Jacqui on Song of Solomon

“Surrendering to the sound, Macon moved closer. He wanted no conversation, no witness, only to listen and perhaps to see the three of them, the source of that music that made him think of fields and wild turkey and calico. Treading as lightly as he could, he crept up to the side window where the candlelight flickered lowest, and peeped in. Reba was cutting her toenails with a kitchen knife or a switchblade, her long neck bent almost to her knees. The girl, Hagar was braiding her hair, while Pilate, whose face he could not see because her back was to the window, was stirring something in a pot. Wine pulp, perhaps. Macon knew it was not food she was stirring, for she and her daughters ate like children. Whatever they had a taste for. No meal was ever planned or balanced or served. Nor was there any gathering at the table. Pilate might bake hot bread and each one of them would eat it with butter whenever she felt like it. Or there might be grapes, left over from the winemaking, or peaches for days on end. If one of them bought a gallon of milk they drank it until it was gone. If another got a half bushel of tomatoes or a dozen ears of corn, they ate them until they were gone too. They ate what they had or came across or had a craving for. Profits from their wine-selling evaporated like sea water in a hot wind—going for junk jewelry for Hagar, Reba’s gifts to men, and he didn’t know what all.

Near the window, hidden by the dark, he felt the irritability of the day drain from him and relished the effortless beauty of the women singing in the candlelight. Reba’s soft profile, Hagar’s hands moving, moving in her heavy hair, and Pilate. He knew her face better than he knew his own. Singing now, her face would be a mask; all emotion and passion would have left her features and entered her voice. But he knew that when she was neither singing nor talking, her face was animated constantly by her moving lips. She chewed things. As a baby, as a very young girl, she kept things in her mouth—straw from brooms, gristle, buttons, seeds, leaves, string, and her favorite, when he could find some for her, rubber bands and India rubber erasers. Her lips were alive with small movements. If you were close to her, you wondered if she was about to smile or was she merely shifting a straw from the baseline of her gums to her tongue. Perhaps she was dislodging a curl of rubber band from inside her cheek, or was she really smiling? From a distance she appeared to be whispering to herself, when she was only nibbling or splitting tiny seeds with her front teeth. Her lips were darker than her skin, wine-stained, blueberry-dyed, so her face had a cosmetic look—as though she had applied a very dark lipstick neatly and blotted away its shine on a scrap of newspaper.

As Macon felt himself softening under the weight of memory and music, the song died down. The air was quiet and yet Macon Dead could not leave. He liked looking at them freely this way. They didn’t move. They simply stopped singing and Reba went on paring her toenails, Hagar threaded and unthreaded her hair, and Pilate swayed like a willow over her stirring” (Morrison 29-30).

This particular passage from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon initially stood out to me because of the parallel to the themes found in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. There is the similarity to Robinson’s novel with the separation of Macon from Pilate, Reba, and Hagar through a window, separating the darkness from the warmth of a home. This concept of being on the outside looking into a lighted house was a pivotal part of Robinson’s development of the characters in her novel. The characters on the outside, presumably Ruth and Sylvie, had been the more experienced characters, the ones more in touch with themselves—however, Morrison chooses to have Macon on the outside, alone in the dark although he’s the wealthier, more successful and “normal” by society’s standards. While resenting his sister in the day, he longs to have the closeness and the security that she feels with her family, but has chosen to not be a part of that feeling with Pilate, or anyone else, through his threatening and abusive personality. This perhaps causes readers to question the source of Macon’s hatred as a possible over exaggerated defense mechanism.

This passage is also particularly interesting, because it illuminates a different aspect of Macon’s personality by exposing parts of his past and the emotions these memories evoke. Before this scene in the novel, Macon is indirectly characterized through others’ reactions to him, mostly their fear of him. Yet, through his reactions and acute attention to his sister, such as his analysis of whether or not she’s chewing on something or about to smile—shows that he cares to know more about her, possibly guilt from the years he lost knowing her. It’s also key to notice that he refers to his sister as the child-like version of herself often. Similar to the narrator in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, who claimed it’s easier to have parents who died young because then the memory of them stays unchanged forever, Pilate in a sense has died to Macon through his shunning of her, and his image of her has therefore been crystallized in a more positive light, which is his memory of her as a young child, when he was close to her.

While Macon is without doubt evil through his actions and words, this particular passage speaks to a different, more human side of his character, because it shows a deep longing for acceptance, and possibly even regret for his abandonment of his sister and ultimately his own history.

Questions:

1. Do you agree that this passage exemplifies Macon’s suppressed feelings of guilt about his sister? Why or why not? Is yes, why does he push Pilate out of his life both literally and mentally if he longs for a connection?

2. How does Morrison’s diction help further characterize Pilate in this scene? What does her ability to recover after Macon’s hatred say about her character?