Song of Solomon:Quest for Identity/Self

 Song of Solomon 

Dr Manisha Patil 

In her first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula Morrison’s main focus was on the lives, aspirations and problems of African American women. But Morrison is not a narrow feminist writer but rather a ‘womanist’ one, for whom racial, cultural, national economic and political considerations are as important as sexual issues. She is also the historian/custodian of African American culture and community as a whole and community as a whole includes men as well as women. So in Song of Solomon, she has made ‘a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one’ (xii). This novel is about protagonist Milkman’s quest for identity for which he has to go back to his roots in the rural South. His physical travel from north to south symbolizes his moving from materialism to spiritualism.

I. Quest for Identity/Self

Milkman is born as the single male successor/heir (almost ten years after the first two daughters are born) to a prosperous real estate agent Macon Dead and his wife Ruth Faster who is the only daughter of the very first black (Negro) doctor in the town. Though he gets all the material privileges, normally available only to rich whites and enjoys all the comforts conferred upon the youngest and only male child in the family, his personality is not developed in a normal healthy way. He carries the psychological baggage of the strained relationship between his parents and his ‘enmeshment’ – the suffocating bond parents create with their children that Morrison calls ‘anaconda love’1 – with his parents. 

Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, is representative of those hard working, ambitious black men, who desire material success in the commercial white America. His father, Macon Dead I, was an ex-slave who got this absurd name because of a white drunken soldier who filled up his form wrongly. However, he retained this name because his wife liked it. According to her, this name would wipe out the past and offer them a new fresh start. After freedom, with his hard work, Macon Dead I owned a hundred – and fifty-acre farm which he named as ‘Lincoln’s Heaven’. However, he couldn’t read or write. As a result, some white people who were jealous of his prosperity cheated him saying that he had signed some papers and so now the farm no longer belonged to him. Macon, I tried to protect his farm with all his strength. But the greedy white farmers, who were intent on stealing his land, brutally murdered him. His very young children Macon II and Pilate eye witnessed this murder and it devastated their life completely. Unfortunately, both the siblings became estranged to each other and moved in two different directions. Macon II internalized and hyperbolized his father’s ethos of work and property ownership while Pilate responded with self denial and renunciation, becoming an absolute out cast. Though the circumstances of his father’s death, create ‘a degree of sympathy for his slippage for ownership as resistance to slavery to ownership as slavery’s repetition in the “free market” of capitalism…the text also insists on how for this traumatic memory goes in distorting Macon’s access to the present: It turns him against his previously beloved sister Pilate, whom he now sees as having ‘cut the last thread of propriety’ and thus unworthy of association with a ‘propertied Negro’ (20); and it poisons his relationship with his wife, whose allegedly ‘inappropriate’ (23) relationship with her father leads to Macon’s paranoid presupposition of an incestuous relationship.’2 Macon further instils this ideology in his son Milkman and thus makes Milkman incapable of empathising with others. Macon tells Milkman, “Let me tell you now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things and let the things you own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too”. (55)

Ruth’s history tells another story. Her father was the first black doctor in the city and so almost whole of the black population in the city was his client. Accordingly, the blacks spontaneously named the area where he lived as the ‘Doctor Street’. They also started using this name officially in addresses until and unless the postal department issued the notification saying that the particular area is known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street. Since then, blacks called it ‘Not Doctor Street’.

The intention of Northern white society to suppress black people’s identity and consign them to invisibility is palpable in the white, beaurocratic insistence that Mains Avenue was not ‘Doctor Street’. The resilient determination of the dispossessed who have named it because a black doctor lived there, triumphs in their persistent reference to it thereafter as ‘Not Doctor Street’. Humorous as it is, the underlying indignity offered to the black townspeople is not missed. The power of naming is white and the struggle for black identity begins with an insistence upon being named correctly.3

However, Dr. Foster himself was a hypocrite. He posed himself as calm and dignified but actually he was class and colour conscious. Negroes in the town worshipped him but he called them cannibals. If Macon and his father were the comrades working together, Ruth and her father had the master-servant relationship. Dr. Foster, ‘the most important Negro in the city’ (22) treated Ruth as a servant, ‘useful’ for housework and for his caretaking after his wife died. Ruth on the other hand, made her father into a demigod, alienating herself from the whole outside world: “I had no friends…but I didn’t think I ever need a friend because I had him. I was small but he was big.” (124) Even her marriage to Macon was not an outcome of love but of the obedience of a devoted daughter. As a result, even after marriage, her life was dominated by her father. She became a ‘trophy’ for which Macon and Dr. Foster contested, Dr. Foster having the upper hand because Ruth was on his side. Dr. Foster even delivered Ruth’s first two daughters himself, much against the wish of Macon. This made Macon suspicious of the incestuous relationship between father and daughter. However, he himself acknowledged that Dr. Foster could not fuck because he was addicted to ether. Still, he insisted that she was naked in the bed with Dr. Foster when he was dead. When milkman enquired about this incident, Ruth firmly refused: “No. But I did kneel there in my slip at his bedside and kiss his beautiful fingers.” (126) Ruth also explained her position as “I am a small woman. I don’t mean little; I mean small and I’m small because I am pressed small.” For both Dr. Foster and Macon, Ruth was not a person but a ‘thing’ to be possessed. Ruth knew this well and accordingly changed her weakness into the strength. She started using her ‘smallness’ as a mask to disguise her own efforts for control over the family and her obedience, deference and servility as her weapons. ‘Rather than becoming a helpless neurotic, Ruth uses Macon’s battering to fortify her position as the centre of power in the home…By depicting herself as a ‘buffoon’, she ruins herself as Macon’s ‘property’ and denies him his dream of Lincoln’s Heaven. She receives his abuse, but also renders him impotent before his children and consolidates their sympathy for her. Outside the household, Macon wields power as landlord but within his family, physical power is the only alternative he believes he possesses. If one views the process of this family’s functioning, Macon’s violence represents his futile, reprehensible effort to offset the emotional power Ruth has garnered, ironically, through her own submission.’4 With her calm matriculations, she led ‘her husband down paths from where there was no exit save violence. Lena thought Macon’s rages unaccountable. But Corinthians began to see a plan. To see how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power (a nine year old girl could slap Ruth and get away with it) but of helplessness.’ (64)

