With all that gravitas, you might not realize it, but Toni Morrison was funny as hell. Many of her friends reminisce about her sense of humor; according to some, it bordered on the bawdy. As a close reader of her work, I am not in the least surprised. She kills me, as they say.
In The Bluest Eye (1970), for instance, Pecola Breedlove’s joyless family life takes place downstairs from a trio of sex workers. Through her innocent ears, we hear their ribald banter:
“You think ’cause you skinny, folks think you young? You’d make a haint buy a girdle.”
“And you look like the north side of a southbound mule.”
“All I know is, them bandy little legs of yours is every bit as old as mine.”
“Don’t worry ’bout my bandy legs. That’s the first thing they push aside.”
All three of the women laughed.
These “merry gargoyles” insult one another ruthlessly, hilariously, but their shared laughter is part of a spirit of camaraderie that becomes a respite for poor Pecola.
Even more jarringly, an act of violence attempted by Sethe, the tragic heroine of Morrison’s Beloved (1987), becomes an occasion for wisecracking between her lover, Paul D, and her friend Stamp Paid:
“Every time a whiteman come to the door she got to kill somebody?”
“For all she know, the man could be coming for the rent.”
“Good thing they don’t deliver mail out that way.”
“Wouldn’t nobody get no letter.”
“Except the postman.”
“Be a mighty hard message.”
“And his last.”
Here, too, these morbid jokes crack the two men up—“As the scene neither one had witnessed took shape before them, its seriousness and its embarrassment made them shake with laughter”—allowing for a release, a relief, but also a deepening of the relationship between them.
Morrison makes no bones about making jest of incest, lynching, murder, even infanticide in many of her works. But it is in Song of Solomon, published in 1977, that she gives the most room to this kind of black humor, in both senses. For example, when the hero of the novel, Milkman Dead, visits his aunt Pilate for the first time, with his best friend, Guitar, she tells him:
“I know your daddy. I know you too.”
Again Guitar spoke up. “You his daddy’s sister?”
“The only one he got. Ain’t but three Deads alive.”
Milkman…heard himself shouting: “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead!”
Each of these family names has an ironic backstory. Milkman’s real name is Macon Dead III; he got his distasteful nickname because his mother breastfed him until he was four. Pilate was named for Pontius Pilate—not the biblical personage with that moniker, but the look of its letters, which her illiterate father found “strong and handsome.”
And according to family lore, their surname, Dead, came about when this patriarch gave his information to a drunken man at the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War:
He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, “He’s dead.” Asked him who owned him, Papa said, “I’m free.” Well, the Yankee wrote it all down, but in the wrong spaces. Had him born in Dunfrie, wherever the hell that is, and in the space for his name the fool wrote, “Dead” comma “Macon.”
The incidental surname, which at first seems a blessing that will “wipe out the past,” allows for all sorts of punning mischief. Later on, Milkman Dead counters his mother’s notion that he should be a doctor by saying: “How would that look? M.D., M.D. If you were sick, would you go see a man called Dr. Dead?”
Morrison’s funniest book is in fact mired in death, maybe because her recently deceased father was her muse for it: “I think it was because I felt closer to him than to myself that, after his death, I deliberately sought his advice for writing the novel that continued to elude me.” Song of Solomon begins when Milkman’s mother, Ruth, goes into labor with him the day after a man jumps from the top of a hospital after announcing that he’s going to fly to the other side of Lake Superior. (This takes place on February 18, 1931, Morrison’s birth date, perhaps a nod to the fact that she grants Milkman details of her own ancestry.) Milkman is born to a couple already sundered by death: when Ruth’s father passed away years earlier, her husband walked in on her touching the corpse in a way that disturbed him deeply.
Milkman, pampered by his wounded mother and tended to by his resentful sisters, grows into an arrogant young man. He becomes estranged from both his landlord father, Macon Dead II, for whom he works, and Guitar, who has joined a vigilante group with a grim mission. Inspired by the death of a boy named Till, members of the Seven Days avenge the murders of black people with randomized murders of white people.
