Song of Solomon

views updated

Song of Solomon

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in African American communities in Michigan, rural Virginia, and Pennsylvania between 1930 and the early 1960s; published in 1977.

SYNOPSIS

A young African American man searches for his identity and discovers his real and mythical family history.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Toni Morrison was born in Lorraine, Ohio, in 1931 as Chloe Anthony Wofford. An avid reader, Morrison studied literature, earning a bachelor’s degree at Howard University followed by a master’s degree in English at Cornell University in 1955. After earning her degrees she worked as an editor for Random House, becoming instrumental in the publication of autobiographies and fiction by African American women such as Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara. In 1970 Morrison published her own first novel, The Bluest Eye (also in Literature and Its Times). She followed it with the National Book Award-nominated Sula (1973), and a few years later with Song of Solomon. Using myths and folktales, Song of Solomon details the coming-of-age of a young black man, meanwhile tackling African American issues that emanate from the experience of slavery (displacement, naming, loss of ancestry and homelands). It was this novel, critics concur, that “established [Morrison] as a major American writer” (Draper, p. 216).

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

A Promised Land?

Repressive and oppressive conditions plagued the South following the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. In addition to dehumanizing laws that mandated segregation between the races and lynching campaigns that targeted blacks, widespread poverty plagued the region. A lack of job opportunities, coupled with agricultural setbacks (the boll weevil, flooding), made it difficult to climb out of that poverty if one remained in the region. So to improve their lot in life, nearly 5 million African Americans rode the rails, trekked, and otherwise made their ways north from 1890 to 1950, a movement otherwise known as the Great Migration. The North seemed to be a sort of Promised Land, offering jobs and hope for a more equitable life than in the South. Leaving behind the rural landscape and agrarian lifestyle that had been home for roughly three centuries since the first Africans had landed in Jamestown in 1619, most of these migrants stepped out of the southern countryside into sprawling metropolises and, far more often than before, out of rural work into industrial jobs. The transition was not a simple one, nor was it always even desirable.

The black press had done much to promote the North, “To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than at the hands of a mob,” advised the Chicago Defender in the 1910s (Franklin and Moss, p. 376). And indeed conditions seemed promising at first. Especially during World War I (1914-18) blacks entered the industrial workforce in large numbers, finding jobs in the ammunition, iron, and steel manufacturing industries, in car and truck assembly, and in the production of electrical items. World War II (1939-45) likewise saw mass hiring of black workers in manufacturing, again largely in iron and steel works but also in the newer aircraft industry. But social change lagged behind occupational breakthroughs. Much to the chagrin of the hopeful migrants, the segregation of the South appeared in the North as well, only in a less direct manner:

Black Southerners who moved north hoping to leave behind the color line and racial hostilities quickly learned a harsher reality. The rules were unwritten in the North, but they were rules nonetheless. These neighborhoods were off-limits; those restaurants “don’t serve Negroes.”
(Kelley and Lewis, p. 396)

Arriving in northern cities, migrant families, like those featured in the novel, experienced housing and employment discrimination. Unwelcome in European-dominated neighborhoods or in the suburbs, the newcomers moved into the less desirable inner cities and established all-black communities in the early 1990s. As blacks continued to migrate, their numbers increased but the physical dimensions of their neighborhoods did not. “What segregation meant was that neither black newcomers nor established residents could move beyond the borders of the emerging ghettos” (Kelley and Lewis, p. 389). The result was severe overcrowding in black ghettos, putting a strain not only on the buildings themselves, which began to deteriorate, but on the people who inhabited them. There emerged a type of existence in the North, despite better jobs and educational conditions, that made the region far from the haven for a better life that some people had made it out to be. “No one had told [the migrants] ‘about one of the most important aspects of the Promised Land: it was a slum ghetto. … There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-size section of a great city’” (Nash, p. 946).

