Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

She gave up, apparently, all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships. Those twelve years in Montour County, where she had been treated gently by a father and a brother, and where she herself was in a position to help farm animals under her care, had taught her a preferable kind of behavior. Preferable to that of the men who called her mermaid and the women who swept up her footprints or put mirrors on her door.

She was a natural healer, and among quarreling drunks and fighting women she could hold her own, and sometimes mediated a peace that lasted a good bit longer than it should have because it was administered by someone not like them. But most important, she paid close attention to her mentor—the father who appeared before her sometimes and told her things. After Reba was born, he no longer came to Pilate dressed as he had been on the woods’ edge and in the cave, when she and Macon had left Circe’s house. Then he had worn the coveralls and heavy shoes he was shot in. Now he came in a white shirt, a blue collar, and a brown peaked cap. He wore no shoes (they were tied together and slung over his shoulder), probably because his feet hurt, since he rubbed his toes a lot as he sat near her bed or on the porch, or rested against the side of the still. Along with winemaking, cooking whiskey became the way Pilate began to make her steady living. That skill allowed her more freedom hour by hour and day by day than any other work a woman of no means whatsoever and no inclination to make love for money could choose. Once settled in as a small-time bootlegger in the colored section of a town, she had only occasional police or sheriff problems, for she allowed none of the activities that often accompanied wine houses—women, gambling—and she more often than not refused to let her customers drink what they bought from her on the premises. She made and sold liquor. Period.

After Reba grew up and began to live from one orgasm to another, taking time out to produce one child, Hagar, Pilate thought it might be time for a change. Not because of Reba, who was quite content with the life her mother and she lived, but because of her granddaughter. Hagar was prissy. She hated, even as a two-year-old, dirt and disorganization. At three she was already vain and beginning to be proud. She liked pretty clothes. Astonished as Pilate and Reba were by her wishes, they enjoyed trying to fulfill them. They spoiled her, and she, as a favor to their indulgence, hid as best she could the fact that they embarrassed her.

Pilate decided to find her brother, if he was still alive, for the child, Hagar, needed family, people, a life very different from what she and Reba could offer, and if she remembered anything about Macon, he would be different. Prosperous, conventional, more like the things and people Hagar seemed to admire. In addition, Pilate wanted to make peace between them. She asked her father where he was, but he just rubbed his feet and shook his head. So for the first time, Pilate went voluntarily to the police, who sent her to the Red Cross, who sent her to the Salvation Army, who sent her to the Society of Friends, who sent her back to the Salvation Army, who wrote to their command posts in large cities from New York to St. Louis and from Detroit to Louisiana and asked them to look in the telephone directory, where in fact one captain’s secretary found him listed. Pilate was surprised that they were successful, but the captain was not, because there could hardly be many people with such a name.

They made the trip in style (one train and two buses), for Pilate had a lot of money; the crash of 1929 had produced so many buyers of cheap home brew she didn’t even need the collection the Salvation Army took up for her. She arrived with suitcases, a green sack, a full-grown daughter, and a granddaughter, and found her brother truculent, inhospitable, embarrassed, and unforgiving. Pilate would have moved on immediately except for her brother’s wife, who was dying of lovelessness then, and seemed to be dying of it now as she sat at the table across from her sister-in-law listening to her life story, which Pilate was making deliberately long to keep Ruth’s mind off Hagar.

Chapter 6

“I took her home. She was standing in the middle of the room when I got there. So I just took her home. Pitiful. Really pitiful.”

Milkman shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about Hagar, but it was a way to sit Guitar down and get around to asking him something else.

“What’d you do to her?” asked Guitar.

“What’d I do to her? You saw her with a butcher knife and you ask me that?”

“I mean before. That’s a messed-up lady.”

“I did what you do to some woman every six months–called the whole thing off.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“No. It had to be something more.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“Take it any way you want. But that girl’s hurt—and the hurt came from you.”

