Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

Later, at the reception, the priest asked her point-blank whether she was Catholic.

“No. I’m Methodist,” she said.

“I see,” he said. “Well, the sacraments of the Church are reserved for—” Just then old Mrs. Djvorak interrupted him.

“Father,” she said, “I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter. Her father saved Ricky’s life. Ricky wouldn’t be here today if…”

Father Padrew smiled and shook Ruth’s hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Foster.”

It was a simple occurrence, elaborately told. Lena listened and experienced each phrase of her mother’s emotion from religious ecstasy to innocent confidence to embarrassment. Corinthians listened analytically, expectantly—wondering how her mother would develop this anecdote into a situation in which Macon would either lash out at her verbally or hit her. Milkman was only half listening.

“‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked me. Well, I was embarrassed for a minute, but then I said, ‘No. I’m Methodist.’ And he started to tell me that only Catholics could take communion in a Catholic church. Well, I never heard of that. Anybody can take communion, I thought. At our church anybody can come up on the first Sunday. Well, before he could get it out, Anna came up and said, ‘Father, I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter.’ Well, the priest was all smiles then. And shook my hand and said he was very pleased and honored to make my acquaintance. So it all turned out all right. But honestly, I didn’t know. I went up there as innocent as a lamb.”

“You didn’t know that only Catholics take communion in a Catholic church?” Macon Dead asked her, his tone making it clear that he didn’t believe her.

“No, Macon. How would I know?”

“You see them put up their own school, keep their kids out of public schools, and you still think their religious stuff is open to anybody who wants to drop in?”

“Communion is communion.”

“You’re a silly woman.”

“Father Padrew didn’t think so.”

“You made a fool of yourself.”

“Mrs. Djvorak didn’t think so.”

“She was just trying to keep the wedding going, keep you from fucking it up.”

“Macon, please don’t use that language in front of the children.”

“What goddam children? Everybody in here is old enough to vote.”

“There is no call for an argument.”

“You make a fool of yourself in a Catholic church, embarrass everybody at the reception, and come to the table to gloat about how wonderful you were?”

“Macon…”

“And sit there lying, saying you didn’t know any better?”

“Anna Djvorak wasn’t the least bit—”

“Anna Djvorak don’t even know your name! She called you Dr. Foster’s daughter! I bet you one hundred dollars she still don’t know your name! You by yourself ain’t nobody. You your daddy’s daughter!”

“That’s so,” said Ruth in a thin but steady voice. “I certainly am my daddy’s daughter.” She smiled.

Macon didn’t wait to put his fork down. He dropped it on the table while his hand was on its way across the bread plate becoming the fist he smashed into her jaw.

Milkman hadn’t planned any of it, but he had to know that one day, after Macon hit her, he’d see his mother’s hand cover her lips as she searched with her tongue for any broken teeth, and discovering none, tried to adjust the partial plate in her mouth without anyone noticing—and that on that day he would not be able to stand it. Before his father could draw his hand back, Milkman had yanked him by the back of his coat collar, up out of his chair, and knocked him into the radiator. The window shade flapped and rolled itself up.

“You touch her again, one more time, and I’ll kill you.”

Macon was so shocked at being assaulted he could not speak. He had come to believe, after years of creating respect and fear wherever he put his foot down, after years of being the tallest man in every gathering, that he was impregnable. Now he crept along the wall looking at a man who was as tall as he was—and forty years younger.

Just as the father brimmed with contradictory feelings as he crept along the wall—humiliation, anger, and a grudging feeling of pride in his son—so the son felt his own contradictions. There was the pain and shame of seeing his father crumple before any man—even himself. Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

He also felt glee. A snorting, horse-galloping glee as old as desire. He had won something and lost something in the same instant. Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the latter. So he cock-walked around the table and asked his mother, “Are you all right?”

She was looking at her fingernails. “Yes, I’m fine.”

Milkman looked at his sisters. He had never been able to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother. They were in their early teens when he was born; they were thirty-five and thirty-six now. But since Ruth was only sixteen years older than Lena, all three had always looked the same age to him. Now when he met his sisters’ eyes over the table, they returned him a look of hatred so fresh, so new, it startled him. Their pale eyes no longer appeared to blur into their even paler skin. It seemed to him as though charcoal lines had been drawn around their eyes; that two drag lines had been smudged down their cheeks, and their rosy lips were swollen in hatred so full it was about to burst through. Milkman had to blink twice before their faces returned to the vaguely alarmed blandness he was accustomed to. Quickly he left the room, realizing there was no one to thank him—or abuse him. His action was his alone. It would change nothing between his parents. It would change nothing inside them. He had knocked his father down and perhaps there were some new positions on the chessboard, but the game would go on.

Sleeping with Hagar had made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined. Wide-spirited and generous enough to defend his mother, whom he almost never thought about, and to deck his father, whom he both feared and loved.

Back in his bedroom, Milkman fiddled with things on his dresser. There was a pair of silver-backed brushes his mother had given him when he was sixteen, engraved with his initials, the abbreviated degree designation of a doctor. He and his mother had joked about it and she hinted strongly that he ought to consider going to medical school. He’d foisted her off with “How would that look? M.D., M.D. If you were sick, would you go see a man called Dr. Dead?”

She laughed but reminded him that his middle name was Foster. Couldn’t he use Foster as a last name? Dr. Macon Foster. Didn’t that sound fine? He had to admit that it did. The silver-backed brushes were a constant reminder of what her wishes for him were—that he not stop his education at high school, but go on to college and medical school. She had as little respect for her husband’s work as Macon had for college graduates. To Milkman’s father, college was time spent in idleness, far away from the business of life, which was learning to own things. He was eager for his daughters to go to college—where they could have found suitable husbands—and one, Corinthians, did go. But it was pointless for Milkman, particularly since his son’s presence was a real help to him in the office. So much so that he had been able to get his bank friends to speak to some of their friends and get his son moved out of I-A draft classification and into a “necessary to support family” status.