born from an uncomfortable secret, and he'll spend his entire life searching for something he can't quite name. By the novel's end, he too will leap into the air, finally understanding what that insurance agent on the rooftop was really reaching for.

A Name That Carries History

The name "Macon Dead" sounds like a mistake. That's because it is one.

Generations earlier, during the confusion following emancipation, a drunk Union soldier registering freed slaves wrote the wrong information in the wrong boxes. The family's hometown became their first name. Their father's condition—dead—became their surname. And so the Dead family was born, carrying this bureaucratic error like a scar through the generations.

Morrison understood something profound about names in African American history. Enslaved people were often stripped of their original names and given new ones by slaveholders. After emancipation, many families found themselves documented by officials who were careless, drunk, or simply indifferent. The result was a generation of people whose very identities were shaped by clerical accidents and white indifference.

The Dead family name functions as a kind of dark poetry throughout the novel. It whispers of severed roots, of identities imposed rather than chosen. And it asks a question that haunts Milkman: Can you truly live when you don't know who you really are?

Growing Up Dead

Milkman's childhood is suffocating in the most literal sense.

His mother Ruth, isolated and emotionally starved in her marriage, continues breastfeeding him until he's four years old. When one of her husband's employees witnesses this, the boy gets a nickname that will follow him forever. But the extended nursing is just one symptom of a household frozen in dysfunction.

His father, Macon Dead II, is a successful property owner but an emotional void. He married Ruth for her father's status and money, and the marriage curdled into something cold long ago. Young Milkman grows up in material comfort but spiritual poverty, disconnected from any sense of purpose or belonging.

He's alienated, restless, uninterested. Morrison describes him as someone who has never been properly alive—a kind of walking death that echoes his unfortunate surname.

Then his Aunt Pilate enters his world.

The Woman Without a Navel

Pilate Dead is one of the most remarkable characters in American literature. She's a bootlegger who makes her living selling illegal liquor. She's a conjure woman, meaning she practices a form of folk magic rooted in African American spiritual traditions. And according to the novel, she was born without a navel—a physical impossibility that marks her as somehow outside the normal order of things.

The missing navel is Morrison's way of suggesting that Pilate exists partially outside ordinary human experience. She wasn't connected to her mother in the usual way. She doesn't connect to society in the usual way either. She lives in a modest house with her daughter and granddaughter, keeps a mysterious bag hanging from her ceiling, and seems to know things she shouldn't be able to know.

For Milkman, Pilate becomes a portal to the past. She's his father's sister, but the two siblings couldn't be more different. Where Macon II accumulated property and became respectable and dead inside, Pilate chose freedom and remained vibrantly alive. Through her, Milkman gets his first glimpses of family history—stories of their father, their origins in Virginia, and a cave filled with gold that the siblings discovered as children but were too afraid to take.

That gold will become Milkman's obsession.

The Cousin Problem

Morrison doesn't shy away from uncomfortable territory. Milkman begins a sexual relationship with Hagar, who is his first cousin once removed—Pilate's granddaughter. In the African American community Morrison depicts, where extended families often lived in close proximity and social options were limited by segregation, such relationships weren't unheard of.

But the relationship is doomed from the start. Milkman, still emotionally stunted and incapable of real connection, eventually loses interest and abandons Hagar. He doesn't break up with her so much as simply stop caring, leaving her in a limbo of non-rejection that's somehow crueler than a clean break.

Hagar's response is both terrifying and heartbreaking. She becomes obsessed with Milkman, attempting to kill him once a month with whatever weapon she can find—a knife, an ice pick, a bottle. But she can never follow through. She loves him too much to actually harm him, and hates herself too much to stop trying.

Morrison uses Hagar to explore what happens when a woman's entire sense of self becomes dependent on a man's attention. It's a cautionary tale that feels uncomfortably relevant decades later.

The Hunt for Gold

When Milkman mentions to his father that Pilate has a heavy bag hanging from her ceiling, Macon II's eyes light up. He remembers the cave from their childhood. He assumes the bag must contain gold.

He sends Milkman and his friend Guitar to steal it.

