Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

“Mercy?” Now she was asking a question. “Mercy?”

It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out—the one word held so long it became a sentence—and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she was answered in a sweet soprano: “I hear you.”

The people turned around. Reba had entered and was singing too. Pilate neither acknowledged her entrance nor missed a beat. She simply repeated the word “Mercy,” and Reba replied. The daughter standing at the back of the chapel, the mother up front, they sang.

In the nighttime.

Mercy.

In the darkness.

Mercy.

In the morning.

Mercy.

At my bedside.

Mercy.

On my knees now.

Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

They stopped at the same time in a high silence. Pilate reached out her hand and placed three fingers on the edge of the coffin. Now she addressed her words to the woman bordered in gray satin who lay before her. Softly, privately, she sang to Hagar the very same reassurance she had promised her when she was a little girl.

Who’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?

Who’s been botherin my baby?

Who’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?

Who’s been botherin my baby girl?

Somebody’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

Somebody’s been botherin my baby.

Somebody’s been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

Somebody’s been botherin my baby girl.

I’ll find who’s botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

I’ll find who’s botherin my baby.

I’ll find who’s botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin.

I’ll find who’s botherin my baby girl.

“My baby girl.” The three words were still pumping in her throat as she turned away from the coffin. Looking about at the faces of the people seated in the pews, she fastened on the first pair of eyes that were directed toward her. She nodded at the face and said, “My baby girl.” She looked for another pair of eyes and told him also, “My baby girl.” Moving back down the aisle, she told each face turned toward her the same piece of news. “My baby girl. That’s my baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl.”

Conversationally she spoke, identifying Hagar, selecting her away from everybody else in the world who had died. First she spoke to the ones who had the courage to look at her, shake their heads, and say, “Amen.” Then she spoke to those whose nerve failed them, whose glance would climb no higher than the long black fingers at her side. Toward them especially she leaned a little, telling in three words the full story of the stumped life in the coffin behind her. “My baby girl.” Words tossed like stones into a silent canyon.

Suddenly, like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh or his amazing strength, Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear, “And she was loved!”

It startled one of the sympathetic winos in the vestibule and he dropped his bottle, spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere.

Chapter 14

Perhaps it was because the sun had hit the rim of the horizon, but Susan Byrd’s house looked different. The cedar tree was a silvery gray and its bark crinkled all the way up. It looked to Milkman like the leg of an ancient elephant. And now he noticed that the ropes that held the swing were frayed and the picket fence that had looked so bright and perky before was really flaked, peeling, even leaning to the left. The blue steps leading to the porch were faded into a watery gray. In fact the whole house looked seedy.

He lifted his hand to knock on the door and noticed the doorbell. He rang it and Susan Byrd opened the door.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “you’re as good as your word.”

“I’d like to talk to you some more, if you don’t mind. About Sing. May I come in?”

“Of course.” She stood back from the door and the odor of another batch of gingerbread wafted out. Again they sat in the living room—he in the gray wing-back chair, she on the sofa this time. Miss Long was nowhere in sight.

“I know you don’t know who Sing married or if she married, but I was wondering—”

“Of course I know who she married. That is if they did marry. She married Jake, that black boy her mother took care of.”

Milkman felt dizzy. Everybody kept changing right in front of him. “But yesterday you said nobody heard from her after she left.”

“Nobody did. But they knew who she left with!”

“Jake?”

“Jake. Black Jake. Black as coal.”

“Where—where did they live? Boston?”

“I don’t know where they ended up. North, I guess. We never heard.”

“I thought you said she went to a private school in Boston.”

She dismissed the whole notion with a wave of her hand. “I just said that in front of her, Grace. She talks so much, you know. Carries tales all over the county. It’s true she was supposed to go to some school, but she didn’t. She left on that double-team wagon with that black boy, Jake. A whole lot of slaves got together. Jake was driving. Can you imagine it? Riding off with a wagonload of slaves?”