In the midst of the volatile racial politics of the 1950s, Milkman finds himself torn between the acquisitive calculations of his father and grandfather, the older Macon Deads, and the spiritual priorities of his aunt Pilate, who lives in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town with her daughter, Reba, and granddaughter, Hagar. This conflict takes on material weight in the form of a sack that hangs from the ceiling of Pilate’s home and contains what she calls the family “inheritance.” Milkman’s father tells him it must hold a treasure that he and Pilate stumbled across as children. But when Milkman recruits Guitar to steal it with him, it turns out to be not a stash of gold but a mess of bones.
Milkman leaves town to seek out his true inheritance with death threats hanging over him from both his cousin Hagar, who has fallen in love with him, and Guitar, who believes Milkman has located and is now hoarding the gold for himself. Milkman’s search for his roots becomes, in essence, an effort to answer the question, What kind of a Dead do you want to be?
One might submit that this is simply the foundational conundrum of being black in America, from the history of social and literal death imposed on the enslaved to the ongoing threat of police brutality. Song of Solomon isn’t gloomy or melancholy about this zombie existence, however, but sharp and funny. As the critic Glenda Carpio has argued, there is a rich history of dark humor in black art: “Jokes about lynching and other forms of racial violence in the aftermath of slavery…express the quintessential quality of gallows humor.”
Milkman’s “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead!” deftly puns on this penumbra of morbidity around black life by riffing on the southern habit of adding an “a” to the start of a word (“I’m a-goin’”) and on the familiar rhythm of a “yo mama” joke. Yo mama jokes are a version of a black cultural and social practice known as signifying. I often use this example to illustrate it in my classroom: “Your mama’s so broke, her welcome mat just says ‘Well…’” Signifying is also sometimes called the dozens, baiting, boasting, making fun, joning, screaming on, sounding, lying, toasting, loud talking, specifying, reading, dragging, or throwing shade.
In his 1988 book The Signifying Monkey, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces the history of these intense, aggressive, yet oblique practices through definitions provided by lexicographers of black English in the 1970s. One called signifying, for instance, “a very elaborate game traditionally played by black boys, in which the participants insult each other’s relatives, especially their mothers. The object of the game is to test emotional strength.” Another described it as “communicating (often an obscene or ridiculing message) by indirection.”
Different theories have been posited about why signifying emerged—and why it persists—in black communities. The most convincing to me is the idea that it has a homeopathic or immunizing effect, training the marginalized to withstand the more consequential insults and violence that may come from mainstream society.
A passage about signifying from Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) suggests that it serves cultural and literary purposes as well as social and political ones:
The bookless may have difficulty in reading a paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get down to “playing the dozens” they have no equal in America, and, I’d risk a sizeable bet, in the whole world. Starting off in the first by calling you a seven-sided son-of-a-bitch, and pausing to name the sides, they proceed to “specify” until the tip-top branch of your family tree has been “given a reading.”
By using the word “bookless,” an outcome of the interdiction of black literacy under slavery and Jim Crow, Hurston distinguishes a lack of access to printed words from the ways black people have long relished the elaboration and precision of language.
Morrison often spoke about our underrecognized gift for and delight in words. In an interview in the early Eighties, she remarked:
It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion…. It’s terrible to think that a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with those books that are less than his own language…. He may never know the etymology of Africanisms in his language, not even know that “hip” is a real word or that “the dozens” meant something.
Morrison offers her own definition of the dozens in an offhand description in Song of Solomon of how Milkman and Guitar play with language as young black men: “When in conversation they came to the battleground of difference, their verbal sparring was full of good humor.”
Their repartee over the course of the novel is indeed all jabs and feints, marked by the “extremes of humor and violence” that Carpio finds in fiction on slavery and its afterlives. For instance, when they’re joking about Hagar’s threats to kill Milkman for rejecting her, a macabre digression about decapitation yields an “unintended pun” on fellatio—“Ain’t nobody giving up no head.”
The threatening tone is really directed toward each other:
“You gonna do me in? My name is Macon, remember? I’m already Dead.”
Guitar didn’t smile at the familiar joke, but there was enough recognition of it in his face to soften the glare in his eyes.
“Somebody ought to tell your murderer that,” said Guitar.
Note that Morrison emphasizes the joke for us typographically: the capitalized “D” in Milkman’s pun, “I’m already Dead,” would be inaudible in a spoken exchange.
