Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

“No. I didn’t ask for you by name. I asked him if he knew where a woman named Circe used to live.”

“Circe? Yes. Lord, old Circe!”

“He told me to talk to you.”

Reverend Cooper smiled and poured more whiskey. “Everybody round here knows me and I know everybody.”

“Well, I know my father stayed with her awhile, after they…when they…after his father died.”

“They had a fine place. Mighty fine. Some white folks own it now. Course that’s what they wanted. That’s why they shot him. Upset a lot of people here, a whole lot of people. Scared ’em too. But didn’t your daddy have a sister name of Pilate?”

“Yes, sir. Pilate.”

“Still living, is she?”

“Oh, yes. Very much living.”

“Issat so? Pretty girl, real pretty. My daddy was the one made the earring for her. That’s how we knew they was alive. After Old Macon Dead was killed, nobody knew whether the children was dead too or what. Then a few weeks passed and Circe came to my daddy’s shop. Right across from where the post office is now—that’s where my daddy’s blacksmith shop was. She came in there with this little metal box with a piece of paper bag folded up in it. Pilate’s name was written on it. Circe didn’t tell Daddy anything, but that he was to make a earring out of it. She stole a brooch from the folks she worked for. My daddy took the gold pin off it and soldered it to the box. So we knew they was alive and Circe was taking care of ’em. They’d be all right with Circe. She worked for the Butlers—rich white folks, you know—but she was a good midwife in those days. Delivered everybody. Me included.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, which always made other people gracious when he drank it, but Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real. Hearing Pilate talk about caves and woods and earrings on Darling Street, or his father talk about cooking wild turkey over the automobile noise of Not Doctor Street, seemed exotic, something from another world and age, and maybe not even true. Here in the parsonage, sitting in a cane-bottomed chair near an upright piano and drinking homemade whiskey poured from a mayonnaise jar, it was real. Without knowing it, he had walked right by the place where Pilate’s earring had been fashioned, the earring that had fascinated him when he was little, the fixing of which informed the colored people here that the children of the murdered man were alive. And this was the living room of the son of the man who made the earring.

“Did anybody ever catch the men who did it—who killed him?”

Reverend Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Catch?” he asked, his face full of wonder. Then he smiled again. “Didn’t have to catch ’em. They never went nowhere.”

“I mean did they have a trial; were they arrested?”

“Arrested for what? Killing a nigger? Where did you say you was from?”

“You mean nobody did anything? Didn’t even try to find out who did it?”

“Everybody knew who did it. Same people Circe worked for—the Butlers.”

“And nobody did anything?” Milkman wondered at his own anger. He hadn’t felt angry when he first heard about it. Why now?

“Wasn’t nothing to do. White folks didn’t care, colored folks didn’t dare. Wasn’t no police like now. Now we got a county sheriff handles things. Not then. Then the circuit judge came through just once or twice a year. Besides, the people what did it owned half the county. Macon’s land was in their way. Folks just was thankful the children escaped.”

“You said Circe worked for the people who killed him. Did she know that?”

“Course she did.”

“And she let them stay there?”

“Not out in the open. She hid them.”

“Still, they were in the same house, right?”

“Yep. Best place, I’d say. If they came to town somebody’d see’em. Nobody would think of looking there.”

“Did Daddy—did my father know that?”

“I don’t know what he knew, if Circe ever told him. I never saw him after the murder. None of us did.”

“Where are they? The Butlers. They still live here?”

“Dead now. Every one of ’em. The last one, the girl Elizabeth, died a couple years back. Barren as a rock and just as old. Things work out, son. The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always works out. Nothing they stole or killed for did ’em a bit a good. Not one bit.”

“I don’t care whether it did them good. The fact is they did somebody else harm.”

Reverend Cooper shrugged. “White folks different up your way?”

“No, I guess not…. Sometimes, though, you can do something.”

“What?” The preacher looked genuinely interested.

Milkman couldn’t answer except in Guitar’s words, so he said nothing.

