Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

“Michigan? You sure Michigan?”

“Sure I’m sure. Was he supposed to meet you in Roanoke?”

When Milkman looked wild-eyed, the man said, “I seen your tags.”

Milkman sighed with relief. And then said, “I wasn’t sure where we were going to meet up. And he didn’t say his name?”

“Naw. Just said to give you some good-luck message if I was to see you. Lemme see…”

“Good luck?”

“Yeah. Said to tell you your day was sure coming or your day…something like that…your day is here. But I know it had a day in it. But I ain’t sure if he said it was comin or was already here.” He chuckled. “Wish mine was here. Been waitin fifty-seven years and it ain’t come yet.”

The other men in the store laughed congenially, while Milkman stood frozen, everything in him quiet but his heart. There was no mistaking the message. Or the messenger. Guitar was looking for him, was following him, and for professional reasons. Unless … Would Guitar joke about that phrase? That special secret word the Seven Days whispered to their victims?

“The drink abuse you?” Mr. Solomon was looking at him. “Sweet soda water don’t agree with me.”

Milkman shook his head and swallowed the rest hurriedly. “No,” he said. “I’m just…car weary. I think I’ll sit outside awhile.” He started toward the door.

“You want me to see ‘bout your car for you?” Mr. Solomon sounded slightly offended.

“In a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Milkman pushed the screen door and stepped outside on the porch. The sun was blazing. He took off his jacket and held it on his forefinger over his shoulder. He gazed up and down the dusty road. Shotgun houses with wide spaces between them, a few dogs, chickens, children, and the women with nothing in their hands. They sat on porches, and walked in the road swaying their hips under cotton dresses, bare-legged, their unstraightened hair braided or pulled straight back into a ball. He wanted one of them bad. To curl up in a cot in that one’s arms, or that one, or that. That’s the way Pilate must have looked as a girl, looked even now, but out of place in the big northern city she had come to. Wide sleepy eyes that tilted up at the corners, high cheekbones, full lips blacker than their skin, berry-stained, and long long necks. There must be a lot of intermarriage in this place, he thought. All the women looked alike, and except for some light-skinned red-headed men (like Mr. Solomon), the men looked very much like the women. Visitors to Shalimar must be rare, and new blood that settled here nonexistent.

Milkman stepped off the porch, scattering the hens, and walked down the road toward a clump of trees near a building that looked like a church or clubhouse of some sort. Children were playing behind the trees. Spreading his jacket on the burnt grass, he sat down and lit a cigarette.

Guitar was here. Had asked for him. But why was he afraid? They were friends, close friends. So close he had told him all about the Seven Days. There was no trust heavier than that. Milkman was a confidant, almost an accomplice. So why was he afraid? It was senseless. Guitar must have left that particular message so Milkman could know who was looking for him without his giving his name. Something must have happened back home. Guitar must be running, from the police, maybe, and decided to run toward his friend—the only one other than the Days who would know what it was all about and whom he could trust. Guitar needed to find Milkman and he needed help. That was it. But if Guitar knew Milkman was headed for Shalimar, he must have found that out in Roanoke, or Culpeper—or maybe even in Danville. And if he knew that, why didn’t he wait? Where was he now? Trouble. Guitar was in trouble.

Behind him the children were singing a kind of ring-around-the-rosy or Little Sally Walker game. Milkman turned to watch. About eight or nine boys and girls were standing in a circle. A boy in the middle, his arms outstretched, turned around like an airplane, while the others sang some meaningless rhyme:

Jay the only son of Solomon

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee

Whirl about and touch the sun

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee…

They went on with several verses, the boy in the middle doing his imitation of an airplane. The climax of the game was a rapid shouting of nonsense words accompanied by more rapid twirling: “Solomon rye balaly shoo; yaraba medina hamlet too”—until the last line. “Twenty-one children the last one Jay!” At which point the boy crashed to earth and the others screamed.

Milkman watched the children. He’d never played like that as a child. As soon as he got up off his knees at the window sill, grieving because he could not fly, and went off to school, his velvet suit separated him from the other children. White and black thought he was a riot and went out of their way to laugh at him and see to it that he had no lunch to eat, nor any crayons, nor ever got through the line to the toilet or the water fountain. His mother finally surrendered to his begging for corduroy knickers or straights, which helped a little, but he was never asked to play those circle games, those singing games, to join in anything, until Guitar pulled those four boys off him. Milkman smiled, remembering how Guitar grinned and whooped as the four boys turned on him. It was the first time Milkman saw anybody really enjoy a fight. Afterward Guitar had taken off his baseball cap and handed it to Milkman, telling him to wipe the blood from his nose. Milkman bloodied the cap, returned it, and Guitar slapped it back on his head.