In such a malfunctioning family, Milkman is born both innocent and accountable. Macon and Ruth both use Milkman to control each other and Milkman in turn uses everybody around him to gratify his wishes. Milkman’s conception itself was an attempt on Ruth’s part to control Macon. So it enraged Macon and he insisted on abortion. But Ruth with Pilate’s help successfully resisted Macon and in Milkman found a ‘marital surrogates’ (a male to serve) [a phase borrowed from Gary Storhoff’s ‘Anaconda Love’]. Her prolonged breast feeding of Milkman resulted in his nickname which ‘sounded dirty, intimate and hot’ (15). Instead of feeling happy for having a long awaited son after fifteen years of marriage, Macon felt bitterness and disgust at his public humiliation caused by that nickname. In turn, Macon used Milkman as a weapon for dominance and control over Ruth. As Milkman grows up, Macon gradually instilled his materialistic ideology in Milkman. Milkman helped his father not only as a real estate agent but also to steal the supposed gold from Pilate’s home. Even when Milkman slapped Macon for Ruth’s sake, Macon was actually proud that his son had really become a ‘man’. By making Milkman suspect incest between Ruth and her father, Macon gained final victory over Ruth, ‘His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth.’ (63) Since birth Milkman was placed in an untenable situation: if he pleased one, he rejected the other. This situation made Milkman selfish. He pleased or rejected not only his parents but also other people to fulfil his needs. He felt ‘everybody wants something from me’ and in turn ‘[a]pparently he thought he deserved only to be loved – from a distance, though – and given what he wanted a in turn he would be…what? Pleasant? Generous? May be all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness’ (277).

This attitude of Milkman resulted in his alienation from all the people around him and objectification of those people. He followed the footsteps of his father in acquisitiveness but he never understood his father’s vision of Lincoln’s Heaven. He lived in the house with his mother and two sisters but they were never more than decorative objects in the house. Worse still, they were like the domestic slaves who were responsible for all the comforts of this master but in turn had no rights at all. Magdalene called Lena voiced the same complaint when she accused Milkman of peeing on people. “There are all kinds of ways to pee on people...You’ve been doing it to us all your life…You’ve been laughing at us all your like Corinthians. Mama. Me using us, ordering us and judging us how we cook your food; how we keep your house…Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you when you slept, we were quiet: when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you. You have yet to wash your own underwear, spread a bed, wipe the ring from your tub or mouse a fleck of your dirt from one place to another and to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired or sad or wanted a cup of coffee.” (215) In the similar fashion, in the outside world too, he was not able to appreciate the work or the lives of people. Though he associated with guitar as the best friend and exchanged almost everything in his life with him, ‘[t] he racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all.’ (107) Milkman was unable to attach to anybody personally because he lacked the sense of belongingness. He did not belong to the larger African American community because unlike majority of the black people, he was rich. So he was unaffected by the plight and exploitation of black masses in the white capitalist America. The stories of lynching did not touch his heart because he never thought it would affect his life. Neither in betraying Pilate by stealing her bag (which he thought was full of gold) nor in betraying Hagar’s love by using her as an object, he was at all hesitant. He lacked attachment and empathy which makes one’s life worthy. As a result, his material acquisitiveness left him spiritually bankrupt. Physically he was alive but spiritually he was dead. He had no future and so he turned towards his past. He went to south in search of gold which Macon and Pilate had left behind. But ironically, the quest for gold became the quest for self, the quest for identity. Only when he reached the end, he realized the beginning. Just like his childhood car rides where he could see only those things which went behind, in his journey to south, he realized that throughout his life what he was searching for was not gold but self-identity. Apart from the quarrels of his parents, material comforts of his house, friendship of Guitar and lust for Hagar, What he actually wanted was a meaningful self. This meaningful self can be discovered only by going back to one’s roots.

Dr Manisha Patil