The liaison between comedy and violence is a commonplace: the stand-up act kills, we die with laughter, a pun makes us groan, a joke has a punch line, wit can be cutting. These days we litter the Internet with the skull emoji and call signifying shade, as if it has made a ghost of us. But this aggressive tilt to humor—especially between men—can tip easily into real violence, real morbidity, as Morrison demonstrates when Milkman heads down south.
First, two young black men swap mocking speculations in front of him about whether “pussy” is different “up North” or whether “pricks” are. “How different?” one asks. “Wee little,” the other replies. Milkman, the only northerner in town, catches the stray and sends it back:
“I wouldn’t know,” said Milkman. “I never spent much time smacking my lips over another man’s dick.” Everybody smiled, including Milkman. It was about to begin.
“What about his ass hole? Ever smack your lips over that?”
“Once,” said Milkman. “When a little young nigger made me mad and I had to jam a Coke bottle up his ass.”
“What’d you use a bottle for? Your cock wouldn’t fill it?”
“It did. After I took the Coke bottle out. Filled his mouth too.”
“Prefer mouth, do you?”
“If it’s big enough, and ugly enough, and belongs to a ignorant motherfucker who is about to get the livin shit whipped out of him.”
The knife glittered.
This “name-calling toilet contest” builds into fisticuff brutality: “If he’d had a weapon, he would have slaughtered everybody in sight.” Luckily, Milkman bears no arms, and the bloodlust dissipates.
A group of older men then invite him to go hunting, to “test him, match and beat him, probably, on some other ground.” This ends up being a bonding experience, as the men trade jokes and lessons over the expert skinning of a slaughtered animal. While the mix of aggression and intimacy in signifying can lead to violence, it can also foster connection and resilience.
Another way that Morrison brings the energy of signifying into Song of Solomon is through the novel’s formal multiplicity, which we see in its imagery, characters, stories, genres, and traditions, yielding the effect of an ongoing clash of contradictions. Her evocation of signifying as “verbal sparring…full of good humor” on “the battleground of difference” suggests that this agonistic, funny, and precise exchange of words was for her a model for how we work out—or at least lay out—our differences within a community.
Song of Solomon repeatedly muses on the differences between things: a real fear and an unreal one; northern and southern tea drinkers or, as in the exchange above, northern and southern genitalia; a soft-fried egg and a fried egg; the French sun and the Congo sun; a mother and an aunt; a woman and a lady.
There are over twenty variations on the question “What’s the difference?” in the novel. This can be personal, as when Pilate asks, “When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference?” It can be definitional, as when Reba says of Milkman and Hagar, “That ain’t her brother, Mama. They cousins,” and Pilate responds, “What’s the difference in the way you act toward ’em?” Or it can be rhetorical, as in Milkman’s ice-cold assessment of Hagar when they become quasi-incestuous lovers anyway:
She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?
The battleground of difference can also be a matter of perspective. Though we see the world differently through various characters in her other novels as well, the contrast between viewpoints in Song of Solomon is sharper—sometimes to the point of mutual exclusion. For instance, Milkman’s parents have conflicting memories of what Macon saw Ruth doing with her father’s corpse. Macon reports that Ruth was “laying next to” her dead father in the bed, “naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.” But when Milkman asks his mother if this is true, she says, “No. But I did kneel there in my slip at his bedside and kiss his beautiful fingers.” Milkman doesn’t know whom to believe—and neither do we.
This structure of competing accounts reaches an apogee in the particular way that Morrison represents historical atrocity. Song of Solomon includes an account of the death of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who was lynched in August 1955 when he was visiting his relatives near Money, Mississippi, and whose mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, famously insisted on an open casket for his funeral. Morrison, who later wrote a play called Dreaming Emmett expressly about how we imagine and argue over that history, portrays Till’s death in Song of Solomon through the competing perspectives of members of the black community.
Morrison tweaks the details of Till’s story ever so slightly. She spells Emmett “Emmet”; he is “stomped to death” rather than shot; and it happens “in fifty-three” rather than in 1955. All the manuscripts of Song of Solomon were destroyed in a fire, but I think we can assume these internal deviations are not errors but purposeful changes. Morrison uses these minor differences to emphasize our distorted and necessarily prismatic view of the past.
Differences of opinion and fact are precisely how Till’s story emerges in the world of Song of Solomon. We learn about his fate not from a historical document or an eyewitness account, but through “the crisscrossed conversations” among black men in a barbershop:
“It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie.
