Toni Morrison (1931-)

Song of Solomon


Characters:

• Robert Smith
• Ruth Foster Dead
• Milkman Dead
• Corinthians
• Magdalene
• Pilate
• Macon Dead II
• Guitar Bains

Plot summary:

• Robert Smith, an insurance agent, leaps off the roof of Mercy Hospital. The next day, Ruth Foster Dead, daughter of the first black doctor in town, gives birth to the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, Milkman Dead.
• Milkman grows up loved and privileged but does not reciprocate the kindness and attention of his relatives. He is afflicted with a genetic malady, an emotional disease that has its origins in oppressions endured by past generations and passed onto future ones. 
• When Milkman is 32, Macon Jr., his father, informs him that his aunt Pilate may have millions of dollars hidden in her shack. Milkman robs Pilate with his best friend, Guitar Bains but only finds rocks and a human skeleton, his grandfather's. 
• Milkman goes to Pennsylvania because he thinks that the gold might be in a cave near his grandfather's old farm, but ends up looking for his long-lost family history instead. He discovers that his grandfather's original name was Jake and that he was married to an Indian girl Sing.
• Milkman heads down to Shalimar, his grandfather's ancestral home in Virginia. Unbeknownst to him, he is followed by Guitar, who wants to murder Milkman because he thinks Milkman has cheated him out of his share of gold. 
• Milkman finds that Jake's father was the legendary flying African, Solomon, who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa. However, he abandoned his wife and their children, including Milkman's grandfather, Jake. 
• Milkman's findings give him profound joy and a sense of purpose, and he becomes a compassionate, responsible adult. Milkman survives an assassination by Guitar and returns home to tell his parents about his discoveries.
• He finds that Hagar, his cousin and lover, has died of a broken heart. Milkman buries Jake's bones on Solomon's Leap, the mountain from which Solomon's flight to Africa began, and Pilate is struck dead by a bullet Guitar had intended for Milkman. 

1. The singing woman . . . had wrapped herself up in an old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto

2. He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

3. Milkman closed his eyes and opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street.

4. “Gold,” he whispered, and immediately, like a burglar on his first job, stood up to pee.
Life, safety, and luxury fanned out before him like the tailspread of a peacock, and as he stood there trying to distinguish each delicious color, he saw the dusty boots of his father standing just on the other side of the shallow pit.

5. O Solomon don’t leave me here

Cotton balls to choke me
O Solomon don’t leave me here
Buckra’s arms to yoke me
Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone
Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home.

Beloved

Characters:

• Sethe
• Denver
• Baby Suggs
• Howard
• Buglar
• Paul D.
• Mr. Garner's Sweet Home plantation
• Sixo
• Schoolteacher
• Amy Denver
• Stamp Paid
• 124 Bluestone Road
• Ella
• Lady Jones

Plot summary:

• Sethe, a former slave, has been living with her 18 year old daughter Denver.
• Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby Snuggs, had lived with them previously. Just beforeBaby Suggs' death, Sethe's two sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away, and Sethe believes they fled because of the presence of an abusive ghost that has haunted their house  at 124  Bluestone Road for years. Denver, however, likes the ghost which everyone believes to be the spirit of her dead sister.
• The novel begins when Paul D, whom Sethe has not seen since they worked together on Mr. Garner's Sweet Home plantation 20 years earlier, stops by Sethe's house. His presence resurrects memories for Sethe. 
• Sethe was born in the South to an African mother she never knew. When she was thirteen she was sold to the Garners who practiced a benevolent slavery. 
• Sethe chooses to marry Halle, another man-slave who proved himself generous enough to buy his mother's freedom by hiring himself on the weekends. Sethe and Halle have Howard and Buglar as well as a baby daughter. 
• After the death of Mr. Garner, Mrs. Garner asks her racist brother-in-law, known to the slaves as Schoolteacher, to help run the farm. He makes the plantation unbearable and the slaves decide to run.
• Schoolteacher capture Paul D and Sixo and he kills Sixo. Sethe is still intent on running and has already sent her children to Baby Sugg's house in Cincinnati. Schoolteacher's nephews seize Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter. Unbeknownst to Sethe, Halle is watching the event from above, where he lies frozen with horror. Afterwards, he goes mad, and Paul D sees him sitting by a churn with butter slathered all over his face. Paul D has to wear an iron bit in his mouth. 
• Schoolteacher whips Sethe for reporting his misdeeds and his nephews' to Mrs. Garner, even though she is pregnant. Sethe runs away nevertheless but collapses from exhaustion in a forest. A white girl, Amy Denver, finds her and nurses her back to health. Sethe names her second daughter Denver after his girl who helped her. 
• Sethe receives help from Stamp Paid, who rows her across the Ohio River to Baby Sugg's house. 
• Schoolteacher comes for Sethe to take her and her children back, but Sethe flees with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them. Only the third child dies, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe. Sethe later arranges for the baby's headstone to be carved with the word "Beloved."
• The sheriff take Sethe and Denver to jail but a group of white abolitionists, led by the Bodwins, fight for her release. Sethe returns to Baby Suggs house but Baby Suggs has sunk into depression and the community shuns the house.
• Meanwhile, Paul D endures torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia where he was sent after trying to kill the slave owner he was sold to by Schoolteacher. His traumatic experiences cause him to lock away his memories and emotions in the "tin tobacco box" of his heart. He eventually escapes and ends up on Sethe's porch in Cincinnati. 
• Paul D chases the house's resident ghost away, which makes Denver resent him.
• Sethe and Paul D look forward to a future together until they encounter a strange young woman sleeping near the steps of 124. Most of the novel's characters believe that the woman - who calls herself beloved - is the embodied spirit of Sethe's dead daughter. Denver develops an obsessive attachment to Beloved and Beloved is attached to Sethe. Paul D and Beloved hate each other but she controls him by moving him around the house like a rag doll and seducing him against his will. 
• When Paul D learns of Sethe's infanticide, he leaves 124 and begins sleeping in the basement of the local church. In his absence, Sethe and beloved's relationship becomes more intense. Beloved grows increasingly abusive, manipulative and parasitic, and Sethe is obsessed with satisfying Beloved's demands and making her understand why she murdered her. 
• Denver leaves to seek help from Lady Jones, her former teacher. Under the leadership of Ella, a woman who had worked on the Underground Railroad and helped with Sethe's escape, they attempt to exorcise Beloved from 124. However, when they arrive at Sethe's house, they see Sethe on the porch with Beloved, who is smiling at them naked and pregnant. 
• Mr. Bodwin, who has come to 124 to take Denver to her new job, arrives at the house and Sethe runs at him with an ice pick, mistaking him for Schoolteacher. She is restrained but in the confusion Beloved disappears and never returns.
• Paul D comes back to Sethe who has retreated to Baby Sugg's bed to die. Mourning Beloved, Sethe laments, "She was my best thing." But Paul D replies "You your best thing , Sethe." The novel ends with a warning that "this is not a story to pass on" and that the town and residents of 124 have forgotten Beloved "like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep."

1. 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

2. White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

3. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

4. . . . [I]f you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there, waiting for you . . . [E]ven though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.

5. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe.