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

Deeply connected to Milkman's aimlessness is his namelessness. Morrison uses knowing one's name as a metaphor for knowing one's past, and it is the South that holds the secret of Milkman's family name and family past. The novel's epigraph beckons to the power of the ancestral name: "The fathers may soar, and the children may know their names." It is a kind of blessing that Morrison bestows on her fictional black community, and, as Linda Krumholz has argued, it captures "the tension between black men's mobility. . . and familial and communal responsibilities" (555). Milkman's family has lost its ancestral name, achieving mobility at the cost of intimacy and identity. The original Macon Dead, Milkman's grandfather, received his name from a drunken Yankee at the Freedman's Bureau. According to Milkman's father, the first Macon kept the name because his wife insisted on it, because "it was new and would wipe out the past" (53). Yet losing the name of the ancestor causes the Dead family to lose history, community, and tradition as well; the past becomes "dead," and the loss of name damages the present an understanding of that past.

Names in Song of Solomon are, of course, fraught with significance. The novel points, on the one hand, to the importance of names in traditional societies of West Africa-the origin of most Africans enslaved in North Americawhere names are identified with the individual's essence, with the core of one's being.5 For American slaves, names provided a link with the African past; in the new world slaves conducted secret naming ceremonies and used their African names when they could avoid the presence of Whites. Yet the novel also points to the complicated status of surnames for African Americans in the United States. The denial of a family name, like the denial of marital legitimacy and the breaking apart of families, prevented stable family identities for enslaved Americans. As historian Leon Litwack points out, many slave holders did not want Blacks, be it before or after the Civil War, to take their own last name, and former slaves in turn rejected the surnames of their White owners as signs of illegitimate claims to ownership. But upon emancipation, when to be a citizen meant possessing both a first and a last name, freedmen sometimes took their most recent master's name; more often, they claimed the name of the earliest master they could recall, in order to retain a sense of family and identity.6 Others wanted to choose their own names, rejecting suggestions from Freedman's Bureau officials and choosing instead names that, although they were of European derivation, allowed them a sense of self-determination.

The healing of Milkman's own brokenness-not only as an individual but as a representative of an entire Black generation-requires Milkman's restoration to the community of his ancestors, and that requires, literally, the discovery of their names. Because Milkman has lost his name-and his heritage-he can not establish meaningful connections with his family and his community. He grows up feeling excluded and alone. The first of several symbolic markers of Milkman's separation and his brokenness comes when he is the first Black infant born in the all-White Mercy Hospital. His prolonged nursing also sets him apart. At the age of four, having discovered that he cannot fly, Milkman loses "all interest in himself' and likewise has no interest in those around him (9). His older sisters display only "casual malice" (10), while other children exclude him from neighborhood singing games-the kind of game, ironically, that will provide the answer to the mystery of his great-grandfather's life and identity.