Word: macon
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...street names in Morrison's novel are invented in response to white officialdom, the characters, who are all black, spend their lives reacting in one way or another to persistent discrimination. Macon Dead, a successful black slumlord, will always be warped, both because he must live with a name given his father by a drunken Union soldier who filled out the form wrong, and because he will not be any more accepted by the white banks than he will be by his black tenants. His wife, the doctor's daughter, will never be part of the city's black community...
...give us the story chronologically, mapping out each detail in simple narrative style. Instead, she weaves back and forth across generations, bringing in characters, letting them go, bringing them back again to give us a new insight. The story revolves around the growth of the doctor's grandson, Macon III --or Milkman, as he is generally known--as he moves beyond the dark rooms of his family's house, haunted by death and isolation, into the streets of Southside. There, he meets people who have come to terms with their situation far better than his family has been able...
...past, a series of individual portraits rather than dry history. Milkman's parents, sisters, and gradparents each take on a life of their own; we are introduced to each gradually, as Morrison peels back the layers of Milkman's present. There is his paternal grandfather, the first Macon Dead--a freeholding farmer who taught his children to love being alive before he was killed by a white man's bullet. There are Milkman's siters, who emerge from the sterile silence that surrounds them at the book's opening to become strong characters in their own right. The world...
...prose. Her fictional family is stuck with the portentous name of Dead, the result of an error at the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia in 1869. "The man behind the desk was drunk," explains one of the Deads. "He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, 'He's dead.' The Yankee wrote it all down, but in the wrong spaces...
Morrison's protagonist is also called Macon Dead-grandson of the freed slave. He is nicknamed Milkman because his mother suckled him until he was almost tall enough for his feet to touch the floor. Yet he remains starved as a child for the heritage his silent family cannot or will not provide. His one wish is to fly. "To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull." At twelve, he meets an outcast aunt, Pilate Dead, who fills the role of tribal storyteller. She tells...