Word: milkman
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EACH OF THE CHARACTERS in Song of Solomon has his own burden, some trauma from which he must free himself if finally, he is to move beyond the mental confines of the ghetto. Only Milkman's aunt Pilate is free. She was odd from birth--she never had the choice of conforming, because she has no navel, no connection to even family. She is eccentric, living outside respectability with her daughter and her daughter's daughter, off the proceeds of her homemade wine. Pilate, in her unkempt and mystical way, is not bound by the conventions that trap ordinary people...
During the course of the novel, Milkman must come to recognize Pilate's essential healthiness. But the process is slow, and the realization that Pilate's kind of freedom is won at the cost of a normal life comes painfully. First, Milkman must rediscover his family's roots, and try alternate paths to liberation. For a while he works in his father's office, collecting rents; then he tries a love affair with Pilate's not-quite-crazy granddaughter. These routes are not satisfying, but neither is his friendship with Guitar, a violently angry man who retaliates against murders...
...THROUGH MILKMAN'S EXPLORATION, we meet most of the other characters in Song of Solomon. Partly through his eyes, but partly also through Morrison's own omniscient voice, we see images of the 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...
...Milkman's discovery of his own path to freedom is slightly less compelling, but only because in his case Morrison leaves the city community she has drawn so clearly for a hazier south. Milkman has gone off to find the source of his grandfather's strength, and somehow in the process reality turns to metaphor. The change is somehow not quite satisfying; where other characters have been in-comprehensible at first, gradually gaining clarity, Milkman moves from the understandable to the obstruse. When he finally stands up, facing death at the hands of his former friend, he has found...
Morrison leaves us without resolution of the problems her characters face. Freedom from the urban ghetto, where life is dominated by discrimination and where one can only fight back with wit or violence, means leaving the comprehensible world. Both Pilate and finally Milkman have left the earth: they are off in a world that is inaccessible. Song of Solomon opened with the attempted flight of a lonely insurance salesman, off the roof of No Mercy Hospital; his failure is not a good omen for Milkman's flight. But the attempt, Morrison suggests, is the important thing. Milkman must decide between...