Remembering those days now, Milkman was ashamed of having been frightened or suspicious of Guitar’s message. When he turned up, he would explain everything and Milkman would do what he could to help. He stood up and brushed his jacket. A black rooster strutted by, its blood-red comb draped forward like a wicked brow.

Milkman walked back toward Solomon’s store. He needed a place to stay, some information, and a woman, not necessarily in that order. He would begin wherever the beginning was. In a way it was good Guitar had asked for him. Along with waiting for him and waiting for some way to get a new fan belt, he had a legitimate reason to dawdle. Hens and cats gave up their places on the steps as he approached them.

“Feelin better, are ya?” asked Mr. Solomon.

“Much better. Just needed a stretch, I guess.” He jutted his chin toward the window. “Nice around here. Peaceful. Pretty women too.”

A young man sitting on a chair tilted to the wall pushed his hat back from his forehead and let the front legs of the chair hit the floor. His lips were open, exposing the absence of four front teeth. The other men moved their feet. Mr. Solomon smiled but didn’t say anything. Milkman sensed that he’d struck a wrong note. About the women, he guessed. What kind of place was this where a man couldn’t even ask for a woman?

He changed the subject. “If my friend, the one who stopped by this morning, was going to wait for me here, where would he be likely to find a place to stay? Any rooming houses around here?”

“Rooming houses?”

“Yeah. Where a man can spend the night.”

Mr. Solomon shook his head. “Nothin like that here.”

Milkman was getting annoyed. What was all the hostility for? He looked at the men sitting around the store. “You think maybe one of them could help with the car?” he asked Mr. Solomon. “Maybe get another belt somewhere?”

Mr. Solomon kept his eyes on the counter. “Guess I could ask them.” His voice was soft; he spoke as if he was embarrassed about something. There was none of the earlier chattiness he’d been full of when Milkman arrived.

“If they can’t find one, let me know right away. I may have to buy another car to get back home.”

Every one of the faces of the men turned to look at him, and Milkman knew he had said something else wrong, although he didn’t know what. He only knew that they behaved as if they’d been insulted.

In fact they had been. They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken. And what’s more, who had said so in front of them. He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them “them,” and would certainly despise their days, which should have been spent harvesting their own crops, instead of waiting around the general store hoping a truck would come looking for mill hands or tobacco pickers in the flatlands that belonged to somebody else. His manner, his clothes were reminders that they had no crops of their own and no land to speak of either. Just vegetable gardens, which the women took care of, and chickens and pigs that the children took care of. He was telling them that they weren’t men, that they relied on women and children for their food. And that the lint and tobacco in their pants pockets where dollar bills should have been was the measure. That thin shoes and suits with vests and smooth smooth hands were the measure. That eyes that had seen big cities and the inside of airplanes were the measure. They had seen him watching their women and rubbing his fly as he stood on the steps. They had also seen him lock his car as soon as he got out of it in a place where there couldn’t be more than two keys twenty-five miles around. He hadn’t found them fit enough or good enough to want to know their names, and believed himself too good to tell them his. They looked at his skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers.

Now one of them spoke to the Negro with the Virginia license and the northern accent.

“Big money up North, eh?”

“Some,” Milkman answered.

“Some? I hear tell everybody up North got big money.”

“Lotta people up North got nothing.” Milkman made his voice pleasant, but he knew something was developing.

“That’s hard to believe. Why would anybody want to stay there if they ain’t no big money?”

“The sights, I guess.” Another man answered the first. “The sights and the women.”

“You kiddin,” said the first man in mock dismay. “You mean to tell me pussy different up North?”

“Naw,” said the second. “Pussy the same everywhere. Smell like the ocean; taste like the sea.”

“Can’t be,” said a third. “Got to be different.”

“Maybe the pricks is different.” The first man spoke again.

“Reckon?” asked the second man.

“So I hear tell,” said the first man.

“How different?” asked the second man.

“Wee little,” said the first man. “Wee, wee little.”

“Naw!” said the second man.

“So they tell me. That’s why they pants so tight. That true?” The first man looked at Milkman for an answer.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Milkman. “I never spent much time smacking my lips over another man’s dick.” Everybody smiled, including Milkman. It was about to begin.

“What about his ass hole? Ever smack your lips over that?”

“Once,” said Milkman. “When a little young nigger made me mad and I had to jam a Coke bottle up his ass.”

“What’d you use a bottle for? Your cock wouldn’t fill it?”