By 1950, more than 7.5 million African Americans (52 percent of all blacks in the U.S.) lived in northern metropolitan areas, concentrated in these black ghettos. As blacks flowed into the cities, whites and jobs flowed out to the suburbs. “The factories that remained, if any, were updated into high-tech industries requiring special skills and fewer personnel, thus creating structural unemployment that would remain a critical problem for blacks and for many other Americans for the remainder of the century” (Franklin and Moss, p. 515). Combined with the ever-increasing inner city population, the factors of job and housing discrimination, postwar industrial restructuring, and relocation produced a steady rise in un- and under- employment in urban areas. Unemployment escalated to nearly 14 percent in 1957, directly affecting more than half of the black population in the U.S. With nearly one in six out of work, the local economy and tax revenues (including school levy and city budgets) were hard hit. While most of the nation was experiencing an economic boom, urban minorities were not. The ratio of unemployment of blacks to whites was 2:1, and for every one dollar a white man earned, a black man earned from 40 to 60 cents for performing the same job. This discrepancy helped contribute to a growing disparity of wealth and to rising tensions between blacks and whites. It also contributed to a widening rift between middle- and upper-class blacks and the struggling majority of lower-class blacks.

For black women, the picture was even more dismal—especially for young black women. Those aged 16-19 averaged nearly 35 percent unemployment annually (through 1988); those aged 20-24 averaged 22 percent (Ploski and Williams, p. 611). As shown in the novel, Corinthians Dead is a well-educated woman yet she has not been able to get a job befitting her education since she graduated Bryn Mawr in the 1940s. “After graduation she returned to a work world in which colored girls, regardless of their background, were in demand for one and only one kind of work” (Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 189). That “one” kind of work was domestic service, which the majority of black women, regardless of education or skill level, undertook out of necessity.

Power in numbers

There were some positive aspects to the “ghettoization” or concentration of African Americans in America’s northern inner cities. Residents of black communities found themselves relatively safe from racial attack in their own enclaves. It proved easier—especially in Harlem—for artists and other residents to express themselves culturally in the all-black neighborhoods. And the community gave rise to a black press, which detailed race crimes, political issues, and social ills that white papers would not report. Most of all, the concentration of African Americans in all-black communities created a political power base out of a formally powerless and dispersed ethnic minority in America.

The movement to the cities resulted in conditions favorable to protest: the amassing of large numbers of people with similar grievances, a slight economic improvement over rural poverty so that folks could be less concerned with their daily bread, a nucleus of organizations through which communication and mobilization could occur, and a cultural support system for black pride and militancy.
(Blumberg, p. 30)

This power base, primed for protest, emerged in the North just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the South. From their relative position of strength and with the black press able to publicize events and concerns, northern blacks greatly aided the fledgling movement in the South. They added volume, organization, and fiery leadership, including the words of Malcom X who “seemed best able to capture the imaginations of urban blacks and verbalize their smoldering resentment” (Blumberg, p. 30).

Riots, rights, protest

As the decade of the 1960s began, the plight of blacks worsened. One million farm jobs were lost from 1950 to 1969. In most urban areas, unemployment levels and living conditions were becoming intolerable. In the community of Watts in Los Angeles, for example, the unemployed made up 30 percent of the 83,000 blacks who comprised the area’s all-black population, which was cramped into an area four times as congested as the rest of the city (Franklin and Moss, p. 546). Because of housing discrimination “few blacks were able to secure housing elsewhere, even when they could afford it” (Franklin and Moss, p. 546).

Meanwhile in the South, violence against blacks reached new heights. The Ku Klux Klan and hard-line segregationists reacted against civil rights victories inside and outside the courts, which required Southerners to desegregate (schools, for example, [Brown v. Board of Education, 1954] and buses [Birmingham Boycott, 1956]). Refusing to accept defeat, the segregationists embarked on a campaign of terrorism. “City buses were fired upon, injuring some black passengers … a wave of bombings hit black churches and … homes” (Blumberg, p. 48). In Birmingham, Alabama, there were 17 unsolved bombings between 1957 and 1964, mostly of black churches, homes, and businesses. One of the bombings occurred at the 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four young black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley). In the novel, this incident spurs strong reaction from Guitar and his protest group, the Seven Days.

Despite the violence, bent on securing voting and civil rights for blacks once and for all, the civil rights movement continued to take direct action. The decade had started with a grassroots student protest by a group of four freshman from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, who on January 31, 1960, refused to budge from an all-white lunch counter at a Woolworth’s drug store. Beginning here, students and others staged sit-ins and freedom rides across the country, held marches, and conducted protests and strikes to call attention to blacks being deprived of their rights and force the passage of new civil rights legislation.

