Song of Solomon

by Toni Morrison

  Yeah. And black men were not excluded. With two exceptions, everybody he was close to seemed to prefer him out of this life. And the two exceptions were both women, both black, both old. From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.

  Would you save my life or would you take it? Guitar was exceptional. To both questions he could answer yes.

  “Should I go home first, or go to Pilate’s first?” Out in the street, late at night with autumn air blowing cold off the lake, he tried to make up his mind. He was so eager for the sight of Pilate’s face when he told her what he knew, he decided to see her first. He’d have a long time at his own house. He took a taxi to Darling Street, paid the driver, and bounded up the stairs. He pushed the door open and saw her standing over a tub of water, rinsing out the green bottles she used for her wine.

  “Pilate!” he shouted. “Have I got stuff to tell you!”

  She turned around. Milkman opened his arms wide so he could hold all of her in a warm embrace. “Come here, sweet-heart,” he said, grinning. She came and broke a wet green bottle over his head.

  When he came to, he was lying on his side in the cellar. He opened one eye and considered the option of not coming to for a little while more. For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to be something else, and probably was. Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn’t even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.

  So he lay on the cool damp floor of the cellar and tried to figure out what he was doing there. What did Pilate knock him out for? About the theft of her sack of bones? No. She’d come to his rescue immediately. What could it be, what else could he have done that would turn her against him? Then he knew. Hagar. Something had happened to Hagar. Where was she? Had she run off? Was she sick or…Hagar was dead. The cords of his neck tightened. How? In Guitar’s room, did she…?

  What difference did it make? He had hurt her, left her, and now she was dead—he was certain of it. He had left her. While he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying. Sweet’s silvery voice came back to him: “Who’d he leave behind?” He left Ryna behind and twenty children. Twenty-one, since he dropped the one he tried to take with him. And Ryna had thrown herself all over the ground, lost her mind, and was still crying in a ditch. Who looked after those twenty children? Jesus Christ, he left twenty-one children! Guitar and the Days chose never to have children. Shalimar left his, but it was the children who sang about it and kept the story of his leaving alive.

  Milkman rolled his head back and forth on the cellar floor. It was his fault, and Pilate knew it. She had thrown him in the cellar. What, he wondered, did she plan to do with him? Then he knew that too. Knew what Pilate’s version of punishment was when somebody took another person’s life. Hagar. Something of Hagar’s must be nearby. Pilate would put him someplace near something that remained of the life he had taken, so he could have it. She would abide by this commandment from her father herself, and make him do it too. “You just can’t fly on off and leave a body.”

  Suddenly Milkman began to laugh. Curled up like a Polish sausage, a rope cutting his wrists, he laughed.

  “Pilate!” he called. “Pilate! That’s not what he meant. Pilate! He didn’t mean that. He wasn’t talking about the man in the cave. Pilate! He was talking about himself. His own father flew away. He was the ‘body.’ The body you shouldn’t fly off and leave. Pilate! Pilate! Come here. Let me tell you what your father said. Pilate, he didn’t even tell you to sing, Pilate. He was calling for his wife—your mother. Pilate! Get me out of here!”

  Light exploded in his face. The cellar door opened over his head. Pilate’s feet appeared on the stone steps, and paused.

  “Pilate,” said Milkman, softly now, “that’s not what he meant. I know what he meant. Come, let me tell you. And Pilate, those bones. They’re not that white man’s bones. He probably didn’t even die. I went there. I saw. He wasn’t there and the gold wasn’t there either. Somebody found it and found him too. They must have, Pilate. Long before you got there. But, Pilate…”

  She descended a few steps.

  “Pilate?”

  She came all the way down and he looked in her eyes and at her still mouth. “Pilate, your father’s body floated up out of the grave you all dug for him. One month later it floated up. The Butlers, somebody, put his body in the cave. Wolves didn’t drag the white man to the front of the cave and prop him on a rock. That was your father you found. You’ve been carrying your father’s bones—all this time.”

  “Papa?” she whispered.

  “Yes. And, Pilate, you have to bury him. He wants you to bury him. Back where he belongs. On Solomon’s Leap.”

  “Papa?” she asked again.