“See this here?” The reverend turned around and showed Milkman a knot the size of a walnut that grew behind his ear. “Some of us went to Philly to try and march in an Armistice Day parade. This was after the First World War. We were invited and had a permit, but the people, the white people, didn’t like us being there. They started a fracas. You know, throwing rocks and calling us names. They didn’t care nothing ‘bout the uniform. Anyway, some police on horseback came—to quiet them down, we thought. They ran us down. Right under their horses. This here’s what a hoof can do. Ain’t that something?”

“Jesus God.”

“You wouldn’t be here to even things up, would you?” The preacher leaned over his stomach.

“No. I’m passing through, that’s all. Just thought I’d look around. I wanted to see the farm….”

“Cause any evening up left to do, Circe took care of.”

“What’d she do?”

“Hah! What didn’t she do?”

“Sorry I didn’t come out here long time ago. I would have liked to meet her. She must have been a hundred years old when she died.”

“Older. Was a hundred when I was a boy.”

“Is the farm nearby?” Milkman appeared mildly interested.

“Not too far.”

“I sort of wanted to see where it was since I’m out this way. Daddy talked so much about it.”

“It’s right back of the Butler place, about fifteen miles out. I can take you there. My old piece of car’s in the shop, but it was supposed to be ready yesterday. I’ll check on it.”

Milkman waited four days for the car to be ready. Four days at Reverend Cooper’s house as his guest, and the purpose of long visits from every old man in the town who remembered his father or his grandfather, and some who’d only heard. They all repeated various aspects of the story, all talked about how beautiful Lincoln’s Heaven was. Sitting in the kitchen, they looked at Milkman with such rheumy eyes, and spoke about his grandfather with such awe and affection, Milkman began to miss him too. His own father’s words came back to him: “I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him.” Milkman thought then that his father was boasting of his manliness as a child. Now he knew he had been saying something else. That he loved his father; had an intimate relationship with him; that his father loved him, trusted him, and found him worthy of working “right alongside” him. “Something went wild in me,” he’d said, “when I saw him on the ground.”

His was the genuine feeling that Milkman had faked when Reverend Cooper described the hopelessness of “doing anything.” These men remembered both Macon Deads as extraordinary men. Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl “that couldn’t nobody put shoes on.” Only one of them remembered his grandmother. “Good-lookin, but looked like a white woman. Indian, maybe. Black hair and slanted-up eyes. Died in childbirth, you know.” The more the old men talked—the more he heard about the only farm in the county that grew peaches, real peaches like they had in Georgia, the feasts they had when hunting was over, the pork kills in the winter and the work, the backbreaking work of a going farm—the more he missed something in his life. They talked about digging a well, fashioning traps, felling trees, warming orchards with fire when spring weather was bad, breaking young horses, training dogs. And in it all was his own father, the second Macon Dead, their contemporary, who was strong as an ox, could ride bareback and barefoot, who, they agreed, outran, outplowed, outshot, outpicked, outrode them all. He could not recognize that stern, greedy, unloving man in the boy they talked about, but he loved the boy they described and loved that boy’s father, with his hip-roofed barn, his peach trees, and Sunday break-of-dawn fishing parties in a fish pond that was two acres wide.

They talked on and on, using Milkman as the ignition that gunned their memories. The good times, the hard times, things that changed, things that stayed the same—and head and shoulders above all of it was the tall, magnificent Macon Dead, whose death, it seemed to him, was the beginning of their own dying even though they were young boys at the time. Macon Dead was the farmer they wanted to be, the clever irrigator, the peachtree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time flat and sang like an angel while he did it. He had come out of nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing but free papers, a Bible, and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year he’d leased ten acres, the next ten more. Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon. “You see?” the farm said to them. “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,” it said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—can you hear me? Pass it on!”

But they shot the top of his head off and ate his fine Georgia peaches. And even as boys these men began to die and were dying still. Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying. That’s why Milkman began to talk about his father, the boy they knew, the son of the fabulous Macon Dead. He bragged a little and they came alive. How many houses his father owned (they grinned); the new car every two years (they laughed); and when he told them how his father tried to buy the Erie Lackawanna (it sounded better that way), they hooted with joy. That’s him! That’s Old Macon Dead’s boy, all right! They wanted to know everything and Milkman found himself rattling off assets like an accountant, describing deals, total rents income, bank loans, and this new thing his father was looking into—the stock market.