The Tactic of Non-Violence

A mass civil rights movement unfolded in the 1960s, beginning early in the decade with nonviolent protest. The goal was securing passage of legislation to guarantee voting rights and civil liberties. Patterned after Gandhi’s successful passive resistance campaign that won India freedom from Great Britain in 1949, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized and became the national voice of nonviolent protest for black civil rights in the U.S. His organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, produced many great leaders whose main emphasis was getting legislation passed to end segregation and ensure the rights of minorities. Their efforts and those of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led to the passage of the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting Rights (1965) acts, which outlawed discrimination in places of public accommodation and permitted federal agents to register black voters when needed.

While the nonviolent approach did produce legal victories, many felt that their achievements had involved unprovoked violence against blacks that ought to be met with an in-kind response. The unmet needs of the urban majority, including economic relief, job and educational opportunity and reform, and black control over black communities, became paramount through the 1960s. In the process, the nonviolent, legislative-focused civil rights movement gave way to a more publicly combative, urban-focused movement that became known as Black Power. The Black Power movement, championed by leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, took the position that legislation alone would not solve the problems facing most African Americans. Well aware of the harsh realities of urban life, these leaders sought greater job opportunities for the majority of poor blacks, better housing, and an increased voice in and control over their future.

While King urged integration and nonviolent direct action, Black Power advocates touted black independence and said they should gain rights by “any means necessary,” including armed rebellion. As a former SNCC leader who had tried the passive, integrationist approach, Carmichael was frustrated by the limited gains those tactics had produced. He was ready to lead a new type of protest movement, and others were clearly ready to follow. “The positive response of many young people to Carmichael’s words seemed to prove that the civil rights revolution had shifted” (Blumberg, p. 118). Indeed, by 1966 race riots had erupted in many major cities, including Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), and Detroit (1967). Prominent leaders had been assassinated, including Medgar Evers (1963), John F. Kennedy (1963), and Malcolm X (1965), not to mention scores of lesser-known local civil rights workers and protesters. And grave problems remained. The passage of civil rights legislation had done little or nothing to alleviate unemployment, poverty, urban overcrowding, or racial tensions. By the end of the 1960s the death-by-assassination toll would include Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and a staunch conservative, Richard Nixon, would be the president in the White House. For the black community the future did not look bright. As the 1960s came to a close, the civil rights movement ended and the Black Power movement began.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Song of Solomon opens with flight, birth, and death—recurrent themes of the African American experience, as well as the novel. Combining seemingly random events, Morrison establishes at the outset the connection between the past, present, and future; how history shapes current events in both obvious and subliminal ways. As an insurance agent leaps from the Mercy hospital roof in an attempt to “fly away on my own wings,” the mayhem this causes leads to a breach in protocol that allows a black mother to deliver her child inside the white hospital (Solomon, p. 3). Macon Dead III is born inside, the first black child to be birthed in the white-only hospital where his maternal grandfather worked as its first and only black doctor. Dead’s birth inside Mercy occurs because of the insurance agent’s action, illustrating from the outset how one action sparks another in this tale. The insurance agent’s wish to “fly away on my own wings” will become central to the novel.

Called “Milkman” because his mother breastfeeds him longer than usual, Dead is born into a dysfunctional upper- middle-class black family in an all-black subsection of an unnamed Michigan city in 1931. Milkman’s father, Macon Dead II, owns much of the real estate in the working-class community where they live and, because of his presumed arrogance and self-imposed class distinction, has no friends. Milkman’s sisters (Magdalene, called Lena, and First Corinthians), raised to marry professionals of whom there are virtually none in this town, seem doomed to a life of unfulfilled aspirations. Milkman’s father does not speak to his sister, Pilate, even though they reside in the same town, and forbids his wife and children to have anything to do with that part of the family.

Babied by his mother, Ruth, and spoiled by his father, Milkman enters manhood still very much a boy. Drawn to the forbidden side of his family, he begins sleeping with his cousin, Hagar, while his aunt, Pilate, becomes the parent or guiding force he never had. Milkman’s father has taught him to value things; in contrast, Pilate

AFRICAN FOLKLORE

Africans have long believed that the spirits of the dead are tied to the land they inhabited in life and must be properly interred there. Throughout Africa, funerals have traditionally been important, elaborate events, the belief being that the spirits of the dead play “an important part in the life of the kinship group” (Franklin and Moss, p. 26), Family history and ancestry are considered vital to contemporary life. In fact, traditionalists have long thought of death as the climax of life and extensive rituals as “sacred obligations of the survivors” (Franklin and Moss, p. 26). In the novel, Pilate shows her respect for this custom by carrying a sack of human bones with her for years until, with the help of Milkman, she manages to properly bury them.