  Milkman did not speak; he watched her long fingers travel up her dress, to rest like the wing of a starling on her face. “I’ve been carryin Papa?” Pilate moved toward Milkman, stopped and looked at him for a while. Then her eyes turned to a rickety wooden table that stood against the stone wall of the cellar. It was in a part of the room so dark he had not even seen it. She walked over to the table and lifted from it a green-and-white shoe box, its cover held down with a rubber band. “Joyce,” it said on the box. “Thank heaven for little Joyce heels.”

  “If I bury Papa, I guess I ought to bury this too—somewhere.” She looked back at Milkman.

  “No,” he said. “No. Give it here.”

  When he went home that evening, he walked into the house on Not Doctor Street with almost none of the things he’d taken with him. But he returned with a box of Hagar’s hair.

  She wouldn’t set foot on an airplane, so he drove. She seemed happy now. Her lips mobile again, she sat next to him in Macon’s Buick, a mink stole Reba had won wrapped around her shoulders over her old black dress. The knit cap was pulled down on her forehead and her shoes still had no laces. Every now and then she glanced at the back seat to check on the sack. Peace circled her.

  Milkman felt it too. His return to Not Doctor Street was not the triumph he’d hoped it would be, but there was relief in his mother’s crooked smile. And Lena, though unforgiving as ever, was civil to him, since Corinthians had moved to a small house in Southside, which she shared with Porter. The Seven Days, Milkman guessed, would be looking for a new recruit, as they had to when Robert Smith jumped off the roof of Mercy. But there were long rambling talks with his father, who could not hear it enough—the “boys” who remembered him in Danville; his mother’s running off with his father; the story about his father and his grandfather. He wasn’t a bit interested in the flying part, but he liked the story and the fact that places were named for his people. Milkman softened his description of Circe, saying simply that she was alive, and taking care of the dogs.

  “I ought maybe to take me a trip down there,” said Macon.

  “Virginia?” Milkman asked him.

  “Danville. I ought to go by and see some of those boys before these legs stop moving. Let Freddie pick up the rents, maybe.”

  It was nice. No reconciliation took place between Pilate and Macon (although he seemed pleased to know that they were going to bury their father in Virginia), and relations between Ruth and Macon were the same and would always be. Just as the consequences of Milkman’s own stupidity would remain, and regret would always outweigh the things he was proud of having done. Hagar was dead and he had not loved her one bit. And Guitar was … somewhere.

  In Shalimar there was general merriment at his quick return, and Pilate blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn. They stayed with Omar’s family, and on the second and last evening, Milkman and Pilate walked up the road to the path that led to Solomon’s Leap. It was the higher of two outcroppings of rock. Both flat-headed
, both looking over a deep valley. Pilate carried the sack, Milkman a small shovel. It was a long way to the top, but neither stopped for breath. At the very top, on the plateau, the trees that could stand the wind at that height were few. They looked a long time for an area of earth among the rock faces large enough for the interment. When they found one, Pilate squatted down and opened the sack while Milkman dug. A deep sigh escaped from the sack and the wind turned chill. Ginger, a spicy sugared ginger smell, enveloped them. Pilate laid the bones carefully into the small grave. Milkman heaped dirt over them and packed it down with the back of his shovel.

  “Should we put a rock or a cross on it?” Milkman asked.

  Pilate shook her head. She reached up and yanked her earring from her ear, splitting the lobe. Then she made a little hole with her fingers and placed in it Sing’s snuffbox with the single word Jake ever wrote. She stood up then, and it seemed to Milkman that he heard the shot after she fell. He dropped to his knees and cradled her lolling head in the crook of his arm, barking at her, “You hurt? You hurt, Pilate?”

  She laughed softly and he knew right away that she was reminded of the day he first met her and said the most stupid thing there was to say.

  The twilight had thickened and all around them it was getting dark. Milkman moved his hand over her chest and stomach, trying to find the place where she might be hit. “Pilate? You okay?” He couldn’t make out her eyes. His hand under her head was sweating like a fountain. “Pilate?”