“What’s the matter with you? You’ve been watching her try to kill me for months and I never laid a hand on her. Now you sit there worried about her. All of a sudden you’re police. You’ve been wearing a halo a lot lately. You got a white robe too?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m tired of being criticized by you. I know we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. I know you think I’m lazy—not serious, you say—but if we’re friends…I don’t meddle you, do I?”

“No. Not at all.”

Several minutes passed while Milkman played with his beer and Guitar sipped tea. They were sitting in Mary’s Place on a Sunday afternoon a few days after Hagar’s latest attempt on his life.

“You’re not smoking?” asked Milkman.

“No. I quit. Feel a hell of a lot better too.” There was another pause before Guitar continued. “You ought to stop yourself.”

Milkman nodded. “Yeah. If I stay around you I will. I’ll stop smoking, fucking, drinking–everything. I’ll take up a secret life and hanging out with Empire State.”

Guitar frowned. “Now who’s meddling?”

Milkman sighed and looked straight at his friend. “I am. I want to know why you were running around with Empire State last Christmas.”

“He was in trouble. I helped him.”

“That’s all?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know what else. But I know there is something else. Now, if it’s something I can’t know, okay, say so. But something’s going on with you. And I’d like to know what it is.”

Guitar didn’t answer.

“We’ve been friends a long time, Guitar. There’s nothing you don’t know about me. I can tell you anything—whatever our differences, I know I can trust you. But for some time now it’s been a one-way street. You know what I mean? I talk to you, but you don’t talk to me. You don’t think I can be trusted?”

“I don’t know if you can or not.”

“Try me.”

“I can’t. Other people are involved.”

“Then don’t tell me about other people; tell me about you.”

Guitar looked at him for a long time. Maybe, he thought. Maybe I can trust you. Maybe not, but I’ll risk it anyway because one day…

“Okay,” he said aloud, “but you have to know that what I tell you can’t go any further. And if it does, you’ll be dropping a rope around my neck. Now do you still want to know it?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Guitar poured some more hot water over his tea. He looked into his cup for a minute while the leaves settled slowly to the bottom. “I suppose you know that white people from time to time, and most folks shake their heads and say, ’Eh, eh, eh, ain’t that a shame?’”

Milkman raised his eyebrows. He thought Guitar was going to let him in on some deal he had going. But he was slipping into his race bag. He was speaking slowly, as though each word had to count, and as though he were listening carefully to his own words. “I can’t suck my teeth or say ‘Eh, eh, eh.’ I had to do something. And the only thing left to do is balance it; keep things on an even keel. Any man, any woman, or any child is good for five to seven generations of heirs before they’re bred out. So every death is the death of five to seven generations. You can’t stop them from killing us, from trying to get rid of us. And each time they succeed, they get rid of five to seven generations. I help keep the numbers the same.

“There is a society. It’s made up of a few men who are willing to take some risks. They don’t initiate anything; they don’t even choose. They are as indifferent as rain. But when a Negro child, Negro woman, or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done about it by their law and their courts, this society selects a similar victim at random, and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hang; if a Negro was burnt, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder. If they can. If they can’t do it precisely in the same manner, they do it any way they can, but they do it. They call themselves the Seven Days. They are made up of seven men. Always seven and only seven. If one of them dies or leaves or is no longer effective, another is chosen. Not right away, because that kind of choosing takes time. But they don’t seem to be in a hurry. Their secret is time. To take the time, to last. Not to grow; that’s dangerous because you might become known. They don’t write their names in toilet stalls or brag to women. Time and silence. Those are their weapons, and they go on forever.

“It got started in 1920, when that private from Georgia was killed after his balls were cut off and after that veteran was blinded when he came home from France in World War I. And it’s been operating ever since. I am one of them now.”

Milkman had held himself very still all the time Guitar spoke. Now he felt tight, shriveled, and cold.

“You? You’re going to kill people?”

“Not people. White people.”

“But why?”

“I just told you. It’s necessary; it’s got to be done. To keep the ratio the same.”

“And if it isn’t done? If it just goes on the way it has?”

