Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

  As soon as she closed the door she heard voices and instinctively touched her loose hair. The voices came from beyond the dining room, from behind the closed kitchen door. Men’s voices. Corinthians blinked. She had just come from a house in which men sat in a lit kitchen talking in loud excited voices, only to meet an identical scene at home. She wondered if this part of the night, a part she was unfamiliar with, belonged, had always belonged, to men. If perhaps it was a secret hour in which men rose like giants from dragon’s teeth and, while the women slept, clustered in their kitchens. On tiptoe she approached the door. Her father was speaking.

  “You still haven’t explained to me why you brought him along.”

  “What difference does it make now?” That was her brother’s voice.

  “He knows about it,” said her father. “That’s what difference.”

  “About what? There’s nothing to know. It was a bust.” Milkman’s voice swelled like a blister.

  “It was a mistake, not a bust. It just means it’s somewhere else. That’s all.”

  “Yeah. The mint. You want me to go to the mint?”

  “No!” Macon struck the table. “It’s got to be there. It’s got to.”

  Corinthians couldn’t make sense out of what they were talking about with so much passion, and she didn’t want to stay there and learn, lest it distract her from the contentment she was feeling. She left them and climbed the stairs to her own bed.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Milkman folded his arms on the table and put his head down. “I don’t care. I don’t care where it is.”

  “It was just a mistake,” said his father. “One little mess-up. That don’t mean we have to pull out.”

  “You call being thrown in jail a little mess-up?”

  “You out, ain’t you? You was only there twenty minutes.”

  “Two hours.”

  “Wouldn’t have been two minutes if you had called me soon’s you got there. Sooner. Should have called me soon’s they picked you up.”

  “Police cars don’t have telephones in them.” Milkman was weary. He lifted his head and let it rest in his hand, directing his words into his shirt sleeve.

  “They would have let you, if it had just been you. Soon as you told them your name they would have let you go. But you was with that Southside nigger. That’s what did it.”

  “That is not what did it. It was riding around with a sack of rocks and human bones that did it. Human bones. Which is, if you’re a halfway intelligent cop, a hint that there must have been a human being connected to them bones at one time.”

  “Of course at one time. But not tonight. There couldn’t have been a human attached to the bones yesterday. It takes time for a body to be a skeleton. They know that. And don’t tell me it wasn’t Guitar they was suspicious of. That yellow-eyed nigger looks like he might do anything.”

  “They didn’t see his eyes when they told us to pull over. They didn’t see nothing. They just sideswiped us, and told us to get out. Now, what was that for? What’d they stop us for? We wasn’t speeding. Just driving along.” Milkman searched for cigarettes. He got angry again when he thought about bending over the car, his legs spread, his hands on the hood, while the policeman fingered his legs, his back, his ass, his arms. “What business they got stopping cars that ain’t speeding?”

  “They stop anybody they want to. They saw you was colored, that’s all. And they’re looking for the Negro that killed that boy.”

  “Who said it was a Negro?”

  “Paper said it.”

  “They always say that. Every time…”

  “What difference does it make? If you’d been alone and told them your name they never would have hauled you in, never would have searched the car, and never would have opened that sack. They know me. You saw how they acted when I got there.”

  “They didn’t act any different when you got there….”

  “What?”

  “They acted different when you took that sucker off in the corner and opened your wallet.”

  “You better be thankful I got a wallet.”

  “I am. God knows I am.”

  “And that would have been the end of it, except for that Southside nigger. Hadn’t been for him, they wouldn’t of had to get Pilate down there.” Macon rubbed his knees. The idea of having to depend on Pilate to get his son out of jail humiliated him. “Raggedy bootlegging bitch.”