Guitar is a fascinating character in his own right—a childhood friend of Milkman's who has become involved with a secret organization called the Seven Days. This group, fictional but inspired by real vigilante movements, responds to unpunished murders of Black people by killing white people in exact retaliation. If a Black man is lynched on a Tuesday, a member of the Seven Days will kill a white person on Tuesday. An eye for an eye, administered with cold precision.

Guitar represents one response to American racism: organized, violent resistance. Milkman represents another: willful ignorance, a refusal to engage with the larger struggles of his community. Their friendship is a collision of these worldviews.

The theft succeeds, but the bag doesn't contain gold. When police arrest Milkman and Guitar, they discover it holds human bones. Pilate has kept them for decades, believing they belong to a man her brother killed in that cave long ago. She calls them her "inheritance."

Macon and Pilate manage to get the young men released. But Milkman can't let go of the gold. If it's not in the bag, he reasons, it must still be somewhere. He sets off on a journey south to find it.

The Journey That Changes Everything

Milkman travels to Pennsylvania, following fragments of family stories. He talks to elderly relatives and acquaintances, piecing together a history that was never shared with him. He learns that his grandfather, the original Macon Dead, owned a thriving farm before white neighbors murdered him and stole his land. He learns about his grandmother, an Indigenous woman named Sing. He learns that his family roots stretch back to Virginia, to a place called Shalimar.

The gold recedes in importance. What Milkman is really finding is himself.

When he reaches Shalimar, Virginia, he finds a small, poor, all-Black town where people still remember the old ways. The community is suspicious of this city man with his expensive clothes and superior attitude. Milkman has to shed his arrogance piece by piece, learning humility the hard way.

One night, he joins the older men on a hunt. They chase a bobcat through the woods using only moonlight and dogs trained to track by sound. No flashlights. No modern equipment. Just ancient skills passed down through generations.

During this hunt, Guitar appears. He's followed Milkman from Michigan, convinced that Milkman found the gold and is keeping it for himself. The friendship that sustained both men through childhood has curdled into paranoid violence. Guitar tries to kill Milkman with a wire around his throat. In the struggle, Milkman fires his shotgun blindly into the darkness, and Guitar flees.

Milkman survives. And the next morning, he hears children singing.

The Song

The children of Shalimar are playing a game, singing a song that's been passed down for generations. The lyrics tell a story about a man named Solomon who could fly—who escaped slavery by literally lifting off the ground and soaring back to Africa.

Milkman realizes with a shock that this is the same song Pilate used to sing. The names in the song are his ancestors' names. Solomon was his great-grandfather. The flying African of legend is his own blood.

This is Morrison at her most powerful. Throughout African American folklore, there are stories of flying Africans—enslaved people who were said to have flown back to their homeland rather than endure bondage. Most historians interpret these stories as metaphors for escape, death, or spiritual transcendence. Morrison takes the myth literally and asks: What if it were true? What would it mean to be descended from someone who could fly?

For Milkman, it means everything. He finally has a story to belong to. He finally knows who his people were. The gold never mattered. The treasure was always this: a song, a name, a history.

The Price of Flight

But Morrison doesn't let the myth remain purely triumphant. The song also reveals that when Solomon flew away, he left behind a wife and twenty-one children. His flight was also an abandonment. His freedom came at the cost of a family left to fend for themselves.

This tension runs through the entire novel. Every flight is also a fall. Every escape leaves someone behind. Robert Smith, the insurance agent who jumped off that roof in the opening pages, didn't actually fly—he died on the pavement below. The desire to transcend the limitations of Black life in America is understandable, even beautiful. But it can also be a form of abandonment.

Morrison refuses easy answers. She holds the beauty and the tragedy together, letting them coexist.

Meanwhile, Back Home

While Milkman has been finding himself in Virginia, Hagar has been dying in Michigan.

Her obsession with Milkman has transformed into something worse: self-hatred. She becomes convinced that if only she were prettier, if only she had lighter skin and straighter hair, Milkman would love her. She takes her grandmother's life savings and goes on a shopping spree—makeup, clothes, a new hairstyle at the salon.

