Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

Macon Dead’s Packard rolled slowly down Not Doctor Street, through the rough part of town (later known as the Blood Bank because blood flowed so freely there), over the bypass downtown, and headed for the wealthy white neighborhoods. Some of the black people who saw the car passing by sighed with good-humored envy at the classiness, the dignity of it. In 1936 there were very few among them who lived as well as Macon Dead. Others watched the family gliding by with a tiny bit of jealousy and a whole lot of amusement, for Macon’s wide green Packard belied what they thought a car was for. He never went over twenty miles an hour, never gunned his engine, never stayed in first gear for a block or two to give pedestrians a thrill. He never had a blown tire, never ran out of gas and needed twelve grinning raggle-tailed boys to help him push it up a hill or over to a curb. No rope ever held the door to its frame, and no teen-agers leaped on his running board for a lift down the street. He hailed no one and no one hailed him. There was never a sudden braking and backing up to shout or laugh with a friend. No beer bottles or ice cream cones poked from the open windows. Nor did a baby boy stand up to pee out of them. He never let rain fall on it if he could help it and he walked to Sonny’s Shop—taking the car out only on these occasions. What’s more, they doubted that he had ever taken a woman into the back seat, because rumor was that he went to “bad houses” or lay, sometimes, with a slack or lonely female tenant. Other than the bright and roving eyes of Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians, the Packard had no real lived life at all. So they called it Macon Dead’s hearse.

First Corinthians pulled her fingers through her hair. It was long, lightweight hair, the color of wet sand. “Are you going anyplace special, or are we just driving around?” She kept her eyes on the street, watching the men and women walking by.

“Careful, Macon. You always take the wrong turn here.” Ruth spoke softly from the right side of the car.

“Do you want to drive?” Macon asked her.

“You know I don’t drive,” she answered.

“Then let me do it.”

“All right, but don’t blame me if…”

Macon pulled smoothly into the left fork of the road that led through downtown and into a residential area.

“Daddy? Are we going any special place?”

“Honoré,” Macon said.

Magdalene called Lena pushed her stockings farther down on her legs. “On the lake? What’s out there? There’s nothing out there, nobody.”

“There’s a beach community out there, Lena. Your father wants to look at it.” Ruth reasserted herself into the conversation.

“What for? Those are white people’s houses,” said Lena.

“All of it’s not white people’s houses. Some of it’s nothing. Just land. Way over on the other side. It could be a nice summer place for colored people. Beach houses. You understand what I mean?” Macon glanced at his daughter through the rear-view mirror.

“Who’s going to live in them? There’s no colored people who can afford to have two houses,” Lena said.

“Reverend Coles can, and Dr. Singleton,” Corinthians corrected her.

“And that lawyer—what’s his name?” Ruth looked around at Corinthians, who ignored her.

“And Mary, I suppose.” Lena laughed.

Corinthians stared coldly at her sister. “Daddy wouldn’t sell property to a barmaid. Daddy, would you let us live next to a barmaid?”

“She owns that place, Corinthians,” Ruth said.

“I don’t care what she owns. I care about what she is. Daddy?” Corinthians leaned toward her father for confirmation.

“You’re going too fast, Macon.” Ruth pressed the toe of her shoe against the floorboard.

“If you say one more thing to me about the way I drive, you’re going to walk back home. I mean it.”

Magdalene called Lena sat forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Ruth was quiet. The little boy kicked his feet against the underside of the dashboard.

“Stop that!” Macon told him.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said his son.

Corinthians held her head. “Oh, Lord.”

“But you went before we left,” said Ruth.

“I have to go!” He was beginning to whine.

“Are you sure?” his mother asked him. He looked at her. “I guess we better stop,” Ruth said to nobody in particular. Her eyes grazed the countryside they were entering.

Macon didn’t alter his speed.

“Are we going to have a summer place, or are you just selling property?”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m thinking of buying and then renting,” Macon answered her.

“But are we —”

“I have to go,” said the little boy.

“—going to live there too?”

“Maybe.”

“By ourselves? Who else?” Corinthians was very interested.

“I can’t tell you that. But in a few years—five or ten—a whole lot of coloreds will have enough to afford it. A whole lot. Take my word for it.”

Magdalene called Lena took a deep breath. “Up ahead you could pull over, Daddy. He might mess up the seat.”

Macon glanced at her in the mirror and slowed down. “Who’s going to take him?” Ruth fiddled with the door handle. “Not you,” Macon said to her.

Ruth looked at her husband. She parted her lips but didn’t say anything.

“Not me,” said Corinthians. “I have on high heels.”

“Come on,” Lena sighed. They left the car, little boy and big sister, and disappeared into the trees that reared up off the shoulder of the road.

“You really think there’ll be enough colored people—I mean nice colored people—in this city to live there?”

“They don’t have to be from this city, Corinthians. People will drive to a summer house. White people do it all the time.” Macon drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, which trembled a little as the car idled.

“Negroes don’t like the water.” Corinthians giggled.

“They’ll like it if they own it,” said Macon. He looked out the window and saw Magdalene called Lena coming out of the trees. A large colorful bouquet of flowers was in her hand, but her face was crumpled in anger. Over her pale-blue dress dark wet stains spread like fingers.

“He wet on me,” she said. “He wet me, Mama.” She was close to tears.

Ruth clucked her tongue.

Corinthians laughed. “I told you Negroes didn’t like water.”

He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

But if the future did not arrive, the present did extend itself, and the uncomfortable little boy in the Packard went to school and at twelve met the boy who not only could liberate him, but could take him to the woman who had as much to do with his future as she had his past.

Guitar said he knew her. Had even been inside her house.

“What’s it like in there?” Milkman asked him.

“Shiny,” Guitar answered. “Shiny and brown. With a smell.”

“A bad smell?”

“I don’t know. Her smell. You’ll see.”

All those unbelievable but entirely possible stories about his father’s sister—the woman his father had forbidden him to go near—had both of them spellbound. Neither wished to live one more day without finding out the truth, and they believed they were the legitimate and natural ones to do so. After all, Guitar already knew her, and Milkman was her nephew.

They found her on the front steps sitting wide-legged in a long-sleeved, long-skirted black dress. Her hair was wrapped in black too, and from a distance, all they could really see beneath her face was the bright orange she was peeling. She was all angles, he remembered later, knees, mostly, and elbows. One foot pointed east and one pointed west.