  “She’s still a bitch?” Milkman began to chuckle. Exhaustion and the slow release of tension made him giddy. “You thought she stole it. All these years…all … all these years you’ve been holding that against her.” He was laughing out right now. “How she sneaked out of some cave with a big bag of gold that must have weighed a hundred pounds over her shoulder, all over the country for fifty years and didn’t spend none of it, just hung it from the ceiling like a fuckin sack of onions.” Milkman put his head back and let the laughter fill the kitchen. Macon was silent. “Fifty years…You been thinking about that gold for fifty years! Oh, shit. This is some crazy shit….” Tears of laughter were running from his eyes. “Crazy. All of you. Just straight-out, laid-back crazy. I should of known. The whole thing was crazy; everything about it was crazy—the whole idea.”

  “What’s crazier? Her hauling a sack of gold around all this time, or hauling a dead man’s bones around? Huh? Which one?” Macon asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “If she do one, she could do the other. She’s the one they should have kept. When you all told them the bones belonged to her, they should have locked her up soon’s she walked in the door.”

  Milkman wiped the tears on his sleeve. “Lock her up for what? After that story she told?” He started laughing again. “She came in there like Louise Beaver and Butterfly McQueen all rolled up in one. ‘Yassuh, boss. Yassuh, boss….”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “Almost. She even changed her voice.”

  “I told you she was a snake. Drop her skin in a split second.”

  “She didn’t even look the same. She looked short. Short and pitiful.”

  “That’s cause she wanted it back. She wanted them to let her have the bones back.”

  “Her poor husband’s bones, that she didn’t have no money to bury. Pilate got a husband somewhere?”

  “Does the Pope?”

  “Well, she got ’em back. They gave ’em to her.”

  “She knew what she was doing, all right.”

  “Yeah, she knew. But how did she know so fast? I mean she came in there…you know…prepared… you know … prepared. She had it all together when she got there. Cop must have told her everything when he picked her up and brought her to the station.”

  “Uh uh. They don’t do that.”

  “Then how did she know?”

  “Who knows what Pilate knows?”

  Milkman shook his head. “Only The Shadow knows.” He was still amused, but earlier, when he and Guitar had sat handcuffed on a wooden bench, his neck skin had crawled with fear.

  “White man’s bones,” Macon said. He stood up and yawned. The dark of the sky was softened now. “Nigger bitch roaming around with a white man’s bones.” He yawned again. “I’ll never understand that woman. I’m seventy-two years old and I’m going to die not understanding one thing about her.” Macon walked toward the kitchen door and opened it. Then he turned around and said to Milkman, “But you know what that means, don’t you? If she took the white man’s bones and left the gold, then the gold must still be there.” He shut the door before his son could protest.

  Well, it would rot there, thought Milkman. If anybody even mentions the word “gold,” I’m going to have to take his teeth out. He sat on there in the kitchen, wishing for more coffee, but too tired to get up and fix it. In a minute his mother would be downstairs; she had got up when he and Macon had come in, but Macon sent her back upstairs. Milkman fished for another cigarette and watched dawn eclipse the electric light over the sink. It was a c
heery sun, which suggested another hot day. But the stronger it got, the more desolate he became. Alone, without Macon, he let the events of the night come back to him—he remembered little things, details, and yet he wasn’t sure these details had really happened. Perhaps he made them up. Pilate had been shorter. As she stood there in the receiving room of the jail, she didn’t even come up to the sergeant’s shoulder—and the sergeant’s head barely reached Milkman’s own chin. But Pilate was as tall as he was. When she whined to the policeman, verifying Milkman’s and Guitar’s lie that they had ripped off the sack as a joke on an old lady, she had to look up at him. And her hands were shaking as she described how she didn’t know the sack was gone until the officer woke her up; that she couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to run off with her husband’s bones; that her husband had been lynched in Mississippi fifteen years ago, and that they wouldn’t let her cut him down, and that she left town then and that when she went back the body had dropped off the rope of its own accord, so she collected it and tried to bury it, but the “funeral peoples” wanted fifty dollars for a coffin, and the carpenter wanted twelve-fifty for a pine box and she just didn’t have no twelve dollars and fifty cents so she just carried what was left of Mr. Solomon (she always called him Mr. Solomon cause he was such a dignified colored man) and put it in a sack and kept it with her. “Bible say what so e’er the Lord hath brought together, let no man put asunder—Matthew Twenty-one: Two. We was bony fide and legal wed, suh,” she pleaded. Even her eyes, those big sleepy old eyes, were small as she went on: “So I thought I just as well keep him near me and when I die they can put him in the same hole as me. We’ll raise up to Judgment Day together. Hand in hand.”

