Jean Cahn

Tracking the Initiation Stories of Antonio and Milkman

Initiation stories are stories that tell of the inner changes that take place in a character because of outer world experiences. Lyman A. Baker gives a good description of initiation stories on his website at Kansas State University. He relates that the whole story is geared to take a protagonist through experiences that cause him to reorganize his sense of self. Initiation stories usually involve a loss of innocence. A person becomes educated in the ways of the world around him, and this changes his sense of who he is within it. Sometimes a loss of innocence backfires, and instead of growing larger in his inner world, the protagonist retreats into a smaller world; yet this, too, is considered the inner change necessary to fulfill the definition of an initiation story. There are no age limits. Although initiation stories are usually of children moving into adolescence, people can make dynamic inner changes at any age. These changes can be evoked by several different events that cause gradual growth in the protagonist, or they can take place in a flash of insight called an epiphany. This basic description is true for either male or female (Baker http://www.k-state.edu).

There is a special purpose in the initiation of a boy. The object of a boy’s journey of initiation is to carry him from his mother’s world to his father’s—from boyhood to manhood. According to Robert A. Johnson, in his book He, “there are potentially three stages of psychological development for a man” (10). “One moves from [stage one] an innocent wholeness, in which the inner world and the outer world are united, to [stage two] a separation and differentiation between the inner and outer worlds with an accompanying sense of life’s duality, and then, hopefully, at last to … [stage three] enlightenment, a conscious reconciliation of the inner and outer once again in harmonious wholeness” (10-11). The move from stage one to stage two could be described as leaving the Garden of Eden, a world of wholeness and perfection to a world of alienation and dualities. Some event precipitates the boy’s wound. It may be that he suffers an injustice, an insult to his masculinity, or perhaps he stumbles into a truth for which he is not ready. During this period of alienation, a boy or man needs a lot of time to ponder his situation. The thing that will take him to stage three, according to Johnson, is a “young, innocent, adolescent, foolish part of himself” (14). This essay will explore Antonio’s life in Bless Me Ultima, by Rudolfo A. Anaya and Milkman’s life in Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon to see how much of the pattern each follows.

In the beginning of Bless Me Ultima, Antonio Márez is almost seven and one with his world. He is in stage one: innocence. Antonio describes his feelings when the curandera, Ultima, comes to live with them: “[T]he beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood” (1). Ultima takes him with her to gather the plants she uses in her cures. She teaches him to recognize each one and to tell the plant why they are digging it up. Antonio trusts his sense of goodness in her.

Antonio has not yet begun school where he will learn to speak English. Now, he is still speaking his mother-tongue, Spanish. When he thinks of leaving his mother for school, his heart sinks (6). This shows Antonio is still a child attached to his mother. At this time, Antonio is at one with his inner and outer worlds. Although there are dualities in his life, they are not problems as yet. Raymond J. Rodrigues mentions these dualities as conflicts in his review of Bless Me Ultima in The English Journal: “the differing backgrounds of his parents, the forces of evil vs. those of good, the encroachment of the outside world upon the life of a rural community, organized religion vs. individual beliefs, the dreams of the old vs. the dreams of the young, and Antonio’s seeing the world as a beautiful place, yet filled with horrors.” All of these things will be part of Antonio’s struggles in stage two of his development.

His first dream shows the conflict is beginning. He dreams about the day he is born and how Ultima puts the afterbirth aside by the Virgin Mary. Then, his mother’s side of the family, the farmers, comes with produce from their farms. They rub soil on Antonio’s forehead to show he would live off the soil. Then, the Márez brothers, the riders of the llano, come and rub the soil away, and their horses trample the produce the Luna farmers had brought. They want to burn the afterbirth and scatter it over the llano to ensure that Antonio will become a vaquero in the Márez tradition. Ultima finally lays claim to the afterbirth to bury and informs all that only she would know Antonio’s destiny. Antonio asks his mother if all these people (from his dream) were present at his birth. Her confirmation assures him that his dream is true, but knowing this also gives him a sick feeling. His parents’ different wishes for him had not been a problem before, but now they come as full-fledged conflicts in his dream. On his mother’s suggestion that he might become a priest, he asks under his breath, “But then, who will hear my confession” (8)? Sensing this question would open too many more, Antonio feels the need to run. His entry into stage two, the world of conflicting ideas, has begun.

