Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

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.

The farm, they said, was right in back of the Butler place, but knowing how different their concept of distance was, he thought he’d better get moving. If he found what he was looking for he would have to come back at night—with equipment, of course, but also with some familiarity with the area. On impulse he reached out his hand and tried to turn the doorknob. It didn’t budge. Half turning to leave—literally as an afterthought—he pushed the door and it swung open with a sigh. He leaned in. The smell prevented him from seeing anything more than the absence of light did. A hairy animal smell, ripe, rife, suffocating. He coughed and looked for somewhere to spit, for the odor was in his mouth, coating his teeth and tongue. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, held it over his nose, backed away from the open door, and had just begun to spill the little breakfast he’d eaten when the odor disappeared and, quite suddenly, in its place was a sweet spicy perfume. Like ginger root—pleasant, clean, seductive. Surprised and charmed by it, he retraced his steps and went inside. After a second or two he was able to see the hand-laid and hand-finished wooden floor in a huge hall, and at its farther end a wide staircase spiraling up into the dark. His eyes traveled up the stairs.

He had had dreams as a child, dreams every child had, of the witch who chased him down dark alleys, between lawn trees, and finally into rooms from which he could not escape. Witches in black dresses and red underskirts; witches with pink eyes and green lips, tiny witches, long rangy witches, frowning witches, smiling witches, screaming witches and laughing witches, witches that flew, witches that ran, and some that merely glided on the ground. So when he saw the woman at the top of the stairs there was no way for him to resist climbing up toward her outstretched hands, her fingers spread wide for him, her mouth gaping open for him, her eyes devouring him. In a dream you climb the stairs. She grabbed him, grabbed his shoulders and pulled him right up against her and tightened her arms around him. Her head came to his chest and the feel of that hair under his chin, the dry bony hands like steel springs rubbing his back, her floppy mouth babbling into his vest, made him dizzy, but he knew that always, always at the very instant of the pounce or the gummy embrace he would wake with a scream and an erection. Now he had only the erection.

Milkman closed his eyes, helpless to pull away before the completion of the dream. What made him surface from it was a humming sound around his knees. He looked down and there, surrounding him, was a pack of golden-eyed dogs, each of which had the intelligent child’s eyes he had seen from the window. Abruptly the woman let him go and he looked down at her too. Beside the calm, sane, appraising eyes of the dogs, her eyes looked crazy. Beside their combed, brushed gun-metal hair, hers was wild and filthy.

She spoke to the dogs. “Go on away. Helmut, go on. Horst, move.” She waved her hands and the dogs obeyed.

“Come, come,” she said to Milkman. “In here.” She took his hand in both of hers, and he followed her—his arm outstretched, his hand in hers—like a small boy being dragged reluctantly to bed. Together they weaved among the bodies of the dogs that floated around his legs. She led him into a room, made him sit on a gray velvet sofa, and dismissed all the dogs but two that lay at her feet.

“Remember the Weimaraners?” she asked, settling herself, pulling her chair close to him.

She was old. So old she was colorless. So old only her mouth and eyes were distinguishable features in her face. Nose, chin, cheekbones, forehead, neck all had surrendered their identity to the pleats and crochetwork of skin committed to constant change.

Milkman struggled for a clear thought, so hard to come by in a dream: Perhaps this woman is Circe. But Circe is dead. This woman is alive. That was as far as he got, because although the woman was talking to him, she might in any case still be dead—as a matter of fact, she had to be dead. Not because of the wrinkles, and the face so old it could not be alive, but because out of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl.

“I knew one day you would come back. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some days I doubted it and some days I didn’t think about it at all. But you see, I was right. You did come.”

It was awful listening to that voice come from that face. Maybe something was happening to his ears. He wanted to hear the sound of his own voice, so he decided to take a chance on logic.

“Excuse me. I’m his son. I’m Macon Dead’s son. Not the one you knew.”

She stopped smiling.