  Milkman was astonished. He thought Pilate’s only acquaintance with the Bible was the getting of names out of it, but she quoted it, apparently, verse and chapter. Furthermore, she had looked at Milkman and Guitar and Macon like she didn’t know who exactly they were. In fact, when asked if she knew them, she pointedly said, “Not this man, here,” looking at her brother, “but I do believe I’ve noticed this fella around the neighborhood.” Here she motioned toward Guitar, who sat there like marble with the eyes of a dead man. Later, as Macon drove them all home—Pilate sitting in front, Guitar and himself in the back—Guitar never said a word. His anger was like heat shimmering out of his skin, making the hot air blowing in through the open window seem refreshing by comparison.

  And again there was a change. Pilate was tall again. The top of her head, wrapped in a silk rag, almost touched the roof of the car, as did theirs. And her own voice was back. She spoke, but to Macon only, and nobody else spoke at all. In a conversational tone, like somebody picking up a story that had been interrupted in the telling, she told her brother something quite different from what she told the policemen.

  “I spent that whole day and night in there, and when I looked out the next morning you was gone. I was scared I would run into you, but I didn’t see hide nor hair of you. It was three years or more ‘fore I went back. The winter it was. Snow was everywhere and I couldn’t hardly find my way. I looked up Circe first, then went looking for the cave. It was a hard trek, I can tell you, and I was in frail condition. Snow piled up every which way. But you should of known better than to think I’d go back there for them little old bags. I wasn’t stuttin ’em when I first laid eyes on ’em, I sure wasn’t thinking about them three years later. I went cause Papa told me to. He kept coming to see me, off and on. Tell me things to do. First he just told me to sing, to keep on singing. ‘Sing,’ he’d whisper. ‘Sing, sing.’ Then right after Reba was born he came and told me outright: ‘You just can’t fly on off and leave a body,’ he tole me. A human life is precious. You shouldn’t fly off and leave it. So I knew right away what he meant cause he was right there when we did it. He meant that if you take a life, then you own it. You responsible for it. You can’t get rid of nobody by killing them. They still there, and they yours now. So I had to go back for it. And I did find the cave. And there he was. Some wolves or something must have drug it cause it was right in the mouth of the cave, laying up, sitting up almost, on that very rock we slept on. I put him in my sack, piece by piece. Some cloth was still on him, but his bones was clean and dry. I’ve had it every since. Papa told me to, and he was right, you know. You can’t take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And the dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it’s a better thing, a more better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way, it frees up your mind.”

  Fucks up your mind, thought Milkman, fucks it up for good. He pulled himself up from the table. He had to get some sleep before he went looking for Guitar.

  Staggering up the stairs, he remembered Pilate’s back as she got out of the Buick—not bent at all under the weight of the sack. And he remembered how Guitar glared at her as she walked away from the car. When Macon dropped him off, he neither answered nor turned his head at Milkman’s “See y’ later.”