The big wound in Antonio’s life is seeing a man die. Before he has even started school, Antonio sneaks out of the house at night and heads for the river when his father goes down to the bridge where an angry mob from town wants the blood of Lupito. He had killed the sheriff when Lupito’s war torn mind convinced him that the sheriff was the enemy. Antonio witnesses the angry mob, the wild, animal eyes of Lupito, the shooting, and finally the death of Lupito in the wet sandbank of the river. Of the night, Antonio says, “The horror of darkness had never been so complete as it was for me that night” (20). Running home, branches catch his face, tree trunks catch his feet, and the wings of disturbed birds slap his face. He does not realize he is sobbing until he reaches the hill to his home. He prayed his Catholic prayers through the whole event, yet he does not relax until he realizes Ultima’s owl has been with him the entire time. At home in Ultima’s arms he is able to ask questions. “Will [Lupito] go to hell?” Ultima’s answer teaches Antonio not to judge: “That is not for us to say, Antonio” (22). Then his concern turned to his father and the men on the bridge. Ultima’s response was, “Men will do what they must do,” and “The ways of men are strange, and hard to learn (22). Assured that he would learn the ways, Antonio falls asleep under the influence of Ultima’s herbal drink.

Antonio’s mother thinks it is a sin for a boy to grow into a man. She hates to see the purity of the boy destroyed by manhood, but Antonio’s father gets angry and tells her “It is no sin, only a fact of life.” In addition, he tells her “It does not destroy, it builds up. Everything he sees and does makes him a man” (28). Overhearing this conversation, Antonio immediately thinks, “I saw Lupito murdered. I saw the men—” (28). Continuing to hold his wife in check, Gabriel tells her, “It is not the priest who will decide [if the boy should be a priest] but Tony himself” (29)! Overhearing this conversation gives Antonio permission and encouragement to make his own decisions. In Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 39, Number 3&4, Fall/Winter, 1993, Linda Krumholz quotes James Baldwin: “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is back or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions is the way he achieves his own identity” (1). Antonio is learning in just this way. He asks many questions about God and religion that go unanswered, and he lives with these questions.

One of his questions comes when he is getting a blessing from Ultima before he goes off to school the first day. She prays “En el nombre del Padre, del hijo, y el Espiritu Santo,” yet Antonio feels the sensation of a whirlwind around him. To Antonio, the whirlwind is a dirt devil. He had always been told to make the cross with his thumb and forefinger to keep its evil away. Once he did not, and it knocked him off his feet. Remembering this feeling of an evil imprint on his soul when the wind of the dirt devil seemed to say his name, he nearly fainted. Then his mother asked him if he was all right. That is when Antonio asks himself a big question: “How could the blessing of Ultima be like the whirlwind? Was the power of good and evil the same” (52)?

On the playground at school, Antonio encounters more ideas about God.  Besides the rote learning of some who take lessons from the Catholic priest, there is Florence, who does not believe in God, Red, who is a Protestant, and Cico, who believes in the golden carp as a god. The Catholics and Protestants taunt each other about their conflicting views. Florence is looking for “a God of beauty, a god of here and now … a god who does not punish” (228). Cico tries to persuade Antonio to forsake Christ and take the golden carp for his god. Antonio does not do this, but he experiences the presence of golden carp just as he had previously experenced the presence in the river. He struggles with the guilt of believing in more than what the church teaches.

Cico tells Antonio the legend that when the sins of men are too heavy, their city will sink into the lake below. Antonio, protests that that would not be fair to those men who had not sinned, and Cico gently informs him that all men sin (111). When Antonio asks Ultima if he should believe the legend, she says she cannot tell him what to believe, that he must find his own truths as he grows into manhood. Again, Antonio gets the message that it is he who must decide.

