“Macon "Milkman" Dead III, born into a comfortable Black family in 1930s Michigan, travels south to discover his ancestral history.”
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Song of Solomon is Toni Morrison's 1977 novel, the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and one of two unquestioned Morrison masterpieces alongside Beloved. Macon "Milkman" Dead III is born into a comfortable Black family in Depression-era Michigan: his father is a successful real-estate owner, his mother is the daughter of the town's first Black doctor, his aunt Pilate runs a wine-house on the edge of respectability. The novel follows Milkman from his birth through his early thirties as he travels south to Pennsylvania and Virginia to discover his ancestral history.
Morrison's project is the construction of a Black American mythology that reaches back into the eighteenth-century African and African-American oral traditions her characters have inherited without knowing it. The Sugarman / Solomon flying-Africans folktale that Pilate sings ("Sugarman done fly away / Sugarman done gone") is the novel's structural and thematic anchor, and the title comes from the Song of Solomon both as Biblical text and as folk song. The supporting cast (Pilate, Hagar, Guitar, Macon Sr., First Corinthians) is rendered with the patient psychological care that distinguishes Morrison's mature fiction.
Recommended as required twentieth-century American literary fiction reading, as the right Morrison entry point for readers who want the patient interior register before reading Beloved, and as one of the canonical novels of the late-twentieth-century African-American literary tradition. Toni Morrison's own audiobook narration is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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