Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison (1977)
“A Black man searches for his identity through his family's mythic past — and discovers that his ancestors could literally fly.”
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Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison (1977) · 337pages · Contemporary / African American Literature · 9 AP appearances
Summary
Macon 'Milkman' Dead III grows up in a middle-class Michigan family disconnected from its roots. Guided by his eccentric aunt Pilate — a woman born without a navel — and pushed by his childhood friend Guitar's growing radicalism, Milkman travels south to find a cache of gold hidden by his grandfather, but instead discovers his family's mythic origins: the legend of Solomon, his great-great-grandfather who flew back to Africa and left his wife and twenty-one children behind. At the novel's end, Milkman leaps into the air toward Guitar — whether in death or in transcendence, Morrison refuses to say.
Why It Matters
Song of Solomon was Toni Morrison's breakthrough — the first novel by a Black woman to be a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection since 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, established Morrison as a major American novelist, and laid the thematic and formal groundwork for Beloved. ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Formally literary in narration, steeped in African American vernacular in dialogue — a deliberate fusion that refuses to choose between the academy and the community
Narrator: Third-person omniscient with deep interiority — Morrison moves fluidly between external observation and interior cons...
Figurative Language: Extremely high
Historical Context
Novel published 1977; set across approximately 1930s-1960s Michigan and Virginia: The novel's temporal span — from Macon Dead I's murder in the post-Reconstruction South through Milkman's journey in the early 1960s — maps the full arc of the Great Migration and its psychological...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Morrison gives this novel its title from the Biblical Song of Solomon — a love poem. How does the Biblical source complicate or enrich the novel? What kind of 'love song' is this?
- Every major character in the novel has a name with a story behind it. Analyze the naming of any three characters and argue what Morrison is saying through those names about identity, power, and inheritance.
- Guitar's argument for the Seven Days is logically coherent. Where does his reasoning go wrong? Or does it? Use specific dialogue to support your position.
- Solomon's flight is presented by Morrison as a real event — not legend, not metaphor. What happens to the novel if you read it as actual? What happens if you read it as purely metaphorical?
- Milkman discards Hagar with a politely worded note. Morrison then shows us Hagar's disintegration across several chapters. Why does Morrison spend so much time on Hagar's collapse when Milkman is the protagonist?
Notable Quotes
“Mr. Smith's blue silk wings must have left them with a hunger no one was going to satisfy that day.”
“O Sugarman done fly away / Sugarman done gone.”
“Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself.”
Why Read This
Because this is the novel that makes you understand what literature is actually for. Morrison doesn't just tell a story — she recovers a history that was deliberately suppressed, encodes it in form as well as content, and delivers it through prose...