Africans also generally believed that their ancestors’ spirits dwelt on family land, in the ground, the trees, and rocks. In the novel, Milkman returns to his family’s southern homeland and uncovers the mythology of their—and his—life story. It seems, as in many African folktales about slaves, that his great-grandfather, Solomon, escaped slavery by flying away. His spirit now lives in a double-headed rock that looks like a bird, and his wife’s spirit lives in the gulch. When the wind blows, you can hear her crying, just as she did the day he flew away. As Milkman learns in the novel, these traditions and history are kept alive in African and African American culture orally. Always a key element of African societies, storytelling through words and music has been used to educate as well as entertain. ‘Handed down principally through the kinship group, the oral literature was composed of supernatural tales, moral tales, proverbs., epic poems, satires, love songs, funeral pieces, and comic tales” (Franklin and Moss, p. 28). In the novel, Milkman learns of his ancestry through the song the children sing in his southern home, the “Song of Solomon.” In a larger sense, the “Song of Solomon” is an education and passing on of cultural heritage not only of a particular story but of the African American experience as a whole, lust as her ancestors have done, Morrison is carrying on the African tradition of storytelling in order to enlighten and keep culture and history alive.

teaches him strength of character through her own example. She is a bootlegger who has raised her daughter and granddaughter on her own, cares nothing for material possessions, and has a reputation as someone with supernatural powers. Pilate retains earthly ties to the natural world that have been all but lost by others who have moved to the northern cities.

Although Milkman works a little, collecting rent for his father, he spends the majority of his time roaming the streets and idly passing the time with his friend and alter ego, Guitar. Though the civil rights movement and racial violence dominate the news, Milkman remains oblivious and apathetic. Guitar, however, is becoming increasingly involved in the movement. Milkman soon learns that his friend is one of the Seven Days, a covert radical group that advocates violent retribution against whites whenever blacks are attacked.

As Milkman matures, he becomes more curious about his origins. His parents tell him conflicting stories, as does Pilate, which only makes him more inquisitive. One day his father informs him that the source of conflict between himself and Pilate is a bag of gold he thinks she has stolen. Simultaneously Milkman learns that his friend is in trouble; Guitar must get a great sum of money for the Seven Days or risk being killed. Milkman thinks that a bag of bones Pilate keeps in her house is the gold his father spoke of and steals it to help Guitar. When it turns out that it is indeed a bag of bones and not gold, Milkman unwittingly begins the most important chapter of his life.

Journeying to the South in search of the gold he now thinks is there, Milkman retraces his family’s migration north and learns of his proud ancestry. Instead of finding gold, he finds riches he never imagined. In the town of Shalimar, he discovers what an amazing man his paternal grandfather was and that his great-grandfather is mythologized by the local population. Milkman slowly solves the riddle of the song he constantly hears the local children sing—the “Song of Solomon”:

 Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
 Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home

(Solomon, p. 303)

The song conveys the myth of Milkman’s great-grandfather, a slave who freed himself by flying back to Africa.

When he realizes that he has a proud heritage, Milkman’s entire outlook changes. In the short period of time he spends in the South, he matures more than in all of his previous years. He returns to Michigan to bring Pilate back to Shalimar so they can properly bury the bones he stole from her.

However, thinking that Milkman has found the gold and is keeping the news from him, Guitar tracks them down South. Just as Pilate predicts, she saves Milkman’s life, taking a bullet intended for him from Guitar. Coming full circle from his family’s and the novel’s beginning, Milkman leaps from a cliff toward Guitar in an effort to free them both. It does not matter, says the novel, which one will “give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother” (Solomon, p. 337). In a conclusion whose nuances are open to interpretation, Milkman at this point realizes he must embrace all facets of his history, his identity, and his fellow African Americans in order to procure any future. So like his great-grandfather, he surrenders to the air and it does not make a difference which of the two—Milkman or Guitar—lives or dies because in essence they both become free.

Reclaiming history

Through the character of Milkman, Song of Solomon illustrates the need for the black community to reclaim the history and traditions that have been lost or “whitewashed” in American society. The novel affirms a need in Morrison’s day for African Americans to forge their own identity, not in terms of the white majority, but in terms of African and African American history and tradition.