“My name is Macon Dead too, but I’m thirty-two years old. You knew my father and his father too.” So far, so good. His voice was the same. Now he needed only to know if he had assessed the situation correctly. She did not answer him. “You’re Circe, aren’t you?”

“Yes; Circe,” she said, but she seemed to have lost all interest in him. “My name is Circe.”

“I’m just visiting,” he said. “I spent a couple of days with Reverend Cooper and his wife. They’re the ones brought me out here.”

“I thought you were him. I thought you came back to see me. Where is he? My Macon?”

“Back home. He’s alive. He told me about you….”

“And Pilate. Where is she?”

“There too. She’s fine.”

“Well, you look like him. You really do.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

“He’s seventy-two years old now,” said Milkman. He thought that would clear things up, make her know he couldn’t be the Macon she knew, who was sixteen when she last saw him. But all she said was “Uhn,” as though seventy-two, thirty-two, any age at all, meant nothing whatsoever to her. Milkman wondered how old she really was.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No. Thank you. I ate breakfast.”

“So you’ve been staying with that little Cooper boy?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“A runt. I told him not to smoke, but children don’t listen.”

“Do you mind if I do?” Milkman was relaxing a little and he hoped the cigarette would relax him more.

She shrugged. “Do what you like. Everybody does what he likes nowadays anyway.”

Milkman lit the cigarette and the dogs hummed at the sound of the match, their eyes glittering toward the flame.

“Ssh!” whispered Circe.

“Beautiful,” said Milkman.

“What’s beautiful?”

“The dogs.”

“They’re not beautiful, they’re strange, but they keep things away. I’m completely worn out taking care of ’em. They belonged to Miss Butler. She bred them, crossbred them. Tried for years to get them in the AKC. They wouldn’t permit it.”

“What did you call them?”

“Weimaraners. German.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Oh, I keep some. Sell some. Till we all die in here together.” She smiled.

She had dainty habits which matched her torn and filthy clothes in precisely the way her strong young cultivated voice matched her wizened face. Her white hair—braided, perhaps; perhaps not—she touched as though replacing a wayward strand from an elegant coiffure. And her smile—an opening of flesh like celluloid dissolving under a drop of acid—was accompanied by a press of fingers on her chin. It was this combination of daintiness and cultivated speech that misled Macon and invited him to regard her as merely foolish.

“You should get out once in a while.”

She looked at him.

“Is this your house now? Did they will you this? Is that why you have to stay here?”

She pressed her lips over her gums. “The only reason I’m here alone is because she died. She killed herself. All the money was gone, so she killed herself. Stood right there on the landing where you were a minute ago and threw herself off the banister. She didn’t die right away, though; she lay in the bed a week or two and there was nobody here but us. The dogs were in the kennel then. I brought her in the world, just like I did her mother and her grandmother before that. Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well, grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”

“Some friend of Reverend Cooper said she looked white. My grandmother. Was she?”

“No. Mixed. Indian mostly. A good-looking woman, but fierce, for the young woman I knew her as. Crazy about her husband too, overcrazy. You know what I mean? Some women love too hard. She watched over him like a pheasant hen. Nervous. Nervous love.”

Milkman thought about this mixed woman’s great-granddaughter, Hagar, and said, “Yes. I know what you mean.”

“But a good woman. I cried like a baby when I lost her. Like a baby. Poor Sing.”

“What?” He wondered if she lisped.

“I cried like a baby when I—”

“No. I mean what did you call her?”

“Sing. Her name was Sing.”

“Sing? Sing Dead. Where’d she get a name like that?”

“Where’d you get a name like yours? White people name Negroes like race horses.”

“I suppose so. Daddy told me how they got their name.”

“What’d he tell you?”

Milkman told her the story about the drunken Yankee.

“Well, he didn’t have to keep the name. She made him. She made him keep that name,” Circe said when he was through.

“She?”

“Sing. His wife. They met on a wagon going North. Ate pecans all the way, she told me. It was a wagonful of ex-slaves going to the promised land.”

“Was she a slave too?”

“No. No indeed. She always bragged how she was never a slave. Her people neither.”

