LITR 5731: Seminar in
American Minority Literature
Student Research Project
Nicole Jackson
12/02/2004
Locating the
African Fugitive: Economies of Suffering, Mythologies, and Escapism in Toni
Morrison’s Song of Solomon
“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial
object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers
and imaginers; from the serving to the served.”—Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a critical novel that weaves a complex tale of loss and survival while illuminating the fragile social fabric in America. And even though this novel critically examines the conflation of culture and race, its power lies in Morrison’s ability to explore the complexities of representing the slippages of race, class, and gender in American literature. Still, Song of Solomon is so much more than a protest or blaxploitation (appropriating ghetto slang, commoditizing blackness, and depicting sexualized female characters) novel. Instead it is a larger cultural critique in which Toni Morrison uses historical, political, and social contexts to create a narrative space of depth and profound magnitude. This middle ground—devoid of racial or gender essentialisms—challenges the American imagination, as Toni Morrison emphasizes those ways in which liberal and conservative paradigms have inefficiently remedied or curtailed problematic race relations in America. And so in a post-colonial, post-slavery, post-colorblind, and post-affirmative action society, Morrison employs facets of critical race theory as a means of encouraging the reader to seriously critique the often overlooked sites of racial domination.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is emphasized in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Morrison insists that there is no way to discuss the politics of identity in African American literature without discussing the financial system of slavery. There is no way to explore mythologies without discussing coping mechanisms and escapism, as such myths made life more bearable for slaves. And there is no way to discuss suicide without discussing a lack of agency or empowerment.
According to legal scholars and critical race theorists Kimberle Crenshaw and Gary Peller’s essay “Reel Time/Real Justice,” critical race theory focuses “more broadly on a consideration of how racial power generally is produced, mediated, and legitimated” (57). Essentially, Crenshaw and Peller state that racial power in America is maintained because Americans do not fully explore the spaces in which this power is created and passed on to others (media, economic and social policy, or between groups who have internalized oppression). By using components of critical race theory, Morrison attests to the interconnectedness of racial domination and unchallenged sites of production that reify social positioning of powerful white Americans and the powerless African, Asian, Latino, or Native American. And these conceptualizations of power (powerful/powerless, dominate/subordinate, us/them) are contextualized in the United States Constitution. Course objective 1—“To define the “minority concept" as a power relationship modeled by some ethnic groups’ historical relation to the dominant American culture”—explains that white-black power paradigms were institutionalized during slavery. Even as the Declaration of Independence of the United States Constitution insists that “all men are created equal…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” whiteness was defined as human; blackness was discussed as property without being agreed upon as being human.
Sadly, in the 21st century, Americans are
still quibbling with this invisible yet invincible issue.
As a result, the multiple constructions of blackness and whiteness are as
much a part of the American identity as baseball and apple pie.
Yet, it is this power structure that Toni Morrison signifies as a means
of suggesting something deeper in the text.
That something deeper has to be summed in one virulent question: What is
whiteness that blackness is not? The
course’s tabular summary suggests that whiteness is a dominant status while
blackness is a minority status. Whiteness
presupposes voluntary immigration and participation; blackness implies forced
migration and resistance of the American Dream.
In short, whiteness indicates a real American.
Blackness does not. In a
collection of Morrison’s critical essays entitled Playing In the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison explains the irony of
this peculiar Africanist specter. She
states, “Through significant and underscored omissions, startling
contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their
work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or
fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to this sense of Americanness” (6).
Ironically however, this Africanist presence is treated as an uninvited
cultural display as well as a node used to authenticate the European presence.
Furthermore, difference does not exist without the proverbial other, so
white is not white until black enters the equation.
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is constructed
around a fluid motif of this concept of the real American.
In so doing, Morrison exposes the nationless “Africanist presence” in
search of a home and a political identity.
Further, she utilizes an economy of suffering, mythologies, and the acts
of suicide and/or escapism to render a novel that sparks discourse centered on
national race relations and the soft sites of racial domination.