The Great Migration north of nearly 5 million African Americans from 1890 to 1950 once again uprooted blacks and placed them in a foreign and often hostile environment, just as slavery had done. Forced through brutality and economic necessity to relocate, this by-and-large rural population moved to the inner cities and took industrial jobs. In contrast to the individual responsibility and comparative freedom of farming, industrial employment meant punching a time clock, working on assembly lines and performing repetitive tasks. The rural landscape most had known and loved was replaced by pavement and factories; gardens by tenements and housing projects. Extended families, part and parcel of rural life, became harder to maintain in the confines of the city. And old gathering spots, such as a country store or someone’s porch, which had been sites of nightly storytelling and merrymaking, were gone.

Though the North offered greater opportunity and clear economic and educational advantages, this second loss of homeland had devastating social effects—especially to the maintenance of African and African American history and tradition. The nightly storytelling, or “lying sessions,” as Zora Neale Hurston called them, had kept cultural heritage alive for centuries. Part of African oral tradition, storytelling was how family histories, folklore, and myths were passed on and preserved, how the individual, to a large degree, attained a sense of self. In the bustle of city life and dispersion of family and friends to various cities and jobs, these stories and hence, the sense of self in relation to one’s past, and of pride in that past, often disappeared. First the ethnic group lost its home in Africa, then it suffered a second loss of the home it made for itself in the American South.

The novel illustrates what this second loss entails and how badly it can affect contemporary youth. Milkman knows nothing of his heritage because in the city it is lost. His parents have been caught up in the drive for assimilation. The lack of a sense of lineage contributes to his aimlessness and feeling of futility about life. He is amazed when he visits his southern homeland and hears the old men talk about his father and grandfather as “extraordinary men” (Solomon, p. 234). “The more the old men talked—the more he heard about the only farm in the county that grew peaches, real peaches like they had in Georgia, the feasts they had when hunting was over, the pork kills in winter and the work, the backbreaking work of a going farm—the more he missed something in his life” (Solomon, p. 234). For the first time Milkman takes pride in himself and acquires a sense of identity and purpose in life. “There was something he felt now—here in Shalimar, and earlier in Danville—that reminded him of how he felt in Pilate’s house … he didn’t have to get over, to turn on, or up, or even out” (Solomon, p. 293). He felt connected and alive, as if he finally belonged.

According to psychologist and art dealer George N’Namdi, “The anchor for any people, for any civilization, is its culture, is its art, is its history” (N’Namdi in Dent, p. 226). Song of Solomon shows how the black community has lost this “anchor” through forced migrations and stresses the importance of finding it again for the self-esteem and success of current and future generations. “If you’re not the protector of your culture, someone else other than yourself controls your culture, and they really control you. … They end up defining you” (N’Namdi in Dent, p. 226). Making this very point, Song of Solomon, by affirming the value of the Southern heritage, itself drops anchor and reclaims control over black identity.

Sources and literary context

The issue of reconnecting with the Southern roots of black culture remained an important cultural and artistic concern for African American artists, poets, and novelists throughout the twentieth century. While novels of the 1920s (such as Jean Toomer’s Cane[1923]), began to examine the Southern rural heritage, later works concentrated on the relocated Southerners and their struggles with the more subtle racism of northern cities. In the 1970s, black authors began to refocus their attention on the question of African American culture and the origins of a common black American experience during slavery, and on the African heritage that preceded it. Helping to touch off widespread interest in African American genealogy, Alex Haley released the memoir Roots (1976), which recounted seven generations in Haley’s search for his slave forebears and their origins. Published the following year, Song of Solomon participates in and encourages this search of roots. The novel actually incorporates a successful finding of the author’s own personal search. Morrison notes that the genealogical song Milkman learns in the novel is a version of a song from the Alabama wing of her family (Jones and Vinson in Taylor-Guthrie, pp. 173-74). The year 1977 also saw the release of international books like Charles L. Blockson’s Black Genealogy. In the same year the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society was founded to promote scholarship of black history and genealogy.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Disillusionment and backlash, 1970s

While great strides had been made to increase the rights and opportunities of African Americans through the 1960s, by the end of the decade there was growing disillusionment within the black community. The view surfaced—especially among black youth—that the civil rights movement had failed. Because leaders such as Dr. King and groups such as the NAACP pursued legal remedies to racial injustices, many urban social ills went unaddressed or worsened. “The masses of Negroes are now starkly aware that the recent civil rights victories benefited primarily a very small percentage of middle class Negroes while their predicament remained the same or worsened” (Kenneth Clark in Franklin and Moss, p. 554). By the end of the 1970s—despite desegregation of the schools and affirmative action programs—just 15 percent of blacks had jobs in the medical and other professions or held managerial positions. The vast majority—85 percent of those employed—held service, unskilled, or skilled labor positions. At the same time, the unemployment rate remained high, averaging 15 percent for black adults, compared to 6 percent for whites, and 36 percent for black youth (aged 16 to 19) compared to about 14 percent for white youth (Ploski and Williams, p. 634-35). By 1970 nearly one third of all blacks labored under the poverty line, earning less than $3,968 per year for a family of four.