That night, Antonio dreams of a cosmic struggle between two forces. It is essentially the struggle between his parents for his life. His father says Antonio has the salt water of the ocean running through his veins and his mother says he has the holy water of the moon. In the dream, the struggle creates a great storm that expresses the clash of the opposites within Antonio. In the dream, Ultima calms the storm and educates Antonio and his parents. She tells them, “the sweet water of the moon which falls as rain is the same water that gathers into rivers and flows to fill the seas. Without the waters of the moon to replenish the oceans there would be no oceans. And the same salt waters of the oceans are drawn by the sun to the heavens, and in turn become again the waters of the moon.” Continuing, she tells him, “The waters are one, Antonio.” In his dream, he “looked into her bright, clear eyes and understood the truth” (113). Once more, Ultima speaks, “You have been seeing only parts…and not looking beyond into the great cycle that binds us all” (113). After that, Antonio is able to sleep peacefully. With Ultima’s help he is able to come to a sense of unity with all things. He has arrived at stage three. It does not appear that a young and foolish part of himself has brought him to stage three, but a dream that takes him there; still, Antonio is young, so he does not have to get there by another means as a grown man might need to do.

Reminded that there are no age limits to making dynamic changes in one’s inner world, this essay now turns to 31 year old protagonist, Milkman, of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Most initiation stories begin in a state of innocence, stage one, when a person is one with his world. One line in the story reveals that Milkman may still be in that youthful condition: “Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own” (75). In addition, he still lives at home with his parents and works for his father. He is still under their wings, so to speak. In agreement, Catherine Carr Lee, in her essay “The South in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Initiation, Healing, and Home,” writes “Milkman is indeed naïve about himself, his family, and his community” (110). He is unconcerned with the needs of the people around him.

Some would say that Milkman’s initiation story begins in a state of alienation. This would be stage two. His family name is “Dead,” and their spirituality and relationships are dead. “Milkman’s family … lost its ancestral name … at the cost of intimacy and identity” (Lee, 111). It was not until Milkman heard his father talk about his own father in a relaxed way that he felt a little intimacy with him. In this conversation he learns that their family name was lost through the carelessness of a drunken clerk working for the Freedman’s Bureau where freed slaves were required to register. The fact that Milkman had not even known that his grandfather had been a slave shows the lack of relationship with his family and the world. Actually, Milkman “wanted to know as little as possible, to feel only enough to get through the day amiably” (180). This shows how unattached Milkman is and wants to be.

Guitar is a longtime acquaintance of Milkman. He was educated in the natural world when he hunted in the woods of Florida throughout his childhood and is very attuned to what goes on around him. “Such sensory attunement and the loss of his father in a gruesome saw mill accident render him environmentally and politically aware in contrast to the dull and apathetic protagonist” writes Jennifer Terry in “Buried Perspectives: Narratives of landscape in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” (105).  In this story Guitar functions as “teacher as well as enemy” (Lee, 114). Guitar often tells Milkman where he falls short in understanding himself and his world. He does not hesitate to tell Milkman he thinks Milkman’s life is pointless (107). Because Guitar thinks Milkman is trying to cheat him out of his share of the gold they were searching for, he attempts to kill him.

The “gold” they are planning to steal, they think, hangs in the green tarpaulin from the ceiling in Milkman’s aunt’s shack in the woods. This aunt is Milkman’s father’s sister, Pilate. Milkman had previously been warned to stay away from her, that she is a snake; but, after Macon Jr. hears Milkman talk about the green tarpaulin, he tells Milkman the story of the cave and urges Milkman to “Get the gold” (173).

The story of the cave is that when Macon Jr. and Pilate were children hidden away by Circe, maid of the Butler family who murders Macon Sr. and steals his land, they get tired of the hidden life and just take off. They come across a man by a cave. When they come close he disappears. Exploring the cave, they find the green tarpaulin covering boards that cover little sacks of gold. When the old man shows up again, Macon Jr. kills him with his knife. Macon Jr. says they should take the gold and run. Pilate says they should not because they would be thought to have killed the man for his gold. In the end Pilate stands her ground with Macon’s knife in the cave. Macon walks away, and brother and sister remain alienated.

Pilate heads across the country looking for her people. What she remembers is that her mother or papa was from Virginia. The first place she finds is with a preacher’s family.  They take her in and send her to school where she discovers geography and loves it. When she has to leave because of the preacher’s inappropriate attentions, she takes up with some migrant workers and goes all over the eastern United States collecting rocks from every place she goes. On a little island just off the coast of Virginia, she finds love and community with “a colony of Negro farmers,” but knows it will end when the people discover she has no navel (146). She is afraid to marry the man who gave her a baby. When her baby, Reba, is two, Pilate takes off for a twenty year wandering spree. Finally, she decides to settle down when Reba gets pregnant and make a home for her daughter and granddaughter. Her experiences allow her to develop into a strong person.

