What happended to Milkman Dead at the Ending of Toni Morrison's song of Solomon?

Abstract

This paper aims to make readers reconsider Morrison’s particular use of myth and folk wisdom in her third novel Song of Solomon against a larger cultural backdrop. For this purpose, the first half of this paper makes a comparative approach to the way in which the motif of flying is embedded in folklore and mythology in general and how it is represented in the context of African and African-American oral traditions. The question of why myth-making matters in America is associated with the question of whether an ethnic group is capable of creating and re-creating its own cultural identity. This is the point Morrison attempts to make when she discloses how white supremacy had brainwashed black people into believing that they were an inferior race without their own culture and when she suggests that it is high time for African-American authors to reconstruct the long-forgotten cultural heritage in order to shape their authentic identity. The second half of this paper investigates the development of the relationship between Milkman Dead and Pilate. Song of Solomon can be viewed as an African-American version of Bildungsroman. What is significant here is the questing hero’s close relationship with a culture-bearing mentor. Milkman needs a pathfinder in his African-American rite of passage. It is Pilate, a black female griot figure, who plays the role of educating him in his journey to selfhood and racial past. Their relationship is thus developed into a double-conscious relationship of African mentor and American disciple in the novel’s syncretic narrative structure of myth and history. Following in the tracks of his mentor Pilate, Milkman becomes aware of the ancestors’ heritage, the values of community, and even the ethical responsibility for black women. Finally, through a fideistic awareness of how to fly, he takes a sacrifice leap in full view of Guitar, his historical counterpart. This event of a black man’s riding the air can be seen as Morrison’s alternative to the political failure of the numerous social protest novels. Insofar as it is properly accepted, such a miraculous accident is close to what Alain Badiou calls a truth event, which shall end all the African-American sorrow songs.