  She sighed. “Watch Reba for me.” And then, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”

  Milkman bent low to see her face and saw darkness staining his hand. Not sweat, but blood oozing from her neck down into his cupped hand. He pressed his fingers against the skin as if to force the life back in her, back into the place it was escaping from. But that only made it flow faster. Frantically he thought of tourniquets and could even hear the rip of cloth he should have been tearing. He shifted his weight and was about to lay her down, the better to wrap her wound, when she spoke again.

  “Sing,” she said. “Sing a little somethin for me.”

  Milkman knew no songs, and had no singing voice that anybody would want to hear, but he couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. “Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Cotton balls to choke me/Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Buckra’s arms to yoke me.” The blood was not pulsing out any longer and there was something black and bubbly in her mouth. Yet when she moved her head a little to gaze at something behind his shoulder, it took a while for him to realize that she was dead. And when he did, he could not stop the worn old words from coming, louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her. He woke only the birds, who shuddered off into the air. Milkman laid her head down on the rock. Two of the birds circled round them. One dived into the new grave and scooped something shiny in its beak before it flew away.

  Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. “There must be another one like you,” he whispered to her. “There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.”

  Even as he knelt over her, he knew there wouldn’t be another mistake; that the minute he stood up Guitar would try to blow his head off. He stood up.

  “Guitar!” he shouted.

  Tar tar tar, said the hills.

  “Over here, brother man! Can you see me?” Milkman cupped his mouth with one hand and waved the other over his head. “Here I am!”

  Am am am am, said the rocks.

  “You want me? Huh? You want my life?”

  Life life life life.

  Squatting on the edge of the other flat-headed rock with only the night to cover him, Guitar smiled over the barrel of his rifle. “My man,” he murmured to himself. “My main man.” He put the rifle on the ground and stood up.

  Milkman stopped waving and narrowed his eyes. He could just make out Guitar’s head and shoulders in the dark. “You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

  Toni Morrison

  SONG OF SOLOMON

  Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

  Also by Toni Morrison

  FICTION

  Love

  Paradise

  fazz

  Beloved

  Tar Baby

  Sula

  The Bluest Eye

  NONFICTION

  The Dancing Mind

  Playing in the Dark:

  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

  ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

  BELOVED

  In Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, set in post–Civil War Ohio, Sethe, an escaped slave, has wrenched herself from living death, has lost a husband, and buried a child. She now lives with her daughter, her mother-in-law, and the disturbing apparition called Beloved.

  Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3341-1

  JAZZ

  Joe Trace shoots to death his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. Richly combining history, legend, and reminiscence, Morrison captures the ineffable mood and the complex humanity of black urban life at a crucial moment in history.

  Fiction/Literature/1-4000-7621-8

  SULA

  Sula and Nel meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. They share everything until Sula escapes the Bottom, their hilltop neighborhood of fierce resentment. After roaming America, misfit Sula returns to find Nel acculturated to life in the Bottom.

  Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3343-8

  TAR BABY

  Jadine, Sorbonne educated and comfortably well off, meets a black American street man and finds herself moving inexorably toward him; he is a kind of man she has dreaded since childhood: uneducated, violent, and contemptuous of her privilege.

  Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3344-6

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  Playing In The Dark:

  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 0-679-74542-4

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

  1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only)

  Acclaim for Toni Morrison’s

  SONG OF SOLOMON

  “It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Lovely…. A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness…. [An] exceptionally diverse novel.”

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  “A rich, full novel…. It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Morrison dazzles…. She creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world…. With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today.”

  —The Nation

  “A marvelous novel, the most moving I have read in ten years of reviewing.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “Toni Morrison has created a fanciful world here…. She has an impeccable sense of emotional detail. She’s the most sensible lyrical writer around today.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A fine novel exuberantly constructed…. So rich in its use of common speech, so s
ophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner…it is also extremely funny.”

  —The Hudson Review

  “Toni Morrison is an extraordinarily good writer. Two pages into anything she writes one feels the power of her language and the emotional authority behind that language…. One closes the book warmed through by the richness of its sympathy, and by its breathtaking feel for the nature of sexual sorrow.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs.”

  —The New Yorker

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2004

  Copyright © 1977, 2004 by Toni Morrison

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1977.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Morrison, Toni.

  Song of Solomon.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.M883So [PS3563.08749]

  813'.5'4

  77-874

  www.vintagebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38812-4

  v3.0