South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home, The

1o See Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain; Bruck, "Returning to One's Roots"; and Lee, "Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air." Byerman calls the hunt "the male initiation rite that Milkman has never had" ( 205); Bruck describes it as "a traditional action in which man unites himself through shared activities and a reverence for the wilderness with both his ancestors and his fellow men" (295-96). Dorothy Lee suggests that with names like Omar, King Walker, Calvin, Luther, and Small Boy, the old men on the hunt are "the circle of village elders, of poets, kings, and men of God" (69). " Krumholz turns to anthropologist Victor Turner to explain the separation and reincorporation that Milkman as quest-hero must undergo. Turner, she says, "divides the ritual process into three stages: rites of separation, rites of limen or margin, and rites of reaggregation ... Turner theorizes

'marginality' or 'liminality' as a space and time within ritual in which social-classifications break down and social relations are transformed. . .. Within the limen all participants, having temporarily put off their status, will see the world differently" ("Dead Teachers" 558). See Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 51-52.

13 Susan Blake points out that Morrison uses a highly individualistic variant of a folktale about flying Africans. She suggests that "in making Milkman's flying ancestor a single individual and focusing his story on the wife and children he left behind, Morrison refers not to a community united by its political experience, but to a conflict of identification between political and personal communities" ("Folklore and Community" SO). This folktale was collected from a number of people by the Georgia Writers' Project in Drums and Shadows (see index for "Africans, flying"), and by Langston Hughes and Ama Bontemps in The Book of Negro Folklore (62, 64).

1 Samuels notes that, in traditional African societies, the initiate must be "carefully tutored in the art of communal living" (63). The individual then exists "only as a representative of the whole" (63).

" Wahneema Lubiano, "The Postmodem Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon," in New Essays on Song of Solomon,notes "that Guitar places his rifle on the ground does not make him any less deadly" (Ill). Lubiano overlooks, however, the fact that Milkman has already provided Guitar with another chance to kill him. Morrison writes that Milkman "knew there wouldn't be another mistake; that the minute he stood up Guitar would try to blow his head off. He stood up." Milkman proceeds to shout: "Guitar! . . . Over here, brother man! Can you see me?" He waves his hand over his head, then continues to call out: "Here I am! . . . You want me? Huh? You want my life?" (340-41). Guitar has ample opportunity to shoot Milkman before he finally sets aside the rifle.

2o See Lubiano,"The Postmodem Rag." Lubiano describes Song of Solomon as "a postmodernist text" and argues that the novel "dramatizes the deconstruction of narrative convention, the complications of race, and the struggles over identification in ways that bring to narrative life the nexus of the personal and the political" (93, 95). While her discussion of the novel's postmodernist use of "black American vernacular Signifying" is illuminating (93), I disagree with her conclusion that the novel's ending is not unifying and transcendent.