“They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.”
“What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie.
“Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered.
“You on for five.”
“Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.”
“What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”
“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.
“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.
“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”
“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”
The men go on to debate who should pay for Till’s death, whether he was carrying a knife, whether he whistled at the white woman, whether his daddy really served in the military.
Eventually, their digressions lead them
to trade tales of atrocities…. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness.
In other words, they signify on the reality of black death in a way that draws them closer even as it again poses Guitar’s rhetorical—but not just rhetorical—question about exactly how it happens: “What the fuck is the difference?”
Song of Solomon doesn’t contain multitudes so much as seethe with them. Morrison grounds the novel’s form in the folktale, the multifarious genre out of which signifying likely originated. As Gates’s research established, there are many black songs and jokes about the encounter between three animals: the two kings of the jungle—the lion and the elephant—and a trickster figure, the “signifying monkey.” This suggests that the practice of signifying may derive from African animal fables.
At one point in Song of Solomon, Milkman’s father blends two well-known fables from Aesop, who was himself a slave. Macon II compares his sister Pilate to the snake that sticks “his poison tongue right in the man’s heart” and that goes on to say, like the tautological scorpion in another tale, “But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?”
Morrison often said she thought of her novels as “village literature,” a notion from John Berger that she applied to black culture: “peasant literature for my people.” Notably, she felt that
so-called primitive languages always emphasize differences. You have hundreds of words for yam, but no one word for yam—hundreds of words for every variety. That’s not a deficiency in the thought process; it reflects an emphasis on distinctions.
Even the folkloric source of signifying has a differential structure.
Morrison said that in writing Song of Solomon, she wished to make “a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one,” which led her to construct a hero from a range of folkloric traditions, what she called “those classical, mythological archetypal stories”: “A journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like. Old-school heroic.”
When Milkman undertakes his quest for the inheritance that he believes lies in a cave in Virginia, he in effect reverses the Great Migration of black workers from the rural South to urban centers in the North. Like Odysseus’s voyage to Ithaca, Milkman’s journey is in this sense a return home, beset with tests and temptations. He falls under the spell of an ageless witch; he bonds with other men through boasts and hunting; he takes up with a woman who cleanses his body and spirit; he even has a kind of katabasis, a descent to the underworld, when he lands back in Pilate’s cellar. And just as Odysseus washes ashore naked before disguising himself as a beggar, Milkman gradually sheds his possessions—his shoes, wallet, suitcase, car, and clothes—until he ends up skinny-dipping in a river, shouting with glee that he has grasped the tip-top branches of his family tree.
Naturally, the distant relative who finally grants him insight into this family history gives him neither a genealogical chart nor a monetary inheritance, but rather “gossip, stories, legends, speculations.” With this, Song of Solomon describes itself. The novel, too, looks to its literary ancestors—religious works, children’s games, ancient myths, and folktales. These versions of storytelling make up the substrate of daily life for its characters, but they are also what scholars call syncretic forms, meaning they draw together various spiritual beliefs, artistic forms, and schools of thought from different cultures.
Morrison would have known a lot about how syncretism works in the black diaspora from her studies and teaching at Howard. She would also have picked up some ideas from her job at Random House, where she edited the book Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism (1972), a posthumous collection of essays by the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, who famously argued that black cultural practices throughout the Americas incorporated elements retained from Africa as well as from Europe.
Song of Solomon syncretizes these myriad traditions through signifying. Elements of folklore from disparate cultures do not mix in a melting pot—an idea that, as Morrison said, “never worked”—nor in a happy salad of diversity. Rather, they work like the dozens or like samples in a hip-hop song; they interrupt, cut into, contest, and undo one another.
Take Morrison’s title, which she landed on only reluctantly, with the encouragement of the writer John Gardner. “Song of Solomon” is less a grandiose religious allusion than a quotidian pun signifying on multiple traditions. We eventually discover that it refers to a literal song about a man literally named Solomon that Milkman overhears some children singing.
The lyrics, alternating with two seemingly nonce responses (“Come booba yalle, come booba tambee”; “Come konka yalle, come konka tambee”), turn out to be the puzzle pieces of his family history, a complex mosaic of white, black, and Native American origins. We learn of Solomon, who one day “whirled about and touched the sun,” leaving his “baby in a white man’s house” until someone named “Heddy took him to a red man’s house”; meanwhile, a “black lady fell down on the ground” and “threw her body all around.”