Gains for the few, tensions for the many

Because of increased educational and professional opportunities, a rising number of African Americans entered the upper and middle classes, reaching 32 percent by 1970. However, the number of welfare recipients also increased during this time period, to nearly 3 million by 1972. Rather than producing substantive economic and professional opportunities, early civil rights legislation produced “massive tokenism”—that is, a few blacks were placed in high-profile, widely-publicized positions, while “more than 80 percent worked at the bottom of the economic ladder” (Franklin and Moss, p. 545). “Between 1949 and 1964 the relative participation of African Americans in the total economic life of the nation declined significantly” (Franklin and Moss, p. 545). Unemployment in 1963, for example, was more than twice that of whites.

For those who did land managerial, professional, or corporate jobs, race-based wage discrimination quickly surfaced. For example, the average pay for a black person with eight years of education was $4,472 in 1969 as compared to $7,018 for a comparable white. As evidenced in the novel, disparity of wealth within the black community widened as unemployment increased, leading to rifts not only between blacks and whites but also between upper-and lower-class blacks. In the novel, the Deads are ostracized inside and outside their hometown. Outside, they face race prejudice, as when Macon Dead II cannot purchase certain tracts of land in white neighborhoods; inside, their social position prevents their daughters from finding husbands.

Black Power

As the economic plight worsened, racial tensions heightened. Riots again erupted. Disillusioned by the failure of legislation to improve living and working conditions and feeling under-represented in government, blacks again took to the streets—this time forcefully. The year of 1970 “was marked by violence, militant campaigns, racial tensions, and new movements demanding social justice” (Kelley and Lewis, p. 544). Riots erupted in major cities across the country as groups such as the Black Panther party, the Republik of New Africa, the National Committee to Combat Fascism, and the Black Liberation Front gained strength. These groups voiced the outrage and impatience of contemporary black youth, intent on challenging the white-dominated governments and institutions that seemed deaf to so many black concerns. In the novel, the Seven Days are an extreme example of the Black Power branch. When the four girls are killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church, Guitar indicates that his group, the Seven Days, will kill four whites, any four whites. An eye for an eye, says Guitar by way of explanation to Milkman, who is questioning how the group could justify randomly killing four whites:

It doesn’t matter who did it. Each and every one of them could do it. So you just get any one of them. There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one.
(Solomon, p. 155)

Most African Americans did not advocate all-out or random violence such as this. Past leaders had advocated various, nonviolent paths to address the inequities of life for blacks. Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute (1881) to train blacks with skills that would enable their full participation in American society. Led by W. E. B. Dubois, early-twentieth-century radicals began the Niagara Movement (1905) to mount aggressive (nonviolent) action to end discrimination and achieve other urgent goals. A third leader, Marcus Garvey, did much to transform the group’s self-image, insisting that black stood not for “inferior,” but for “beautiful and strong.” Garvey bolstered the black sense of community, as well as pride, developing the Black Star Steamship Line (c. 1920) to promote commerce among peoples of African descent worldwide and to provide transportation for those who wanted to leave the United States. Four decades later Stokely Carmichael, a former SNCC leader, echoed some of these leaders’ ideas and added others, calling on black people to “unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community” (Hamilton in Blumberg, p. 117). Along with Charles V. Hamilton, Carmichael wrote the manifesto of the Black Power movement (1967), outlining its ideas: blacks needed to practice self-defense, define their own goals, lead their own organizations, and support each other instead of depending on whites.