  Milkman woke at noon. Somebody had come into his room and placed a small fan on the floor near the foot of his bed. He listened to the whirring for a long time before he got up and went into the bathroom to fill the tub. He lay there in lukewarm water, still sweating, too hot and tired to soap himself. Every now and then he flicked water on his face, letting it wet his two-day-old beard. He wondered if he could shave without slicing his chin open. The tub was uncomfortable, too short for him to stretch out, though he remembered when he could almost swim in it. Now he looked down at his legs. The left one looked just as long as the other. His eyes traveled up his body. The touch of the policeman’s hand was still there—a touch that made his flesh jump like the tremor of a horse’s flank when flies light on it. And something more. Something like shame stuck to his skin. Shame at being spread-eagled, fingered, and handcuffed. Shame at having stolen a skeleton, like a kid on a Halloween trick-or-treat prank rather than a grown man making a hit. Shame at needing both his father and his aunt to get him off. Then more shame at seeing his father—with an accommodating “we all understand how it is” smile—buckle before the policemen. But nothing was like the shame he felt as he watched and listened to Pilate. Not just her Aunt Jemima act, but the fact that she was both adept at it and willing to do it—for him. For the one who had just left her house carrying what he believed was her inheritance. It didn’t matter that he also believed she had “stolen” it…. From whom? From a dead man? From his father, who was also stealing it? Then and now? He had stolen it too, and what’s more, he had been prepared—at least he told himself he had been prepared—to knock her down if she had come into the room while he was in the act of stealing it. To knock down an old black lady who had cooked him his first perfect egg, who had shown him the sky, the blue of it, which was like her mother’s ribbons, so that from then on when he looked at it, it had no distance, no remoteness, but was intimate, familiar, like a room that he lived in, a place where he belonged. She had told him stories, sung him songs, fed him bananas and corn bread and, on the first cold day of the year, hot nut soup. And if his mother was right, this old black lady—in her late sixties, but with the skin and agility of a teen-aged girl—had brought him into the world when only a miracle could have. It was this woman, whom he would have knocked senseless, who shuffled into the police station and did a little number for the cops—opening herself up wide for their amusement, their pity, their scorn, their mockery, their disbelief, their meanness, their whimsy, their annoyance, their power, their anger, their boredom—whatever would be useful to her and to himself.

  Milkman sloshed his legs in the water. He thought again of how Guitar had looked at Pilate—the jeweled hatred in his eyes. He had no right to that look. Suddenly, Milkman knew the answer to the question he had never been able to ask Guitar. Guitar could kill, would kill, and probably had killed. The Seven Days was the consequence of this ability, but not its origin. No. He had no cause to look at her like that, Milkman thought, and heaving
himself upright in the tub, he soaped himself hurriedly.

  The September heat blasted him as soon as he got outside, and wiped out the pleasant effects of his bath. Macon had taken the Buick—age forced him to walk less—so Milkman went on foot to Guitar’s house. As he rounded the corner, he noticed a familiar-looking gray Oldsmobile, a jagged crack in the rear window, parked in front of the house. Several men were inside and two were standing outside: Guitar and Railroad Tommy. Milkman slowed his steps. Tommy was talking, while Guitar nodded his head. Then the two men shook hands—a handshake Milkman had never seen before: first Tommy held Guitar’s hand in both his own, then Guitar held Tommy’s hand in his two. Tommy got in the car and Guitar dashed around the house to the side stairs that led to his room. The Oldsmobile—Milkman figured it was a 1953 or 1954 model—made a tight U-turn and headed toward him. When it passed by, all the occupants looked straight ahead. Porter was driving, with Empire State in the middle and Railroad Tommy on the far side, and in the back seat was Hospital Tommy and a man named Nero. Milkman didn’t know the other man.

  That must be them, he thought. His heart beat wildly. Six men, one of them Porter, and Guitar. Those are the Days. And that car. That was the car that let Corinthians off near the house sometimes. Milkman had first assumed his sister had an occasional lift home from her job. Later, since she never mentioned it, and also because she seemed quieter and rounder lately, he decided she was seeing some man on the sly. He thought it funny, sweet and a little sad. But now he knew that whoever she was seeing belonged to that car and belonged to the Seven Days. Foolish woman, he thought. Of all the people to pick. She was so silly. So silly. Jesus!

  He wasn’t up to Guitar now. He would see him later.

  People behaved much better, were more polite, more understanding when Milkman was drunk. The alcohol didn’t change him at all, but it had a tremendous impact on whomever he saw while he was under its influence. They looked better, never spoke above a whisper, and when they touched him, even to throw him out of the house party because he had peed in the kitchen sink, or when they picked his pockets as he dozed on a bench at the bus station, they were gentle, loving.