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

Milkman's trips through the woods to the Butler house and to the cave are part of his initiation as well, and they anticipate the bobcat hunt in Shalimar that will bring the shedding of his old, inauthentic self. Going into the Pennsylvania woods, Milkman is "oblivious to the universe of wood life," just as he has been oblivious to the emotions and experiences of the people around him (221). To find the house he must make "a mile-long walk over moist leaves," dodging branches of overhead trees (240). To find the cave he has to go deeper into the woods, crossing and falling into a creek, then climbing the rocky hillside. His watch and cigarettes, those emblems of distraction and city life, are smashed and soaked; his thin-soled shoes are of little help. Once inside the cave, he has only his hands, feet, and instincts to guide him. His lighter sputters only long enough to show that the gold is gone. In this confrontation with a nature much wilder than the "tended woods" he knew back home, Milkman finds that some genuine feeling begins to emerge, experienced as a ravenous hunger unlike any he has known before (252). Afterwards, Milkman sees the landscape with new eyes. As he travels to Virginia, the hills ahead of him are "no longer scenery.... They were real places that could split your thirty-dollar shoes" (259).

Milkman still has much to learn when he reaches Shalimar. He begins to take southern hospitality for granted, to feel at home in the South-especially so when his car breaks down in front of Solomon's Country Store. In Shalimar, Milkman hears the local children singing "a kind of ring-around-the-rosy or Little Sally Walker game" (266). This is the Solomon song, which Milkman later realizes holds the key to the mystery of his ancestry. At this point this feeling of being at home is an extension of his sense of entitlement, and the mistakes he makes in Shalimar reflect his separateness. Milkman's first mistake underscores the power of naming and the importance of community. He calls the men in the store "them," and by failing to ask their names, Milkman denies their personhood and revels his distrust. When he locks his car and then suggests that he would like one of their women, this serves only to isolate him further. In the ensuing fight Milkman defends himself with a broken bottle before Mr. Solomon rescues him. Although Milkman is obviously marked as an outsider, he is beginning to lose the inadequate trappings of his old, superficial self. In Shalimar his money cannot save him; his daddy cannot bail him out of trouble. All he has to fight with is what he finds immediately at hand.

In the community of Shalimar, the home of his ancestors, Milkman is still the ignorant, irresponsible, passive adolescent. To gain the knowledge of responsible adulthood, he must leave behind the fixed boundaries of his old, immature self and experience the chaotic, liminal, near-death experience of initiation. Like the quest-hero, Milkman is, in the words of Vladimir Propp, "tested, interrogated, [and] attacked" (39), but the bobcat hunt that the older men invite him to join is more accurately a male initiation rite at the hands of the elders and wise men of African tribal cultures. As they usher the initiate into the ways and wisdom of the community, the men enact a ritual dressing of Milkman before the hunt; his city clothes are not adequate for the night ahead, just as his city self cannot serve him during the changes he will undergo.10 Calvin Breakstone takes Milkman under his wing as a protoge, and Milkman's next step toward shedding his old self comes when he realizes that Calvin's lamp, prevents his eyes from adjusting to the dark. In order to see what the night holds, he must "look at what it was possible to see" (276). Finally, Milkman's gaze now penetrates. At the moment he hears the wailing from Ryna's Gulch, and Calvin tells Milkman about the old legend that "a woman named Ryna is cryin' down there"-the Ryna who was abandoned by his great-grandfather, Solomon (277). By letting go of the secure but superficial mooring of artificial light, Milkman begins to gain access to the mysteries of his ancestry.