“Then the world is a zoo, and I can’t live in it.”

“Why don’t you just hunt down the ones who did the killing? Why kill innocent people? Why not just those who did it?”

“It doesn’t matter who did it. Each and every one of them could do it. So you just get any one of them. There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one. You think Hitler surprised them? You think just because they went to war they thought he was a freak? Hitler’s the most natural white man in the world. He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn’t have us. Can you see those Klansmen shocked by him? No, you can’t.”

“But people who lynch and slice off people’s balls—they’re crazy, Guitar, crazy.”

“Every time somebody does a thing like that to one of us, they say the people who did it were crazy or ignorant. That’s like saying they were drunk. Or constipated. Why isn’t cutting a man’s eyes out, cutting his nuts off, the kind of thing you never get too drunk or ignorant to do? Too crazy to do? Too constipated to do? And more to the point, how come Negroes, the craziest, most ignorant people in America, don’t get that crazy and that ignorant? No. White people are unnatural. As a race they are unnatural. And it takes a strong effort of the will to overcome an unnatural enemy.”

“What about the nice ones? Some whites made sacrifices for Negroes. Real sacrifices.”

“That just means there are one or two natural ones. But they haven’t been able to stop the killing either. They are outraged, but that doesn’t stop it. They might even speak out, but that doesn’t stop it either. They might even inconvenience themselves, but the killing goes on and on. So will we.”

“You’re missing the point. There’re not just one or two. There’re a lot.”

“Are there? Milkman, if Kennedy got drunk and bored and was sitting around a potbellied stove in Mississippi, he might join a lynching party just for the hell of it. Under those circumstances his unnaturalness would surface. But I know I wouldn’t join one no matter how drunk I was or how bored, and I know you wouldn’t either, nor any black man I know or ever heard tell of. Ever. In any world, at any time, just get up and go find somebody white to slice up. But they can do it. And they don’t even do it for profit, which is why they do most things. They do it for fun. Unnatural.”

“What about…” Milkman searched his memory for some white person who had shown himself unequivocally supportive of Negroes. “Schweitzer. Albert Schweitzer. Would he do it?”

“In a minute. He didn’t care anything about those Africans. They could have been rats. He was in a laboratory testing himself—proving he could work on human dogs.”

“What about Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“I don’t know about the women. I can’t say what their women would do, but I do remember that picture of those white mothers holding up their babies so they could get a good look at some black men burning on a tree. So I have my suspicions about Eleanor Roosevelt. But none about Mr. Roosevelt. You could’ve taken him and his wheelchair and put him in a small dusty town in Alabama and given him some tobacco, a checkerboard, some whiskey, and a rope and he’d have done it too. What I’m saying is, under certain conditions they would all do it. And under the same circumstances we would not. So it doesn’t matter that some of them haven’t done it. I listen. I read. And now I know that they know it too. They know they are unnatural. Their writers and artists have been saying it for years. Telling them they are unnatural, telling them they are depraved. They call it tragedy. In the movies they call it adventure. It’s just depravity that they try to make glorious, natural. But it ain’t. The disease they have is in their blood, in the structure of their chromosomes.”

“You can prove this, I guess. Scientifically?”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t you be able to prove it before you act on something like that?”

“Did they prove anything scientifically about us before they killed us? No. They killed us first and then tried to get some scientific proof about why we should die.”

“Wait a minute, Guitar. If they are as bad, as unnatural, as you say, why do you want to be like them? Don’t you want to be better than they are?”

“I am better.”

“But now you’re doing what the worst of them do.”

“Yes, but I am reasonable.”

“Reasonable? How?”

“I am not, one, having fun; two, trying to gain power or public attention or money or land; three, angry at anybody.”

“You’re not angry? You must be!”

“Not at all. I hate doing it. I’m afraid to do it. It’s hard to do it when you aren’t angry or drunk or doped up or don’t have a personal grudge against the person.”

“I can’t see how it helps. I can’t see how it helps anybody.”