It doesn't work. The rain ruins her new hairdo on the way home. Her reflection in the mirror shows her the same face she's always had. And something inside her breaks completely.

Hagar takes to her bed and never gets up again. She dies of what can only be called grief—a fever that her body summons because her heart can no longer bear to go on.

At her funeral, Pilate sings. She sings to her granddaughter, to the community, to the cosmos itself. She sings a one-word song: "Mercy." Over and over. It's one of the most devastating scenes Morrison ever wrote.

The Final Flight

Milkman returns to Michigan transformed. He finds Pilate and tells her everything he's learned. The bones in her bag, he now understands, don't belong to the man Macon killed in that cave. They're the bones of her father—their father—the original Macon Dead.

Pilate knocks him unconscious for being partly responsible for Hagar's death. When he comes to, he convinces her to travel with him to Virginia to bury their father properly, in his ancestral home.

They make the journey together. They climb to a ridge overlooking a ravine, the landscape where the flying Solomon once lived. They dig a grave and lay the bones to rest.

Then a gunshot rings out. Guitar has been waiting. The bullet meant for Milkman strikes Pilate instead.

Milkman holds his aunt as she dies. Her last words are characteristically Pilate: "I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more."

And then Milkman turns to face Guitar. He doesn't run. He doesn't hide. He doesn't fight in any conventional sense.

He leaps.

Morrison ends the novel with Milkman launching himself off the cliff toward Guitar, arms spread. The text tells us that he is flying. Whether this means he literally takes flight like his ancestor Solomon, or whether he is simply falling to his death, Morrison refuses to say. The ambiguity is the point.

What matters is that Milkman, for the first time in his life, commits completely to something. He surrenders to the myth that saved him. He becomes the song.

Why This Book Matters

Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978. When Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993—becoming the first African American woman to receive that honor—the Swedish Academy specifically cited this novel. In 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course ranked it the twenty-fifth best English-language novel of the twentieth century.

The book has also faced numerous challenges and bans in American schools since the 1990s, usually because of its sexual content and violence. These challenges tend to miss what the book is actually about. Morrison isn't celebrating violence or depicting sex gratuitously. She's showing how trauma and dysfunction pass through generations, and how knowledge of one's history might—just might—offer a way to break the cycle.

The novel's influence extends in unexpected directions. The Philadelphia punk band the Dead Milkmen, formed in 1983, took their name from Morrison's protagonist. It's the kind of unlikely cultural cross-pollination that would probably have amused Morrison herself.

The Art of Morrison's Prose

What makes Morrison particularly remarkable is how she writes. Her sentences move between the lyrical and the brutal, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. She can describe a woman's grief in language that sounds like poetry, then pivot to violence so sudden it leaves you gasping.

Consider how she handles the supernatural. In most novels, a character like Pilate—with her missing navel, her conjure woman ways, her seeming ability to appear when she's needed—would be clearly marked as fantasy. Morrison treats these elements as simply part of reality. The magic isn't separate from everyday life. It's woven into it, the same way it exists in the folk traditions she's drawing from.

This approach reflects something important about how Morrison understood African American experience. The line between the natural and supernatural was never as firm in African diasporic traditions as it became in European thought. Ancestors could intervene in the lives of the living. Stories could contain literal truths. A man really could learn to fly.

A Note on Flight

The image of flight echoes through African American culture in ways that predate Morrison's novel. Spirituals sung by enslaved people often mentioned flying away to freedom. The Underground Railroad used aviation metaphors—"conductors," "stations," and passengers who were "taking flight." Some scholars believe the flying African stories originated in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, where enslaved people from specific African ethnic groups maintained strong cultural memories.

Morrison takes this deep cultural symbol and gives it physical weight. In her novel, flight is simultaneously metaphor and reality, escape and abandonment, death and transcendence. She refuses to let it be only one thing.

That's the genius of the book. It holds contradictions together without resolving them. Life is like that, Morrison seems to say. History is like that. Being Black in America is like that. You carry impossible weights. You long for impossible freedoms. And sometimes, against all evidence and reason, you learn to fly.