Sites
of Racial Domination: Economic Depression and Disenfranchisement
Perhaps the most telltale sign of familial and community dysfunction in Song of Solomon occurs on the very first page in which the “North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior” while the “unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young” were spectators (3). These spectators were not agents. They did not attempt to intervene on Mr. Smith’s behalf. In fact, these spectators seemed listless. They were voiceless in reacting to Mr. Smith’s suicide. And these individuals were, according to people’s historian Howard Zinn, choiceless inasmuch as their various economic positions were affected by the “stock market crash…that came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it” (377).
Still, while many literary critics are able to discuss the insurance agent’s suicide as an anomaly, they seem to miss the subtler provocations of social control. Morrison suggests a clear-cut site of racial domination: Not Doctor Street. Morrison clarifies, “Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street…his patients took to calling that street Doctors Street” (4). Conversely, “when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal service became a popular means of transferring messages among them, envelopes…began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street…The post office workers returned these letters or passed them on to Dead Letter Office” (4). Toni Morrison alludes to a lack of power, which is based on racial perceptions. First, since America is stratified by economic classes, the African Americans who lived near the colored doctor must have shared a middle class constituency; therefore, no African American (regardless of economic viability) is immune to negative racialized perceptions or acts of discrimination. Also, Morrison implies that regardless of a semblance of empowerment that higher socioeconomic statuses intimate, these residents lacked authority and community control. So the authorities (postal workers) have disregarded these black residents and overlooked their property because they had no rightful influence or permission to determine the name of a street that they resided on. Furthermore, the greater symbolism of Not Doctor Street—a lack of community control—incorporates these black residents into a larger economy of suffering. Morrison uses the interplay of synecdoche as both community and individualistic representations of suffering. In this manner, the financial suffering of the poor black community and the political disenfranchisement of the black middle class community represent both a collective and individualistic economy of suffering that manages Toni Morrison’s fragmented and self-destructing characters.
Economy of Suffering: Fragmented Identities and Color-Caste
Macon Dead Jr. or Milkman is Morrison’s central character. He is unwittingly searching for an identity. Although Milkman is characterized as a confused and selfish individual, he is uniquely attached to each significant character/event in the novel. For example, Milkman is the first black child born at Mercy Hospital. Additionally, he is connected to a (southern) poverty-stricken lineage and an assimilated (northern) middle-class lineage. But, Milkman suffers because the middle class comforts have not cushioned his need to reconcile his ancestral southern past and northern present. Ironically, even though Milkman is aware of his—what many critics consider a black elitist—maternal lineage, he is tortured by an ignorance of his paternal lineage. As literary critic Valerie Smith contends in her introductory essay, Milkman “appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father” (11). Thus, Milkman’s reclamation of time will only connect Milkman to a deeper understanding of the denigration of the Dead family resulting from individualism and Western values. Milkman is trapped in this economy of suffering because his rootedness in capitalism and his apolitical stances evidence that he too has forgotten the extended kin that his great-grandfather (Solomon) left behind. But most importantly, Milkman suffers because he is the chosen lamb who will mediate the rift between his aunt Pilate (cyclical time and a Socialist-like financial system) and his father (linear time, belief in expansion and free enterprise). Academic scholar Gurleen Grewal’s “Redeeming the Legacy of the Past” says that Morrison also uses Milkman to mediate a “split identity…a family quarrel not just between bother Macon and sister Pilate but between northern urban black mobility and the [southern] jettisoned past” (61).
Thus, Milkman’s suffering is a byproduct of both familial and regional tension between northern and southern African Americans. Dr. John Hope Franklin clarifies the enormity of the conflict between southern and northern blacks. “In the decade following World War I the number of African American potential wage earners expanded considerably. As migration to the industrial centers continued, African Americans found employment in factories and personal service” (381). However, the “textile industry in the South grew tremendously, but only a small number of blacks found employment there” (381). As Northern blacks were incorporated into industrialism and used as pawns to break strikes and compete with poor whites for jobs, their drive to achieve the American Dream of ownership and prosperity caused them to abandon the African American dream of equality, enfranchisement, and equal protection under the law. Even though the American Dream was not fully accessible to northern African Americans (as even Macon Dead Sr. knew as a “Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie”), the industrialized north was more tolerant of their presence and their ability to labor for cheaper wages.