“Then what was she doing on that wagon?”

“I can’t answer you because I don’t know. Never crossed my mind to ask her.”

“Where were they coming from? Georgia?”

“No. Virginia. Both of them lived in Virginia, her people and his. Down around Culpeper somewhere. Charlemagne or something like that.”

“I think that’s where Pilate was for a while. She lived all over the country before she came to us.”

“Did she ever marry that boy?”

“What boy?”

“The boy she had the baby by.”

“No. She didn’t marry him.”

“Didn’t think she would. She was too ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what?”

“Her stomach.”

“Oh, that.”

“Borned herself. I had very little to do with it. I thought they were both dead, the mother and the child. When she popped out you could have knocked me over. I hadn’t heard a heartbeat anywhere. She just came on out. Your daddy loved her. Hurt me to hear they broke away from one another. So it does me good to hear they’re back together again.” She had warmed up talking about the past and Milkman decided not to tell her that Macon and Pilate just lived in the same city. He wondered how she knew about their split, and if she knew what they broke apart about.

“You knew about their quarrel?” he asked quietly, non-chalantly.

“Not the substance. Just the fact. Pilate came back here just after her baby was born. One winter. She told me they split up when they left here and she hadn’t seen him since.”

“Pilate told me they lived in a cave for a few days after they left this house.”

“Is that right? Must have been Hunters Cave. Hunters used it to rest up in there sometimes. Eat. Smoke. Sleep. That’s where they dumped Old Macon’s body.”

“They who? I thought … My father said he buried him. Down by a creek or a river someplace where they used to fish.”

“He did. But it was too shallow and too close to the water. The body floated up at the first heavy rain. Those children hadn’t been gone a month when it floated up. Some men were fishing down there and saw this body, a Negro. So they knew who it was. Dumped it in the cave, and it was summer too. You’d think they would have buried a body in the summer. I told Mrs. Butler I thought it was a disgrace.”

“Daddy doesn’t know that.”

“Well, don’t tell him. Let him have his peace. It’s hard enough with a murdered father; he don’t need to know what happened to the body.”

“Did Pilate tell you why she came back here?”

“Yes. She said her father told her to. She had visits from him, she said.”

“I’d like to see that cave. Where he’s … where they put him.”

“Won’t be anything left to see now. That’s been a long time ago.”

“I know, but maybe there’s something I can bury properly.”

“Now, that’s a thought worth having. The dead don’t like it if they’re not buried. They don’t like it at all. You won’t have trouble finding it. You go back out the road you came in on. Go north until you come to a stile. It’s falling down, but you’ll see it’s a stile. Right in there the woods are open. Walk a little way in and you’ll come to a creek. Cross it. There’ll be some more woods, but ahead you’ll see a short range of hills. The cave is right on the face of those hills. You can’t miss it. It’s the only one there. Tell your daddy you buried him properly, in a graveyard. Maybe with a headstone. A nice headstone. I hope they find me soon enough and somebody’ll take pity on me.” She looked at the dogs. “Hope they find me soon and don’t let me lay in here too long.”

Milkman swallowed as her thought touched his mind. “People come to see you, don’t they?”

“Dog buyers. They come every now and then. They’ll find me, I guess.”

“Reverend Cooper…They think you’re dead.”

“Splendid. I don’t like those Negroes in town. Dog people come and the man that delivers the dog food once a week. They come. They’ll find me. I just hope it’s soon.”

He loosened his collar and lit another cigarette. Here in this dim room he sat with the woman who had helped deliver his father and Pilate; who had risked her job, her life, maybe, to hide them both after their father was killed, emptied their slop jars, brought them food at night and pans of water to wash. Had even sneaked off to the village to have the girl Pilate’s name and snuffbox made into an earring. Then healed the ear when it got infected. And after all these years was thrilled to see what she believed was one of them. Healer, deliverer, in another world she would have been the head nurse at Mercy. Instead she tended Weimaraners and had just one selfish wish: that when she died somebody would find her before the dogs ate her.