“What was Jake’s last name? Can you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think he had one. He was one of those flying African children. They must all be dead a long time now.”

“Flying African children?”

“Urn hm, one of Solomon’s children. Or Shalimar. Papa said Heddy always called him Shalimar.”

“And Heddy was…”

“My grandmother. Sing’s mother and Papa’s too. An Indian woman. She was the one who took care of Jake when his father left them all. She found him and took him home and raised him. She didn’t have any boy children then. My father, Crowell, came later.” She leaned forward and whispered, “She didn’t have a husband, Heddy. I didn’t want to go into all of that with Grace. You can imagine what she’d do with that information.

You’re a stranger, so it doesn’t matter. But Grace…” Susan Byrd looked pleadingly at the ceiling. “This Jake was a baby she found, and he and Sing grew up together, and I guess rather than be packed off to some Quaker school, she ran away with him. You know colored people and Indians mixed a lot, but sometimes, well, some Indians didn’t like it—the marrying, I mean. But neither one of them knew their own father, Jake nor Sing. And my own father didn’t know his. Heddy never said. I don’t know to this day if he was white, red, or—well—what. Sing’s name was Singing Bird. And my father’s name was Crow at first. Later he changed it to Crowell Byrd. After he took off his buckskin.” She smiled.

“Why did you call Solomon a flying African?”

“Oh, that’s just some old folks’ lie they tell around here. Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly. A lot of them flew back to Africa. The one around here who did was this same Solomon, or Shalimar—I never knew which was right. He had a slew of children, all over the place. You may have noticed that everybody around here claims kin to him. Must be over forty families spread in these hills calling themselves Solomon something or other. I guess he must have been hot stuff.” She laughed. “But anyway, hot stuff or not, he disappeared and left everybody. Wife, everybody, including some twenty-one children. And they say they all saw him go. The wife saw him and the children saw him. They were all working in the fields. They used to try to grow cotton here. Can you imagine? In these hills? But cotton was king then. Everybody grew it until the land went bad. It was cotton even when I was a girl. Well, back to this Jake boy. He was supposed to be one of Solomon’s original twenty-one—all boys and all of them with the same mother. Jake was the baby. The baby and the wife were right next to him when he flew off.”

“When you say ‘flew off’ you mean he ran away, don’t you? Escaped?”

“No, I mean flew. Oh, it’s just foolishness, you know, but according to the story he wasn’t running away. He was flying.

He flew. You know, like a bird. Just stood up in the fields one day, ran up some hill, spun around a couple of times, and was lifted up in the air. Went right on back to wherever it was he came from. There’s a big double-headed rock over the valley named for him. It like to killed the woman, the wife. I guess you could say ‘wife.’ Anyway she’s supposed to have screamed out loud for days. And there’s a ravine near here they call Ryna’s Gulch, and sometimes you can hear this funny sound by it that the wind makes. People say it’s the wife, Solomon’s wife, crying. Her name was Ryna. They say she screamed and screamed, lost her mind completely. You don’t hear about women like that anymore, but there used to be more—the kind of woman who couldn’t live without a particular man. And when the man left, they lost their minds, or died or something. Love, I guess. But I always thought it was trying to take care of children by themselves, you know what I mean?”

She talked on and on while Milkman sat back and listened to gossip, stories, legends, speculations. His mind was ahead of hers, behind hers, with hers, and bit by bit, with what she said, what he knew, and what he guessed, he put it all together.

Sing had said she was going to a Quaker school, but she joined Jake on his wagonful of ex-slaves heading for Boston or somewhere. They must have dropped their passengers all along the way. And then Jake, at the reins, took a wrong turn, because he couldn’t read, and they ended up in Pennsylvania.

“But there’s a children’s game they play around here. And in the game they sing, ‘Jake the only son of Solomon.’ Only.” He looked at her, hoping she wouldn’t mind the interruption.