Dr. Martin Luther King explicates the northern/southern tension best in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He states, “A Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” By illuminating the regional injustices, Morrison compels the reader to seriously entertain this economy of suffering and its racial influence. Valerie Smith asserts that for these reasons Milkman is propelled to “explore the nature of family, identity, and culture within a society still burdened by the legacy of slavery and its aftermath of racial violence” (11). But Milkman’s stream of consciousness is impossible without the guidance of the mammy/matriarch Pilate Dead.
Pilate
(a quasi-supernatural female character who was born with neither a navel nor a
living mother to nurture her) is perhaps the most important female character in Song
of Solomon because she is the black community’s proverbial “dirty
laundry.” She is a poor, black, desexualized woman with nappy hair and a
bastard child. Pilate is
uncivilized with little respect for amassing wealth.
She “lived in a narrow single-story house whose basement seemed to be
rising from rather than settling into the ground.
She had no electricity because she would not pay for the service” (27).
Unlike Milkman and his father, Pilate is not capitalistic-minded.
She is an odd character who models folksy ideals (voodoo and a black
market of cheap liquor). She is, on
the one hand, a supportive matriarch. On
the other hand, Pilate is an overly nurturing Mammy.
In many respects, Morrison never allows Pilate to solely be either a
mammy or a matriarch. But, like the
images of a big, black Mammy, she is relegated to a subservient status that is
negatively mediated by color-caste.
Color-caste
is a system that intertwines economic feasibility and skin complexion thereby
rewarding (financially or socially) African Americans with light/pale
complexions. Though Milkman is trapped in an unjust and internalized color-caste
as well (he does not share the pale skin of his sisters and mother), his skin
color does not hinder his social capabilities.
Pilate and Milkman prove that a color-caste is harsher for women to
manipulate. Even though no black
woman is able to completely meet Eurocentric standards of beauty, Pilate’s
African features doom her capacity to ascend the hierarchy.
In comparing Pilate’s facial features to his mother’s, Macon Dead Sr.
says, “I don’t remember my mother well…She…was light-skinned and
pretty…Me and Pilate don’t take nothing after her.
If you ever have a doubt we from Africa, look at Pilate.
She look just like Papa and he looked like all them pictures you ever see
of Africans” (54).
As a result of having African features, Pilate is doubly
oppressed by the white and black communities.
She suffers because she is a reminder of the peculiar Africanist
presence; she is poor/lower caste; she is an unwed mother.
Pilate Dead is Morrison’s key example of why her literature embraces a
racially and culturally political medium. The
characterization of Pilate affirms the erroneous ideologies of Black Nationalism
and feminism. Morrison insists,
through her characters, that these creeds only cause a larger economy of group
suffering because they reify that which they intend to eradicate: racism and
sexism.
By characterizing Pilate as a black matriarch who has an authoritative voice within her family, the author shows the reader why total mobilization under the guises of cultural nationalism and gender solidarity divide groups instead of uniting them. Since Pilate’s love (unlike Guitar’s) was not reserved for a particular gender, race, or ethnicity, she successfully mediates the complications of race, class, and gender. In the waning moments of the novel, Pilate tells Milkman, “Watch Reba for me. 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” (336). Pilate loves irrespective of race, class, or gender. Pilate is unlike Guitar who kills whites as a means of avenging African American deaths. She is unlike Macon Dead Sr. who does not care for the company of lower class blacks. And, her assistance is not only set aside for women. She helps Guitar, Milkman, Ruth, her brother, and other male characters. Pilate guides Milkman to personal freedom by nurturing his dreams of uniting his past and present. ’Marilyn Sanders Mobley’s “Call and Response: Voice, Community, and Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” affirms that being in Pilate’s presence awakens Milkman’s senses and allows him to “respond to the very voices he had been conditioned to ignore under the discipline of patriarchal hegemony” (61).
Still, just as the reader begins to favor the characterizations of Milkman and Pilate, Toni Morrison reestablishes the higher costs of their fragmented identities. In short, Milkman suffers and eventually dies as a result of his initial selfishness and escapists attempts (the search for gold). Pilate dies because of her selflessness. Pilate’s love for Jake—her father—is stronger than her love for self. Pilate had been unable to forgive herself for Jake’s botched burial.