“It did. After I took the Coke bottle out. Filled his mouth too.”

“Prefer mouth, do you?”

“If it’s big enough, and ugly enough, and belongs to a ignorant motherfucker who is about to get the livin shit whipped out of him.”

The knife glittered.

Milkman laughed. “I ain’t seen one of those since I was fourteen. Where I come from boys play with knives—if they scared they gonna lose, that is.”

The first man smiled. “That’s me, motherfucker. Scared to death I’m gonna lose.”

Milkman did the best he could with a broken bottle, but his face got slit, so did his left hand, and so did his pretty beige suit, and he probably would have had his throat cut if two women hadn’t come running in screaming, “Saul! Saul!”

The store was full of people by then and the women couldn’t get through. The men tried to shush them, but they kept on screaming and provided enough lull for Mr. Solomon to interrupt the fight.

“All right. All right. That’s enough of that.”

“Shut your mouth, Solomon.”

“Get them women outta here.”

“Stick him, Saul, stick that cocksucker.”

But Saul had a jagged cut over his eye and the blood pouring from it made it hard to see. It was difficult but not impossible for Mr. Solomon to pull him away. He left cursing Milkman, but his fervor was gone.

Milkman backed up against the counter, waiting to see if anybody else was going to jump him. When it looked as if no one was, and when the people were drifting outside to watch Saul scuffling and cursing at the men pulling him away, he slumped a little and wiped his face. When the entire store save for the owner was empty, Milkman hurled the broken bottle into a corner. It careened by the cooler and bounced off the wall before splintering on the floor. He walked outside, still panting, and looked around. Four older men still sat on the porch, as though nothing had happened. Blood was streaming down Milkman’s face, but it had dried on his hand. He kicked at a white hen and sat down on the top step, wiping the blood with his handkerchief. Three young women with nothing in their hands stood in the road looking at him. Their eyes were wide but noncommittal. Children joined them, circling the women like birds. Nobody said anything. Even the four men on the porch were quiet. Nobody came toward him, offered him a cigarette or a glass of water. Only the children and the hens walked around. Under the hot sun, Milkman was frozen with anger. If he’d had a weapon, he would have slaughtered everybody in sight.

“You pretty good with a bottle. How you with a shotgun?” One of the older men had sidled up to him. The smile on his face was faint. It was as though now that the young men had had their chance, with unsatisfactory results, the older men would take over. Their style, of course, would be different. No name-calling toilet contest for them. No knives either, or hot breath and knotted neck muscles. They would test him, match and beat him, probably, on some other ground.

“Best shot there is,” Milkman lied.

“That so?”

“Yeah, it’s so.”

“Some of us is going huntin later on. Care to join us?”

“That toothless motherfucker going too?”

“Saul? No.”

“Cause I might have to knock the rest of them out.”

The man laughed. “Sheriff took the others—with the butt of a gun.”

“Yeah? Good.”

“Well, you comin?”

“Sure I’m coming. Just get me the gun.”

He laughed again. “Name’s Omar.”

“Macon Dead.”

Omar blinked at the name, but didn’t comment on it. He merely told him to come by King Walker’s, a gas station about two miles up the road, right around sundown. “It’s straight up yonder. Ain’t no way in the world you can miss it.”

“I won’t miss it.” Milkman stood up and walked to his car. He fumbled for the car keys, opened the door, and slid into the seat. He rolled down all four windows, found a towel in the back seat, and stretched out, using his jacket for a pillow and the towel as a bandage for his face. His feet stuck out the open door. Fuck ’em. Who were all these people roaming the world trying to kill him? His own father had tried while he was still in his mother’s stomach. But he’d lived. And he had lived the last year dodging a woman who came every month to kill him, and he had lain just like this, with his arm over his eyes, wide open to whatever she had in her hand. He’d lived through that too. Then a witch had stepped out of his childhood nightmares to grab him, and he’d lived through that. Some bats had driven him out of a cave–and he’d lived through that. And at no time did he have a weapon. Now he walked into a store and asked if somebody could fix his car and a nigger pulled a knife on him. And he still wasn’t dead. Now what did these black Neanderthals think they were going to do? Fuck ’em. My name’s Macon; I’m already dead. He had thought this place, this Shalimar, was going to be home. His original home. His people came from here, his grandfather and his grandmother. All the way down South people had been nice to him, generous, helpful. In Danville they had made him the object of hero worship. In his own home town his name spelled dread and grudging respect. But here, in his “home,” he was unknown, unloved, and damn near killed. These were some of the meanest unhung niggers in the world.