Pilate learns to know herself and her world. She is able to decide for herself how to live. People are frightened because they think she is not human for lack of a navel, but they respect her because she has compassion and respects their privacy. Pilate is also able to see visitations from her dead father who comes in visions from time to give her advice. She chooses a little shack on the edge of the woods for her living place and makes beer and wine to make a living. Close to nature and wizened like Ultima, she is able to be a help to Milkman. “It is her influence and oral legacy that allow Milkman to transform his journey into one of reconnection with, rather than divorce from, his ancestry” (Terry 112-113). The song Pilate sings about Sugarman is the same song Milkman hears the children sing in Shalimar. Decoding that song enables him to discover his family roots.

 Milkman’s quest is not for family roots, selfhood, or identity. What he wants is gold. This quest takes him by plane to Pittsburg where he discovers he must take a bus to get to Danville. The trip bores him. All of the scenery looks the same. This shows Milkman’s lack of relationship to nature. In Danville, the only Negro man on the street directs him to Reverend Cooper’s house. After several days’ stay and visit with the Reverend Mr. Cooper and other old men who remember his father, Milkman finally gets to head out to find Circe’s place. What he gets first is an encounter with the natural world. After he is dropped off, he still has to make his way over a stony road overgrown with weeds. His hat is knocked off by the tree branches, and his pant legs get wet from the leaves. Later, having found Circe alive, he follows her directions to the cave. Along the way, he finds himself shoeless in a creek with slimy stones. The clothes from his city world are getting messed up, as he clashes with the natural world. His search for the gold goes unsatisfied. Again, in Shalimar, Milkman finds that his sense of the world and what is actually there do not match. In stage two, the inner world and outer world are not attuned. His car breaks down in front of Solomon’s General Store. Mr. Soloman seems offended having to ask again if Milkman wants him to see about the car for him (262). When Milkman mentions “pretty women,” the men seem shocked, and hostile. Milkman does not understand but senses something is wrong—even Mr. Soloman clams up. When Milkman says he might have to buy another car, all heads turn toward him. They think he is bragging about his money and shaming them. Then the taunting starts, and a fight breaks out. Milkman had not realized how insulting he was when did not ask to know their names nor tell his. To them he was flaunting his richness and making them feel small and worthless.

Inside the store, the young Negros attack him, and he breaks a bottle for a weapon to protect himself. After the fight in the store, the older men on the porch consider taking on Milkman and beating him in a different way. One asks him if he is as good with a gun as he is with a bottle. He lies and says he’s the best there is (268). Milkman has, in fact, never handled a firearm (270). He is invited to go on a hunt. Going hunting with men who have shown you hostility qualifies as a foolish act. This is good because it is exactly a “young, innocent, adolescent, foolish part of himself” that will take him to stage three, a state of enlightenment (Johnson 14).

Having met at King Walker’s station, the men outfit Milkman with “mud-caked brogans,” dress him in “World War II army fatigues,” and top him with a knit cap (271). His city self is being “redressed.” Then King Walker hands him a Winchester .22. While they are driving to the hunting site, Milkman sees a set of headlights in the darkness behind them. He wonders if another group is going to join them. When they arrive, the woods are pitch black. Small Boy lets the dogs out of the trunk, but they stay quiet, only panting and eager to run. Luther is excited that the dog, Becky, is with them. She is a good hunter. Omar and Small Boy unload the equipment. Now all these men have names. Milkman’s final preparation is to take the flashlight and go with Calvin, the most congenial of the bunch.

The men have a sense of communication with the land and the dogs. Later, it dawns on Milkman that “the men and the dogs [are] talking to each other,” not just signaling (277). Along the way through the woods, Milkman figures out “how to pick up this feet and miss the roots and stones; to distinguish a tree from a shadow, and to keep his head down and away from the branches that [sweep] back from Calvin’s hand into his face” (273). When Calvin hears a whistle in the wind, he knows the others have found a bobcat and starts double-timing it through the woods with Milkman right behind him. Finally, Milkman becomes exhausted after what seems like miles and hours later, and he stops to rest. Now he is alone with his “breath…and his thoughts” (277). It occurs to Milkman that he is damaged in some way—“like Rev. Cooper’s knot, like Saul’s missing teeth, and like his own father,” and he feels a “rush of affection” for them (278). Milkman is making changes that outfit him for stage three. Sitting in the cradle of the roots of a sweet gum tree, Milkman tries to listen to the earth himself.

