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South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home, The
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Lee, Catherine Carr
The news from Mississippi of Emmett Till's murder for whistling at a white girl illuminates the narrowness of Milkman's involvement with his community. The other men at Tommy's Barbershop react with "tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves," as they link the events of their own lives with those of the larger world (83). But Milkman's response is "Yeah, well, fuck Till. I'm the one in trouble" (88). Not only can he not engage with the larger world, Milkman cannot recognize that his alienation has its roots in the very white racism that allowed for the lynching of Emmett Till.
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At the age of thirty-one, then, Milkman is still a narcissist; his life is stagnant and his growth suspended. Throughout, however, he has encountered a series of teachers who, in the tradition of the initiation story, push him forward to commitment even as they draw him inexorably to the South. He cannot respond immediately to their lessons, often feeling puzzled and confused, but he stores these experiences until the night of the Shalimar bobcat hunt, when he undergoes a metamorphosis. The lessons begin when Milkman is twelve, with his introduction to Pilate, the aunt who functions as a benevolent sorceress or a witch figure in his life. She helps his mother conceive him, then gives him a place where he can be "surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him and who laughed out loud" (47). As "Mama" to her granddaughter, Hagar, as well as to her own daughter, Reba, Pilate is the primal earth mother, with her "berry-black lips," surrounded by oranges and peaches (37-38). She is united with the nature with which Milkman must reconcile in order to survive his initiation. Pilate begins by instructing Milkman in practical, everyday knowledge: to say what you mean, how to cook a perfect egg. Because she values nothing but human relationships, Pilate refers to Milkman as Hagar's brother, because, she says, "you treat them both the same" (44). She intersperses this instruction with information about the Dead family's past. Milkman learns that his father grew up on a farm and saw his own father shot from behind, blown five feet in the air by the white men who resented his success. The Macon Dead that Pilate tells him about is a different man than the father Milkman has known. Milkman would have liked the man his father once was, says Pilate: "he would have been a real good friend to you, too, like he was to me" (39).
Meeting Pilate makes Milkman feel for the first time that his name is important, that it joins him with someone to whom he wants to belong. When Pilate tells young Milkman that there "ain't but three Deads alive," Milkman screams that he, too, is a Dead. He misses, of course, Pilate's unintentionalor Morrison's deliberate-irony, for he is one of the Deads who is spiritually dead, and he will insist on his "deadness" for years to come. But Pilate is the only person to provide Milkman with what feels emotionally like a home, so he hesitates to steal the bag hanging in her house that he thinks contains her gold. Guitar tells him that "this ain't no burglary. This is Pilate.... They're your people" (182). But Milkman has a vague understanding that Guitar misses: that in robbing his family, his community, he diminishes his own dignity and humanity. Milkman begins to make this connection when he and Guitar are arrested and Pilate must do her "Aunt Jemima act" to get them released (211). What humiliates Milkman is not just her act, "but the fact that she was both adept at it and willing to do it-for him" (211). He recognizes, briefly, that his actions affect other people, and he also realizes that by hurting Pilate, he has hurt himself. Pilate is also Milkman's closest link with the sustaining power of the past. She has misunderstood the message from her father's ghost, that "you just can't fly on off and leave a body" (209). Pilate thinks he meant that "if you take a life, then you own it. You responsible for it. You can't rid of nobody by killing them [sic]. They still there and they yours now" (209). So she continues to carry what she thinks are the bones of the man that Macon killed years before. As Milkman discovers later, the first Macon referred to his father, Solomon, who abandoned his wife and twenty-one children, but Pilate's interpretation points to the responsibility that Milkman must take.