Mythologies
and Escapism
Song of Solomon ends with the tragic homicide of Pilate and the debatable homicide/suicide of Milkman. Nevertheless, Milkman dies an enlightened man who finally learns to sincerely love a woman. Milkman discovers his love for his aunt Pilate. “He knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly” (336). Milkman loves Pilate because he envisions her as an empowered and fearless woman. Additionally, Milkman loves Pilate because she is not controlled by linear notions of time. She is not concerned with amassing wealth. Pilate soars without escaping her responsibility to others. Surprisingly, Milkman loves Pilate because she does not escape, but he admires Solomon because he could fly. Milkman overlooks the fact that Solomon “had abandoned a slew of children all over the place” (322). Milkman ignores the greater complicity on Solomon’s behalf. Still, escapism byway of subversive myths is more problematic than the reality it attempts to transcend.
Like Solomon, each of Morrison’s characters is seduced by mythologies. Guitar becomes trapped in a myth of freeing blacks by killing whites on their behalf. Pilate becomes ensnared in the myth of the strong, nurturing black woman, which disallows Pilate to nurture and love herself. Macon Dead Sr. becomes a slave to the mythology of the American Dream even though he is marginalized by the mainstream/dominant culture. Ruth Dead remains stuck in the self-willed myth of the tragic mulatto. Milkman’s complicity stems from his desire to escape as a result of a mythology of male heroism (Solomon’s song of flight and kinship) that bears no responsibility for those left behind. While Solomon’s song seems to explain Milkman’s paternal ancestry, it does not incite total empowerment. Synonymous to Guitar, Macon Dead, Pilate, and Ruth, Milkman’s disillusionment convinces him to misread reality and enter a fantasy world whereby blindly flying—or escaping his responsibilities—indicates that he is free indeed.
Gurleen Grewal emphasizes that Morrison’s usage of the flying African is both reactionary and revolutionary. It is reactionary because the tale within itself is a means for the characters to cope with oppression and exploitation. Yet, this myth is revolutionary because it is “both informed by an oral tradition and ‘goes into it’” (65). Grewal continues, “The story of ancestral flight that structures the novel belongs to the oral tradition, one specific to Gullah slaves of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Some African slaves, who were not broken into slavery, refused to labor, choosing to sit under a tree rather than hoe…when the slave driver came ’dey rise off duh groun an fly away’” (65). Toni Morrison’s usage of the folktale of the flying African is, like Milkman’s mission of mediation, her attempt to connect an oral past (African) with a literate present (American). This act is Morrison’s way of introducing forms of resistance and survival in slave culture to a literate middle class. And, it is a way to challenge the American literary canon that excluded the African America in many instances.
Locating and (Re)Presenting
the Africanist Presence
Proving her desire to reconcile the past and present, Toni Morrison’s characters and their fragmented identities magically represent facets of the past and present needing to be made whole. Toni Morrison uses Milkman’s knowledge of the Flying African myth to place the oral tradition in a literate form. In keeping with this tactic, Toni Morrison legitimately creates a narrative space in American literature for the Africanist presence. This space does not make a spectacle of the Africanist presence. It does not essentialize the Africanist presence. Instead, Song of Solomon shows the many—cohesive and conflicting—components of African American cultures while suggesting progressive ways to disengage racial domination in American literature. This semi-clarion call is extended to all ethnicities and nationalities. Morrison proclaims, “The United States, of course, is not unique in the construction of Africanism. South America, England, France, Germany, Spain—the cultures of all these countries have participated in and contributed to some aspect of an ‘invented Africa’” (7).
Because Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon moves beyond the falsity of a colorblind society and deals with the sites of racial domination and the production of racial power, the reader’s “private imagination” begins to honestly interact “with the world it inhabits” (66). Morrison advises that this is the way forward. This is the path to a true American democracy. After all, Morrison contends, “All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes” (91).
Works Cited
Crenshaw, Kimberle and David Peller. “Reel Time/Real Justice.” Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Franklin, John. “The New Deal.” From Slavery to Freedom: A history of African Americans. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
Grewal, Gurleen. “Redeeming the Legacy of the Past: Song of Solomon.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
Mobley, Marilyn. “Call and Response: Voice, Community. And Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” New Essays on Song of Solomon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Random House, 1977.
Smith, Valerie. “Introduction.” New Essays on Song of Solomon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Zinn, Howard. “Self-Help in Hard Times.” A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.