The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,84

as well as humility of one who was not able to do more.

There are several other flights in the work and they are motivationally different. Solomon’s the most magical, the most theatrical, and, for Milkman, the most satisfying. It is also the most problematic—to those he left behind. Milkman’s flight binds these two elements of loyalty (Mr. Smith’s) and abandon and self-interest (Solomon’s) into a third thing: a merging of fealty and risk that suggests the “agency” for “mutual” “life,” which he offers at the end and which is echoed in the hills behind him, and is the marriage of surrender and domination, acceptance and rule, commitment to a group through ultimate isolation. Guitar recognizes this marriage and recalls enough of how lost he himself is to put his weapon down.

The journalistic style at the beginning, its rhythm of a familiar, hand-me-down dignity is pulled along by an accretion of detail displayed in a meandering unremarkableness. Simple words, uncomplex sentence structures, persistent understatement, highly aural syntax—but the ordinariness of the language, its colloquial, vernacular, humorous, and, upon occasion, parabolic quality sabotage expectations and masks judgments when it can no longer defer them. The composition of red, white, and blue in the opening scene provides the national canvas/flag upon which the narrative works and against which the lives of these black people must be seen, but which must not overwhelm the enterprise the novel is engaged in. It is a composition of color that heralds Milkman’s birth, protects his youth, hides its purpose and through which he must burst (through blue Buicks, red tulips in his waking dream, and his sisters’ white stockings, ribbons, and gloves) before discovering that the gold of his search is really Pilate’s yellow orange and the glittering metal of the box in her ear.

These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they were planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances. That is planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the questions the community asks, and both reader and “voice” stand among the crowd, within it, with privileged intimacy and contact, but without any more privileged information than the crowd has. That egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel’s population, the narrator’s voice) on the same footing reflected for me the force of flight and mercy, and the precious, imaginative, yet realistic gaze of black people who (at one time, anyway) did not anoint what or whom it mythologized. The “song” itself contains this unblinking evaluation of the miraculous and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an unblinking gaze that is lurking in the tender but amused choral-community response to the agent’s flight. Sotto (but not completely) is my own giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the journey to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western fable, they are in deep trouble, but the African myth is also contaminated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self-born Pilate is unimpressed by Solomon’s flight and knocks Milkman down when, made new by his appropriation of his own family’s fable, he returns to educate her with it. Upon hearing all he has to say, her only interest is filial. “Papa?…I’ve been carryin’ Papa?” And her longing to hear the song, finally, is a longing for balm to die by, not a submissive obedience to history—anybody’s.

The opening sentence of Tar Baby, “He believed he was safe,” is the second version of itself. The first, “He thought he was safe,” was discarded because “thought” did not contain the doubt I wanted to plant in the reader’s mind about whether or not he really was—safe. “Thought” came to me at once because it was the verb my parents and grandparents used when describing what they had dreamed the night before. Not “I dreamt” or “It seemed” or even “I saw or did” this or that—but “I thought.” It gave the dream narrative distance (a dream is not “real”) and power (the control implied in “thinking” rather than “dreaming”). But to use “thought” seemed to undercut the faith of the character and the distrust I wanted to suggest to the reader. “Believe” was chosen to do the work properly. And the person who does the believing is, in a way, about to enter a dream world, and convinces himself, eventually, that he is in control of it. He believed; was convinced. And