Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

The dogs were trying their best to get up into the tree, and the men were considering whether to shoot the bobcat down, shoot a limb and make him jump down and fight the dogs, or what. They decided to try and kill the cat where he lay. Omar stood up and took his lamp over to the left. The cat crept a little ways out, following the light. Then Small Boy took aim and put a bullet just under the left foreleg and the bobcat dropped through the branches into the jaws of Becky and her companions.

There was a lot of life in the cat; he fought well until Calvin hollered the dogs away and shot it again, and once more, and then it was still.

They held the lamps over the carcass and groaned with pleasure at the size, the ferocity, the stillness of it. All four got down on their knees, pulling rope and knives, cutting a branch the width of a wrist, tying it and binding it for the long walk back.

They were so pleased with themselves it was some time before anybody remembered to ask Milkman what he was shooting at back there. Milkman hoisted the stake he was carrying a little higher and said, “I dropped the gun. I tripped and it went off. Then when I picked it up it went off again.”

They burst into laughter. “Tripped? What’d you have the safety off for? Was you scared?”

“Scared to death,” said Milkman. “Scared to death.”

They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there—on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.

They met dawn in King Walker’s gas station for a rehash of the night they had spent. Milkman was the butt of their humor, but it was good-humored humor, quite unlike the laughter the trip had begun with. “Lucky to be alive. Cat wasn’t the problem; this here nigger was the problem. Blastin away at us while we got a mean cat gettin ready to chew us and the dogs up both. Shootin all through the woods. Could have blown his own head off. Don’t you city boys know how to handle yourself?”

“You country niggers got it all over us,” Milkman answered.

Omar and Small Boy slapped him on the shoulders. Calvin hollered to Luther, “Go get Vernell. Tell her to get breakfast ready. Soon’s we skin this cat, we comin in there with a appetite and she better be ready to meet it!”

Milkman went with them to the back of the station, where, on a small cemented area covered by a corrugated tin roof, the dead bobcat lay. Milkman’s neck had swollen so it was difficult for him to lower his chin without pain.

Omar sliced through the rope that bound the bobcat’s feet. He and Calvin turned it over on its back. The legs fell open. Such thin delicate ankles.

“Every body wants a black man’s life.”

Calvin held the forefeet open and up while Omar pierced the curling hair at the point where the sternum lay. Then he sliced all the way down to the genitals. His knife pointed upward for a cleaner, neater incision.

“Not his dead life; I mean his living life.”

When he reached the genitals he cut them off, but left the scrotum intact.

“It’s the condition our condition is in.”

Omar cut around the legs and the neck. Then he pulled the hide off.

“What good is a man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?”

The transparent underskin tore like gossamer under his fingers.

“Everybody wants the life of a black man.”

Now Small Boy knelt down and slit the flesh from the scrotum to the jaw.

“Fair is one more thing I’ve given up.”

Luther came back and, while the others rested, carved out the rectal tube with the deft motions of a man coring an apple.

“I hope I never have to ask myself that question.”

Luther reached into the paunch and lifted the entrails. He dug under the rib cage to the diaphragm and carefully cut around it until it was free.

“It is about love. What else but love? Can’t I love what I criticize?”

Then he grabbed the windpipe and the gullet, eased them back, and severed them with one stroke of his little knife.

“It is about love. What else?”

They turned to Milkman. “You want the heart?” they asked him. Quickly, before any thought could paralyze him, Milkman plunged both hands into the rib cage. “Don’t get the lungs, now. Get the heart.”

“What else?”

He found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell.

“What else? What else? What else?”

Now Luther went back into the stomach cavity and yanked the entrails out altogether. They sucked up like a vacuum through the hole that was made at the rectum. He slipped the entrails into a paper bag while the others began cleaning up, hosing down, salting, packing, straightening, and then they turned the cat over to let the blood drain down on its own hide.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Milkman.

“Eat him!”

A peacock soared away and lit on the hood of a blue Buick.

Milkman looked at the bobcat’s head. The tongue lay in its mouth as harmless as a sandwich. Only the eyes held the menace of the night.

Hungry as he was, he couldn’t eat much of Vernell’s breakfast, so he pushed the scrambled eggs, hominy, fried apples around in the plate, gulped coffee and talked a lot. And, somehow, he had to get around to the purpose of his visit to Shalimar.

“You know, my grandfather came from somewhere near here. My grandmother too.”

“Did? From around here? What’s their name?”

“I don’t know her maiden name, but her first name was Sing. Any of you ever know anybody with a name like that?”

They shook their heads. “Sing? No. Never heard of nobody name that.”

“I had an aunt live down this way too. Name of Pilate. Pilate Dead. Ever hear of her?”

“Ha! Sound like a newspaper headline: Pilot Dead. She do any flying?”

“No. P-i-l-a-t-e, Pilate.”

“P-i-l-a-t-e. That spell Pie-late,” Small Boy said.

“Naw, nigger. Not no Pie-late. Pilate like in the Bible, dummy.”

“He don’t read the Bible.”

“He don’t read nothin.”

“He can’t read nothin.”

They teased Small Boy until Vernell interrupted them. “You all hush. You say Sing?” she asked Milkman.

“Yeah. Sing.”

“I believe that was the name of a girl my gran used to play with. I remember the name cause it sounded so pretty. Gran used to talk about her all the time. Seem like her folks didn’t like her to play with the colored children from over this way, so her and my gran used to sneak off and go fishin and berry-pickin. You know what I mean? She’d have to meet her in secret.” Vernell eyed Milkman carefully. “This Sing girl was light-skinned, with straight black hair.”

“That’s her!” Milkman said. “She was mixed or Indian, one.”

Vernell nodded. “Indian. One of old Heddy’s children. Heddy was all right, but she didn’t like her girl playin with coloreds. She was a Byrd.”

“A what?”

“A Byrd. Belonged to the Byrd family over by the ridge. Near Solomon’s Leap.”

“Oh, yeah?” said one of the men. “One of Susan Byrd’s people?”

“That’s right. One of them. They never was too crazy ‘bout colored folks. Susan either.”

“Do they still live there?” asked Milkman.

“Susan do. Right behind the ridge. Only house back in there with a brick front. She by herself now. All the others moved out so they could pass.”