Black pride

But the new Black Power movement was not just militant; it had a socio-political agenda. It aimed to restore black pride and have blacks exert control “in all areas where black people are in the majority, and for a proportional share of key decision-making posts where they are in the minority” (Carmichael in McElroy, p. 48). Many participants in the movement rejected their slave names and adopted African names; they abandoned the racial designation of “Negro” and replaced it with “black” or “African American.” As Carmichael wrote, “Black power is a black declaration of independence. It is a turn inward, a rallying cry for a people in the sudden labor of self-discovery, self naming, and self legitimisation” (Carmichael in McElroy, p. 48). A new sense of race pride permeated popular culture; “black is beautiful” became a catch phrase and both black and white youth donned traditional African dress and revived cultural art forms.

On the academic level, the new Black Power movement demanded control over community programs and schools—specifically calling for black studies programs to be implemented in public schools and universities. “As far as African Americans were concerned, the black pride that a reorganized curriculum could stimulate would compensate for the disillusionment and despair that years of frustration and embitterment had produced” (Franklin and Moss, p. 555). Written during the peak of this movement, Song of Solomon shows the clear correlation between the acknowledgment of a people’s historical and cultural achievements and their success in garnering respect and pride. In the novel, Milkman’s journey is an illustration of the process of self-discovery Carmichael talks about and shows that contemporary black youth—who are clearly in jeopardy in this era—can be liberated if respect is paid to their culture.

Fear and misunderstanding

Unfortunately, Black Power for many—especially conservative whites—inspired fear and misunderstanding. Black demands for “land, power, and freedom” frightened many whites, even those who had been involved in the civil rights movement (Kelley and Lewis, p. 519). The riots, such as the 1967 rebellion in Detroit—which resulted in 43 deaths, 2,000 wounded, and the destruction of 5,000 homes—worried not only the government but also many liberal citizens. They “saw chaos and feared true anarchy” (Kelley and Lewis, p. 532). The FBI and local police “declared war” on Black Power groups—especially the Black Panthers. Eight Black Panthers were killed by police in 1968; the infiltration and destruction of black organizations and wire tapping of leaders’ phones became policy. “One of [Richard] Nixon’s campaign promises was to get rid of ‘trouble-makers’” and his arch-conservative administration did its best to do so, as well as dismantle President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty social welfare programs. (Kelly and Lewis, p. 545). Nixon’s re-election in 1972 signified an “anti-black backlash” and white middle-class resentment to government “handouts” to African Americans. Nixon supporters believed that, since civil rights legislation had been passed, racism no longer existed. Aversion to busing, the courtmandated solution for school desegregation, contributed heavily to the backlash as well. Again, even liberal whites opposed sending their kids to school outside their communities. It seemed that theoretical civil rights were easier to swallow than practical solutions.

Despite—or perhaps, in spite of—Nixon’s election and the backlash against blacks, the Black Power movement evolved once again. The National Black Political Assembly held its first convention in 1972 and Shirley Chisholm became the first black person and woman to run for president (1972). Rather than be held back in the white-dominated business world or be represented by whites, blacks concentrated on forming their own businesses and on gaining seats in all areas of government. But the country experienced an economic decline and an energy crisis in the mid-1970s, felt intensely in the devastated, already-ailing inner cities. Changes in the world economy prompted massive unemployment, leading to “an expansion of poverty among African Americans not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s” (Kelley and Lewis, p. 559). While all Americans suffered, the poor African American community felt the brunt of the recession. It is said, in fact, that the inner cities have never recovered from the recession of the 1970s and the troubles the novel alludes to for urban black youth have only worsened. Between 1975 and 1980 the number of unemployed blacks rose by 200,000 while it decreased by over 500,000 for whites, producing the widest unemployment gap between the races ever recorded.

Reception

Having achieved notable critical and popular success with The Bluest Eye and Sula, Morrison enjoyed a dramatic rise in reputation with the publication of Song of Solomon. Reviews generally credited the novel with elevating her literary standing. They concentrated particularly on Morrison’s pre-eminence as a storyteller and on the connection between elements of her writing and Latin American “Magic Realism” (although Morrison herself has downplayed this connection). In the New York Times Book Review, Reynolds Price praised Song of Solomon’s largeness of scope and escape from realist limitations, calling it a “wise and spacious novel” (Price, p. 1). The New Yorker’s Susan Lardner focused on the oral elements in the novel, connecting its theme of flight with the soaring quality of its narrative style. In 1978 Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics Circle award. Morrison did not yet achieve with this novel the popular reach she would attain with the publication of Beloved (1987). But Song of Solomon established her as both a major American literary figure and an authority on African American culture and writing.

—Diane Renée