“Well, they’re wrong. He wasn’t the only son. There were twenty others. But he was the only one Solomon tried to take with him. Maybe that’s what it means. He lifted him up, but dropped him near the porch of the big house. That’s where Heddy found him. She used to come over there and help with the soapmaking and the candlemaking. She wasn’t a slave, but she worked over at the big house certain times of year. She was melting tallow when she looked up and saw this man holding a baby and flying toward the ridge. He brushed too close to a tree and the baby slipped out of his arms and fell through the branches to the ground. He was unconscious, but the trees saved him from dying. Heddy ran over and picked him up. She didn’t have any male children, like I said, just a little bitty girl, and this one just dropped out of the sky almost in her lap. She never named him anything different; she was afraid to do that. She found out the baby was Ryna’s, but Ryna was out of her mind. Heddy lived a good ways off from the place Solomon and them others worked on. She tried to keep the girl away from that place too. And you can imagine how she felt when both of them ran off. Just my father was left.”

“Did Jake have to register at the Freedmen’s Bureau before he left the state?”

“Everybody did. Everybody who had been slaves, that is. Whether they left the state or not. But we were never slaves, so—”

“You told me that. Weren’t any of Jake’s brothers registering too?”

“I couldn’t say. Those must have been some times, back then. Some bad times. It’s a wonder anybody knows who anybody is.”

“You’ve helped me a lot, Miss Byrd. I’m grateful.” He thought then about asking her if she had a photo album. He wanted to see Sing, Crowell, even Heddy. But he decided against it. She might start asking him questions, and he didn’t want to trouble her with a new-found relative who was as black as Jake.

“Now, that’s not the woman you’re looking, is it? Pilate?”

“No,” he said. “Couldn’t be.” He made motions of departure and then remembered his watch.

“By did I leave my watch here? I’d like it back.”

“Watch?”

“Yes. Your friend wanted to see it. Miss Long. I handed it to her but I forgot—” Milkman stopped. Susan Byrd was laughing out loud.

“Well, you can say goodbye to it, Mr. Macon. Grace will go to dinner all over the county telling people about the watch you gave her.”

“What?”

“Well, you know. She doesn’t mean any real harm, but it’s a quiet place. We don’t have many visitors, especially young men who wear gold watches and have northern accents. I’ll get it back for you.”

“Never mind. Never mind.”

“You’ll just have to forgive her otherwise. This is a dull place, Mr. Macon. There’s absolutely nothing in the world going on here. Not a thing.”

Chapter 15

The fan belt didn’t last long enough for him to get to the next gasoline station. It broke on the edge of a little town called Jistann, the needle trembling at H. Milkman sold it to the tow-truck man for twenty dollars and caught the first bus out. It was probably best that way, for over the humming wheels, his legs folded in the little space in front of his seat, he had time to come down from the incredible high that had begun as soon as he slammed the Byrd woman’s door.

He couldn’t get back to Shalimar fast enough, and when he did get there, dusty and dirty from the run, he leaped into the car and drove to Sweet’s house. He almost broke her door down. “I want to swim!” he shouted. “Come on, let’s go swimming. I’m dirty and I want waaaaater!”

Sweet smiled and said she’d give him a bath.

“Bath! You think I’d put myself in that tight little porcelain box? I need the sea! The whole goddam sea!” Laughing, hollering, he ran over to her and picked her up at the knees and ran around the room with her over his shoulder. “The sea! I have to swim in the sea. Don’t give me no itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. I need the whole entire complete deep blue sea!”

He stood her on her feet. “Don’t you all swim around here?”

“Over at the quarry is where the kids go sometimes.”

“Quarry? You all don’t have no sea? No ocean?”

“Naw; this hill country.”

“Hill country. Mountain country. Flying country.”

“A man was here to see you.”

“Oh, yeah? That would be Mr. Guitar Bains.”

“He didn’t give his name.”

“He don’t have to! He’s Guitar Bains. Gitar, Gitar, Gitar Bains!” Milkman did a little dance and Sweet covered her mouth, laughing.

“Come on, Sweet, tell me where the sea is.”