Milkman’s senses peak just in time to catch the wire that Guitar is about to wrap around his neck. But he lets go from the cutting pain. Then the wire cuts into his neck, and he is sad that he will die. Colored lights dance before his eyes and he senses Hagar with her abundant love bending over him. Giving in to death, Milkman’s muscles relax and enable him to take another breath for life. With that, he grabs his shotgun and shoots into the woods. Soon the dogs come running and barking at a treed bobcat and Guitar takes off running.

Milkman is so happy to be alive he lets the men rib him about dropping his gun. Milkman laughs hard at himself, too, “and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil and were comfortable there” (281). Now, Milkman is at one with his world again. He has achieved the enlightenment of Johnson’s stage three. He is sensitive to other people’s feelings. Back at King Walker’s gas station he is asked, “Don’t you city boys know how to handle yourself” (281)? Milkman answers “You country niggers got it all over us” (281). He builds them up rather than ignorantly making them feel worthless as he did before.

Both Antonio and Milkman pass through the three stages described by Johnson. Antonio’s was more classic because it began in childhood. In stage one, Antonio is a well-loved child. He has a home, and he knows the world around him. He has a sense of belonging. Milkman’s childhood was extended into adulthood because of the deadness of his family and the lack of emotional attachment. Antonio was a loved child and he was engaged with the natural world. Part of his job was to feed the animals. This gave him a sense of responsibility that Milkman did not have. Milkman man did not want attachments. He just wanted to get by without any effort. Milkman seems to be living stage one and stage two at the same time. He is childlike because he is taken care of and has not developed a responsibility toward his family and community; yet, when we meet him, he is basically alienated, a sign of stage two. Antonio has the premature wound of seeing a man die that takes him into stage two. Milkman is wounded by a loveless family.

In stage two, Antonio struggles with religious questions, and he has to consider different types of belief. Milkman does not make the effort. His search is for gold. He only accidentally discovers family and meaning and responsibility along the way.

In stage three, Antonio becomes at peace with himself when in a dream he is guided to the knowledge that the world is one. The waters of the moon are the same as the waters of the ocean, Ultima counsels. Milkman comes to peace with his world with a near-death experience when Guitar tries to kill him. His first wound was being born into an emotionally dead family. Then he gets a real wound when his friend tries to kill him. With that, he seems to whiz from stage one-two to stage three. He is happy to be alive and he realizes how selfish he has been with Hagar.

Both Antonio and Milkman had wise earthy women to guide them. Antonio had Ultima, and Milkman had his Aunt Pilate. Both women were in touch with their instincts and had a strong sense of who they were. Both respected their dreams. Both were from cultures out of the white mainstream.

Both had other men to guide them on their journeys. Antonio’s father understood that Antonio needed to be away from his mother and spend time with men, so he was sent to be with his uncles for a while. Milkman needed to be with men, too. Being around the hunters, he was able to consider his own woundedness.

In one way or another boys become men. If they are thoughtfully guided, their efforts may be easier than harder. Observation shows three stages and it seems to be true across cultures. Both Antonio and Milkman were able to navigate the three-stage path—each in his own way.

Works Cited

Baker, Lyman A. “Initiation Story.” 2001. <http://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english287/cc-initiation_story.htm>

Johnson, Robert A. He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Kanzoa Theresa M. “The Golden Carp and Moby Dick: Rudolfo Anaya’s Multi-Culturalism.” MELUS 24.2 (1999): 159-171.

Krumholz, Linda. “Dead Teachers: Rituals of Manhood and Rituals of Reading in Son of Solomon.” Modern Fiction Studies, 39.3&4 (1993): 1-9. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v039/39.3-…10/16/2012>

Lee, Catherine Carr. “The South in Toni Morrison’s song of Solomon: Initiation, Healing, and Home.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 31.2 (1998): 109-123. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Oct. 2012.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage International, 2004.

Rodrigues, Raymond J. “Bless Me, Ultima.” The English Journal, 65.1 (1976): 63-64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/814705. Web. 10 June 2012

Terry, Jennifer. “Buried Perspectives: Narratives of Landscape in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Narrative Inquiry 17.1 (2007): 93-118.