Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

“Hadn’t been for your daddy, I wouldn’t be here today. I would have died in the womb. And died again in the woods. Those woods and the dark would have surely killed me. But he saved me and here I am boiling eggs. Our papa was dead, you see. They blew him five feet up into the air. He was sitting on his fence waiting for ‘em, and they snuck up from behind and blew him five feet into the air. So when we left Circe’s big house we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them woods. Farm country. But Papa came back one day. We didn’t know it was him at first, cause we both saw him blowed five feet into the air. We were lost then. And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

“Now, we lost and there was this wind and in front of us was the back of our daddy. We were some scared children. Macon kept telling me that the things we was scared of wasn’t real. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? I remember doing laundry for a man and his wife once, down in Virginia. The husband came into the kitchen one afternoon shivering and saying did I have any coffee made. I asked him what was it that had grabbed hold of him, he looked so bad. He said he couldn’t figure it out, but he felt like he was about to fall off a cliff. Standing right there on that yellow and white and red linoleum, as level as a flatiron. He was holding on to the door first, then the chair, trying his best not to fall down. I opened my mouth to tell him wasn’t no cliff in that kitchen. Then I remembered how it was being in those woods. I felt it all over again. So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn’t fall. He looked at me with the most grateful look in the world. ‘Would you?’ he said. I walked around back of him and locked my fingers in front of his chest and held on to him. His heart was kicking under his vest like a mule in heat. But little by little it calmed down.”

“You saved his life,” said Guitar.

“No such thing. His wife come in before it was time to let go. She asked me what I was doing and I told her.”

“Told her what? What’d you say?”

“The truth. That I was trying to keep him from falling off a cliff.”

“I bet he wished he had jumped off then. She believe you? Don’t tell me she believed you.”

“Not right away she didn’t. But soon’s I let go he fell dead-weight to the floor. Smashed his glasses and everything. Fell right on his face. And you know what? He went down so slow. I swear it took three minutes, three whole minutes to go from a standing upright position to when he mashed his face on the floor. I don’t know if the cliff was real or not, but it took him three minutes to fall down it.”

“Was he dead?” asked Guitar.

“Stone dead.”

“Who shot your daddy? Did you say somebody shot him?” Guitar was fascinated, his eyes glittering with lights.

“Five feet into the air…”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who and I don’t know why. I just know what I’m telling you: what, when, and where.”

“You didn’t say where.” He was insistent.

“I did too. Off a fence.”

“Where was the fence?”

“On our farm.”

Guitar laughed, but his eyes were too shiny to convey much humor. “Where was the farm?”

“Montour County.”

He gave up on “where.” “Well, when then?”

“When he sat there—on the fence.”

Guitar felt like a frustrated detective. “What year?”

“The year they shot them Irish people down in the streets. Was a good year for guns and gravediggers, I know that.” Pilate put a barrel lid on the table. Then she lifted the eggs from the wash basin and began to peel them. Her lips moved as she played an orange seed around in her mouth. Only after the eggs were split open, revealing moist reddish-yellow centers, did she return to her story. “One morning we woke up when the sun was nearly a quarter way cross the sky. Bright as anything. And blue. Blue like the ribbons on my mother’s bonnet. See that streak of sky?” She pointed out the window. “Right behind them hickories. See? Right over there.”

They looked and saw the sky stretching back behind the houses and the trees. “That’s the same color,” she said, as if she had discovered something important. “Same color as my mama’s ribbons. I’d know her ribbon color anywhere, but I don’t know her name. After she died Papa wouldn’t let anybody say it. Well, before we could get the sand rubbed out of our eyes and take a good look around, we saw him sitting there on a stump. Right in the sunlight. We started to call him but he looked on off, like he was lookin at us and not lookin at us at the same time. Something in his face scared us. It was like looking at a face under water. Papa got up after a while and moved out of the sun on back into the woods. We just stood there looking at the stump. Shaking like leaves.”

Pilate scraped the eggshells together into a little heap, her fingers fanning out over and over again in a gentle sweeping. The boys watched, afraid to say anything lest they ruin the next part of her story, and afraid to remain silent lest she not go on with its telling.

“Shaking like leaves,” she murmured, “just like leaves.”

Suddenly she lifted her head and made a sound like a hoot owl. “Ooo! Here I come!”

Neither Milkman nor Guitar saw or heard anyone approaching, but Pilate jumped up and ran toward the door. Before she reached it, a foot kicked it open and Milkman saw the bent back of a girl. She was dragging a large five-bushel basket of what looked like brambles, and a woman was pushing the other side of it, saying, “Watch the doorsill, baby.”

“I got it,” the girl answered. “Push.”

“About time,” said Pilate. “The light be gone before you know it.”

“Tommy’s truck broke down,” the girl said, panting. When the two had managed to get the basket into the room, the girl stretched her back and turned around, facing them. But Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind.

“Hagar.” Pilate looked around the room. “This here’s your brother, Milkman. And this is his friend. What’s your name again, pretty?”

“Guitar.”

“Guitar? You play any?” she asked.

“That ain’t her brother, Mama. They cousins.” The older woman spoke.

“Same thing.”

“No it ain’t. Is it, baby?”

“No,” said Hagar. “It’s different.”

“See there. It’s different.”

“Well, what is the difference, Reba? You know so much.”

Reba looked at the ceiling. “A brother is a brother if you both got the same mother or if you both—”

Pilate interrupted her. “I mean what’s the difference in the way you act toward ’em? Don’t you have to act the same way to both?”

“That’s not the point, Mama.”

“Shut up, Reba. I’m talking to Hagar.”

“Yes, Mama. You treat them both the same.”

“Then why they got two words for it ‘stead of one, if they ain’t no difference?” Reba put her hands on her hips and opened her eyes wide.

“Pull that rocker over here,” said Pilate. “You boys have to give up your seats unless you gonna help.”

The women circled the basket, which was full of blackberries still on their short, thorny branches.