Song of Solomon Summary: Toni Morrison's Novel of Family, Flight and Identity
What Song of Solomon is about
Song of Solomon is Toni Morrison's third novel, published in 1977. It follows Macon Dead III, an African-American man in Michigan, from his birth to adulthood. Almost everyone calls him Milkman. The story moves between Michigan and the American South and covers the 1930s to the 1960s.
It opens with a crowd watching an insurance agent named Robert Smith on a roof. He jumps, trying to fly. The sight of him sends a woman called Ruth Dead into labour. In the chaos the hospital admits her, and she gives birth to a son. He is the first African-American child born there. His nickname comes a few years later. Ruth is still breastfeeding him at the age of four, and one of her husband's employees sees it.
Milkman grows up in Southside feeling stifled and cut off from his home life. He does not get on with his father, Macon Jr. Things change in his teens, when his aunt Pilate becomes a central figure in his life. Through her he gets his first real look at the family's past.
Pilate and Macon Jr. grew up on the farm of their father, Macon Dead Sr. They saw him murdered by white men who wanted his property. As they fled, they came across a cave full of bags of gold. They left it where it was because they feared reprisals. That gold, and the question of where it went, drives much of the plot. Milkman is drawn into the search for it, first at home and later on a journey south.
The main characters
Milkman (Macon Dead III) is the centre of the book. He begins as a young man with little interest in his family or where it came from. The novel follows how that changes.
Macon Dead Jr. is Milkman's father. Their relationship is strained. His memory of the gold in the cave shapes his decisions.
Ruth Dead is Milkman's mother. Her long attachment to her son is the source of his nickname.
Pilate is Macon Jr.'s sister. She is a bootlegger and conjure woman who lives in a modest home. A heavy bag hangs from her ceiling, and she says it holds her "inheritance". She also sings a song that turns out to matter a great deal.
Hagar is Pilate's granddaughter and Milkman's cousin. The two have a sexual relationship, but Milkman later spurns her. She becomes obsessed with him and tries to kill him once a month. She never follows through.
Guitar is Milkman's friend. He joins Milkman in a plan set up by Macon Jr., and his role in the story turns darker as it goes on.
The themes
Identity sits at the heart of the novel. Milkman knows almost nothing about his grandfather or the family's roots. The book is built around his slow discovery of that history and what it does to him.
Family runs alongside it. A brother and sister share a terrible memory but live very different lives. Their father's murder and the abandoned gold still shape the household a generation later. Old wounds pass down to Milkman whether he wants them or not.
Freedom is tied to the image of flight. The book starts with a man trying to fly from a roof. Later Milkman hears children singing about a slave who escaped bondage by flying home to Africa. That slave left his wife and infant son behind. The novel holds both sides of this. Escape is a kind of freedom, and it also costs the people who are left.
Redemption comes through in the later chapters. Milkman causes real harm through his selfishness, and the closing stretch asks what he owes his family, living and dead.
Why it still matters
Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was later chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, which brought it to a large new readership. When the Swedish Academy awarded Morrison the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, it cited this novel. In 1998 the Radcliffe Publishing Course named it the 25th best English-language novel of the 20th century.
It suits readers who like literary fiction with a strong story underneath. There is a treasure hunt, a road trip and a family mystery. There is also a lot of weight in it: inherited grief, violence and the search for a past that has been half buried. Anyone interested in African-American history, or in novels where songs and stories carry real meaning, will find plenty here.
How the story ends (spoilers)
Macon Jr. thinks Pilate's bag holds gold from the cave. He sends Milkman and Guitar to steal it. They succeed, but the police arrest them when the bag turns out to contain human bones. Macon Jr. and Pilate go to the station to get them released.
Milkman travels south to the old family home in Pennsylvania to look for the gold. After talking to several people, he decides Pilate must have taken it to Virginia. He ends up in Shalimar, Virginia, by accident. While he is out hunting with older men from the town, Guitar attacks him. Guitar has followed him and believes Milkman has kept the gold for himself. In the struggle Milkman fires his gun and scares Guitar away.
In Shalimar, Milkman hears children singing the "Song of Solomon" about the flying slave. He remembers that Pilate sang something similar. He realises the song is about his own family and heads back to Michigan.
Meanwhile Hagar has fallen into a deep depression. She buys dresses, makeup and a haircut, hoping Milkman will want her again. It does little good, and she dies of her grief. The community takes up a collection to bury her, and Pilate sings at her funeral.
When Milkman reaches Pilate, she knocks him unconscious for the grief that killed Hagar. He wakes and persuades her to come to Virginia to bury her father's bones in Shalimar. They bury Macon Dead Sr. overlooking a ravine. Then Guitar fires a shot meant for Milkman and kills Pilate. The novel ends with Milkman leaping towards Guitar, and in that leap he learns to "fly".