While Morrison claimed that she based these lyrics on a song from her own family—which had a patriarch named Solomon—she also clearly used elements from the Federal Writers’ Project, which collected testimony from the formerly enslaved and their descendants. One 1940 anthology of these interviews, Drums and Shadows, contains a few versions of the story of Africans who, like Milkman’s great-grandfather Solomon, rose up in the air and flew—perhaps back to Africa—as well as the words some of them sang: “Kum buba yali kuni buba tambe, Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe.”
Morrison acknowledged that there were other legends hovering behind the image of flight in her novel: “If it means Icarus to some readers, fine; I want to take credit for that. But my meaning is specific: it is about black people who could fly.” She averred that it was “always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts. I don’t care how silly it may seem. It is everywhere—people used to talk about it, it’s in the spirituals and gospels.”
Morrison’s version of the flying African song in Song of Solomon traces the threads of this syncretic weave. Beyond words such as “yaruba” (Yoruba) and “red man’s house”—signs of Milkman’s respective African and Native American lineages—we also find “Belali Shalut,” “Medina Muhammet,” and “Saraka cake.” According to the critic Nada Elia, these allusions reference interviews conducted with the descendants of one Belali Mohomet that reflect Islamic customs such as baking a “saraka” cake, probably derived from sadaqa, or “charity,” an offering of a full meal to the needy. A mingled genealogy of Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Native American, and African traditions is thus tangled with the roots Milkman uncovers during his journey south.
But again, this isn’t simply a multicultural tapestry—it is a crisscrossed conversation, a verbal sparring that takes place on the battleground of difference. Morrison uses this motley history to shatter the heroic masculine arc that serves as the backbone of both Milkman’s quest and his grandfather Solomon’s flight. So, when Milkman recounts the story of the flying African to his new lover Sweet, she asks, “Who’d he leave behind?” And when Milkman arrives back at Pilate’s home, jubilant with his discovery of his real family inheritance, he wakes up in a cellar next to a box of Hagar’s hair, shorn from her corpse.
Morrison liked to say, “The structure is the argument.” The placement of Milkman’s fall back to the earth at the height of his personal triumph is a narrative structure that makes the argument that, as the novel has it, “while he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying.” The novel literally interrupts Milkman’s mythical legend—both his own and the one he wishes to report—right at its climax with the tale of the demise of his cousin and erstwhile lover, which has been deliberately postponed.
We are thrown into a sublime, aching funeral scene:
Pilate burst in, shouting, “Mercy!” as though it were a command…. “I want mercy!” she shouted, and began walking toward the coffin, shaking her head from side to side as though somebody had asked her a question and her answer was no.
Pilate goes on to give a full sermon, replete with call-and-response, testifying, and singing that slides between gospel and blues music. She closes by “telling in three words the full story of the stumped life in the coffin behind her”:
“My baby girl.” Words tossed like stones into a silent canyon.
Suddenly, like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh or his amazing strength, Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear, “And she was loved!”
It startled one of the sympathetic winos in the vestibule and he dropped his bottle, spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere.
Morrison again brings Africa into the room, or rather sends the black church back to the motherland.
The rapid tonal shifts of this scene—black peroration, animal fable, slapstick stumble—capture in small form the way legendary quest, syncretic spirituality, fanciful fairy tales, and Afro-diasporic myths collide in Song of Solomon. Crucially, Morrison makes these folkloric traditions intersect not merely in the name of a colorful medley, but as a way to signify on one another, to throw shade at one another, to blacken one another, so to speak.
Ultimately, this crisscrossing of traditions thwarts any potential didacticism with the dark irony and the willful open-endedness Morrison found in black art. The very “ordinariness of the language,” she argued, “its colloquial, vernacular, humorous and, upon occasion, parabolic quality sabotage expectations and mask judgments.” Using signifying as a formal structure becomes a way to ensure Song of Solomon remains open to conjecture:
Most of my novels are very much like folktale endings…. They don’t close and shut the door, which is like the Western tradition, where the moral is—click!—locked up. But in African folktale, the people often say, “You end it,” “What do you think?”
English (US) · 