Suddenly, in the midst of his telling, Milkman wanted the gold. He wanted to get up right then and there and go get it. Run to where it was and snatch every grain of it from under the noses of the Butlers, who were dumb enough to believe that if they killed one man his whole line died. He glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride.

“Who’d your daddy marry?”

“The daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town.”

“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead!”

“Send you all to college?”

“Sent my sisters. I work right alongside him in our office.”

“Hah! Keep you home to get that money! Macon Dead gonna always make him some money!”

“What kinda car he drive?”

“Buick. Two-twenty-five.”

“Great God, a deuce and a quarter! What year?”

“This year!”

“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead! He gonna buy the Erie Lackawanna’ If he want it, he’ll get it! Bless my soul. Bet he worry them white folks to death. Can’t nobody keep him down! Not no Macon Dead! Not in this world! And not in the next! Haw! Goddam! The Erie Lackawanna!”

After all the waiting, Reverend Cooper couldn’t go. His preaching income was supplemented by freightyard work and he was called for an early shift. His nephew, called Nephew since he was their only one, was assigned to drive Milkman out to the farm—as close as they could get. Nephew was thirteen and barely able to see over the steering wheel.

“Does he have a license?” Milkman asked Mrs. Cooper.

“Not yet,” she said, and when she saw his consternation she explained that farm kids drove early—they had to.

Milkman and Nephew started out right after breakfast. It took them the better part of an hour because the roads were curving two-lanes and they spent twenty minutes behind a light truck they couldn’t pull around. Nephew spoke very little. He seemed interested only in Milkman’s clothes, which he took every opportunity to examine. Milkman decided to give him one of his shirts, and asked him to stop by the bus station to pick up the suitcase he’d left there.

Finally Nephew slowed down on a stretch of road that showed no houses at all. He stopped.

“What’s the matter? You want me to drive?”

“No, sir. This is it.”

“What’s it? Where?”

“Back in there.” He pointed to some bushes. “The road to the Butler place is in there and the farm’s back behind it. You got to walk it. Car won’t make it.”

Nothing was truer; as it turned out, Milkman’s feet could hardly make it over the stony road covered with second growth. He had asked Nephew to wait, thinking he would survey the area quickly and come back later on his own. But the boy had chores, he said, and would be back whenever Milkman wanted him to be there.

“An hour,” said Milkman.

“Take me an hour just to get back to town,” said Nephew.

“Reverend Cooper said you were to take me. Not leave me stranded.”

“My mama whip me, I don’t do my chores.”

Milkman was annoyed, but because he didn’t want the boy to think he was nervous about being left out there alone, he agreed to having him come back at—he glanced at his heavy, overdesigned watch—at noon. It was nine o’clock then.

His hat had been knocked off by the first branches of the old walnut trees, so he held it in his hand. His cuffless pants were darkened by the mile-long walk over moist leaves. The quiet fairly roared in his ears. He was uncomfortable and a little anxious, but the gold loomed large in his mind, as did the faces of the men he’d drunk with last night, and he stepped firmly onto the gravel and leaves of the driveway which circled the biggest house he’d ever seen.

This is where they stayed, he thought, where Pilate cried when given cherry jam. He stood still a moment. It must have been beautiful, must have seemed like a palace to them, but neither had ever spoken of it in any terms but how imprisoned they felt, how difficult it was to see the sky from their room, how repelled they were by the carpets, the draperies. Without knowing who killed their father, they instinctively hated the murderers’ house. And it did look like a murderer’s house. Dark, ruined, evil. Never, not since he knelt by his window sill wishing he could fly, had he felt so lonely. He saw the eyes of a child peer at him over the sill of the one second-story window the ivy had not covered. He smiled. Must be myself I’m seeing—thinking about how I used to watch the sky out the window. Or maybe it’s the light trying to get through the trees. Four graceful columns supported the portico, and the huge double door featured a heavy, brass knocker. He lifted it and let it fall; the sound was soaked up like a single raindrop in cotton. Nothing stirred. He looked back down the path and saw the green maw out of which he had come, a greenish-black tunnel, the end of which was nowhere in sight.