Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

“What did you call them?”

“Weimaraners. German.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Oh, I keep some. Sell some. Till we all die in here together.” She smiled.

She had dainty habits which matched her torn and filthy clothes in precisely the way her strong young cultivated voice matched her wizened face. Her white hair—braided, perhaps; perhaps not—she touched as though replacing a wayward strand from an elegant coiffure. And her smile—an opening of flesh like celluloid dissolving under a drop of acid—was accompanied by a press of fingers on her chin. It was this combination of daintiness and cultivated speech that misled Macon and invited him to regard her as merely foolish.

“You should get out once in a while.”

She looked at him.

“Is this your house now? Did they will you this? Is that why you have to stay here?”

She pressed her lips over her gums. “The only reason I’m here alone is because she died. She killed herself. All the money was gone, so she killed herself. Stood right there on the landing where you were a minute ago and threw herself off the banister. She didn’t die right away, though; she lay in the bed a week or two and there was nobody here but us. The dogs were in the kennel then. I brought her in the world, just like I did her mother and her grandmother before that. Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well, grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”

“Some friend of Reverend Cooper said she looked white. My grandmother. Was she?”

“No. Mixed. Indian mostly. A good-looking woman, but fierce, for the young woman I knew her as. Crazy about her husband too, overcrazy. You know what I mean? Some women love too hard. She watched over him like a pheasant hen. Nervous. Nervous love.”

Milkman thought about this mixed woman’s great-granddaughter, Hagar, and said, “Yes. I know what you mean.”

“But a good woman. I cried like a baby when I lost her. Like a baby. Poor Sing.”

“What?” He wondered if she lisped.

“I cried like a baby when I—”

“No. I mean what did you call her?”

“Sing. Her name was Sing.”

“Sing? Sing Dead. Where’d she get a name like that?”

“Where’d you get a name like yours? White people name Negroes like race horses.”

“I suppose so. Daddy told me how they got their name.”

“What’d he tell you?”

Milkman told her the story about the drunken Yankee.

“Well, he didn’t have to keep the name. She made him. She made him keep that name,” Circe said when he was through.

“She?”

“Sing. His wife. They met on a wagon going North. Ate pecans all the way, she told me. It was a wagonful of ex-slaves going to the promised land.”

“Was she a slave too?”

“No. No indeed. She always bragged how she was never a slave. Her people neither.”

“Then what was she doing on that wagon?”

“I can’t answer you because I don’t know. Never crossed my mind to ask her.”

“Where were they coming from? Georgia?”

“No. Virginia. Both of them lived in Virginia, her people and his. Down around Culpeper somewhere. Charlemagne or something like that.”

“I think that’s where Pilate was for a while. She lived all over the country before she came to us.”

“Did she ever marry that boy?”

“What boy?”

“The boy she had the baby by.”

“No. She didn’t marry him.”

“Didn’t think she would. She was too ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what?”

“Her stomach.”

“Oh, that.”

“Borned herself. I had very little to do with it. I thought they were both dead, the mother and the child. When she popped out you could have knocked me over. I hadn’t heard a heartbeat anywhere. She just came on out. Your daddy loved her. Hurt me to hear they broke away from one another. So it does me good to hear they’re back together again.” She had warmed up talking about the past and Milkman decided not to tell her that Macon and Pilate just lived in the same city. He wondered how she knew about their split, and if she knew what they broke apart about.

“You knew about their quarrel?” he asked quietly, non-chalantly.

“Not the substance. Just the fact. Pilate came back here just after her baby was born. One winter. She told me they split up when they left here and she hadn’t seen him since.”

“Pilate told me they lived in a cave for a few days after they left this house.”

“Is that right? Must have been Hunters Cave. Hunters used it to rest up in there sometimes. Eat. Smoke. Sleep. That’s where they dumped Old Macon’s body.”

“They who? I thought … My father said he buried him. Down by a creek or a river someplace where they used to fish.”

“He did. But it was too shallow and too close to the water. The body floated up at the first heavy rain. Those children hadn’t been gone a month when it floated up. Some men were fishing down there and saw this body, a Negro. So they knew who it was. Dumped it in the cave, and it was summer too. You’d think they would have buried a body in the summer. I told Mrs. Butler I thought it was a disgrace.”

“Daddy doesn’t know that.”

“Well, don’t tell him. Let him have his peace. It’s hard enough with a murdered father; he don’t need to know what happened to the body.”

“Did Pilate tell you why she came back here?”

“Yes. She said her father told her to. She had visits from him, she said.”

“I’d like to see that cave. Where he’s … where they put him.”

“Won’t be anything left to see now. That’s been a long time ago.”

“I know, but maybe there’s something I can bury properly.”

“Now, that’s a thought worth having. The dead don’t like it if they’re not buried. They don’t like it at all. You won’t have trouble finding it. You go back out the road you came in on. Go north until you come to a stile. It’s falling down, but you’ll see it’s a stile. Right in there the woods are open. Walk a little way in and you’ll come to a creek. Cross it. There’ll be some more woods, but ahead you’ll see a short range of hills. The cave is right on the face of those hills. You can’t miss it. It’s the only one there. Tell your daddy you buried him properly, in a graveyard. Maybe with a headstone. A nice headstone. I hope they find me soon enough and somebody’ll take pity on me.” She looked at the dogs. “Hope they find me soon and don’t let me lay in here too long.”

Milkman swallowed as her thought touched his mind. “People come to see you, don’t they?”

“Dog buyers. They come every now and then. They’ll find me, I guess.”

“Reverend Cooper…They think you’re dead.”

“Splendid. I don’t like those Negroes in town. Dog people come and the man that delivers the dog food once a week. They come. They’ll find me. I just hope it’s soon.”

He loosened his collar and lit another cigarette. Here in this dim room he sat with the woman who had helped deliver his father and Pilate; who had risked her job, her life, maybe, to hide them both after their father was killed, emptied their slop jars, brought them food at night and pans of water to wash. Had even sneaked off to the village to have the girl Pilate’s name and snuffbox made into an earring. Then healed the ear when it got infected. And after all these years was thrilled to see what she believed was one of them. Healer, deliverer, in another world she would have been the head nurse at Mercy. Instead she tended Weimaraners and had just one selfish wish: that when she died somebody would find her before the dogs ate her.

“You should leave this place. Sell the damn dogs. I’ll help you. You need money? How much?” Milkman felt a flood of pity and thought gratitude made her smile at him. But her voice was cold.