Song of Solomon Read online

  Milkman’s confusion was rapidly turning to anger. “Strange motherfuckers,” he whispered. “Strange.” If he wanted lay off, he thought, why didn’t he just say that? Just come to me like a man and say, Cool it. You cool it and I’ll cool it. We’ll both cool it. And I’d say, Okay, you got it. But no. He comes to me with some way-out tale about how come and why.

  Milkman was heading toward Southside. Maybe he could find Guitar. A drink with Guitar would be just the thing. Or if he couldn’t find Guitar, he’d go see Hagar. No. He didn’t want to talk to Hagar, to any woman, just yet. Talk about strange. Now, that was a really strange bunch. His whole family was a bunch of crazies. Pilate singing all day and talking off the wall. Reba turning on for everything in pants. And Hagar…well, she was just fine, but still, she wasn’t regular. She had some queer ways. But at least they were fun and not full of secrets.

  Where would Guitar be? Never anywhere when you really needed him. A real pop-up. Popped up anywhere, anytime, but never on time. Milkman realized he was whispering every now and then and that people on the street were looking at him. Suddenly it seemed to him that there were a lot of people out for that time of day. Where the hell was everybody going? He made an effort not to vocalize his thoughts.

  “You want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth,” his father had said. Couldn’t I be a whole man without knowing all that? “You better have some intelligence behind that fist.” Okay. What intelligence? That my mama screwed her daddy. That my grandfather was a high-yellow nigger who loved ether and hated black skin. So what did he let you marry his daughter for? So he could screw her without the neighbors knowing it? Did you ever catch them doing it? No. You just felt something you couldn’t put your finger on. His money, probably. He wouldn’t let you put your finger on that, would he? And his daughter wouldn’t help you, would she? So you figured they must be gettin it on the operating table. If he’d given you those four bankbooks to do what you liked, to buy up the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, he could have had her all he liked, right? He could have come right in your bed, and the three of you could have had a ball. He’d get one tit and you’d get…the…other….

  Milkman stopped dead in his tracks. Cold sweat broke out on his neck. People jostled him trying to get past the solitary man standing in their way. He had remembered something. Or believed he remembered something. Maybe he’d dreamed it and it was the dream he remembered. The picture was developing, of the two men in the bed with his mother, each nibbling on a breast, but the picture cracked and in the crack another picture emerged. There was this green room, a very small green room, and his mother was sitting in the green room and her breasts were uncovered and somebody was sucking them and the somebody was himself. So? So what? My mother nursed me. Mothers nurse babies. Why the sweat? He walked on, hardly noticing the people pushing past him, their annoyed, tight faces. He tried to see more of the picture, but couldn’t. Then he heard something that he knew was related to the picture. Laughter. Somebody he couldn’t see, in the room laughing…at him and at his mother is ashamed. She lowers her eyes and won’t look at him. “Look at me, Mama. Look at me.” But she doesn’t and the laughter is loud now. Everybody is laughing. Did he wet his pants? Is his mother ashamed because while he was nursing he wet his pants? What pants? He didn’t wear pants then. He wore diapers. Babies always wet their diapers. does he think he has pants on? Blue pants with elastic around the calf. Little blue corduroy knickers. Why is he dressed that way? Is that what the man is laughing at? Because he is a tiny baby dressed in blue knickers? He sees himself standing there. “Look at me, Mama,” is all he can think of to say. “Please look at me.” Standing? He is a tiny baby. Nursing in his mother’s arms. He can’t stand up.

  “I couldn’t stand up,” he said aloud, and turned toward a shop window. There was his face leaning out of the upturned collar of his jacket, and he knew. “My mother nursed me when I was old enough to talk, stand up, and wear knickers, and somebody saw it and laughed and—and that is why they call me Milkman and that is why my father never does and that is why my mother never does, but everybody else does. And how did I forget that? And why? And if she did that to me when there was no reason for it, when I also drank milk and Ovaltine and everything else from a glass, then maybe she did other things with her father?”

  Milkman closed his eyes and then opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street. There were no cars and the street lights were on, now that darkness had come, but the sidewalk on the other side of the street was completely empty. He turned around to see where everybody was going, but there was nothing to see except their backs and hats pressing forward into the night. He looked again at the other side of Not Doctor Street. Not a soul.

  He touched the arm of a man in a cap who was trying to get past him. “Why is everybody on this side of the street?” he asked him.

  “Watch it, buddy,” the man snapped, and moved on with the crowd.

  Milkman walked on, still headed toward Southside, never once wondering why he himself did not cross over to the other side of the street, where no one was walking at all.

  He believed he was thinking coldly, clearly. He had never loved his mother, but had always known that she had loved him. And that had always seemed right to him, the way it should be. Her confirmed, eternal love of him, love that he didn’t even have to earn or deserve, seemed to him natural. And now it was decomposing. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone. His visits to the wine house seemed (before his talk with his father) an extension of the love he had come to expect from his mother. Not that Pilate or Reba felt the possessive love for him that his mother did, but they had accepted him without question and with all the ease in the world. They took him seriously too. Asked him questions and thought all his responses to things were important enough to laugh at or quarrel with him about. Everything he did at home was met with quiet understanding from his mother and his sisters (or indifference and criticism from his father). The women in the wine house were indifferent to nothing and understood nothing. Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch and interpret every sound in the universe. Now he questioned them. Questioned everybody. His father had crept along the wall and then come upstairs with a terrible piece of news. His mother had been portrayed not as a mother who simply adored her only son, but as an obscene child playing dirty games with whatever male was near—be it her father or her son. Even his sisters, the most tolerant and accommodating of all the women he knew, had changed their faces and rimmed their eyes with red and charcoal dust.

  Where was Guitar? He needed to find the one person left whose clarity never failed him, and unless he was out of the state, Milkman was determined to find him.

  His first stop, Tommy’s Barbershop, was fruitful. Guitar was there with several other men, leaning in various attitudes, but all listening to something.

  As Milkman entered and spotted Guitar’s back, he was so relieved he shouted, “Hey, Guitar!”

  “Sh!” said Railroad Tommy. Guitar turned around and motioned him to come in but to be quiet. They were listening to the radio and muttering and shaking their heads. It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.

  Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts.
The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.

  Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations.

  “It’ll be in the morning paper.”

  “Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter.

  “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.”

  “What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”

  “So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”

  “He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”

  “Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.

  “Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”

  “The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.

  “Who?” asked Freddie.

  “Till. That’s who.”

  “He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”

  “A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter.

  “Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult.

  “Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.

  “You!” shouted Porter.

  “You calling me a coward?” Freddie wanted to get the facts first.

  “If the shoe fits, put your rusty foot in it.”

  “You all gonna keep that up, you have to get out of my shop.”

  “Tell that nigger somethin,” said Porter.

  “I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.”

  “Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters.

  “Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”

  “Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero.

  “They got to catch ’em.”

  “So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!”

  “How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight.

  “How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain.

  “But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.”

  “You wanna bet? This is sure money!”

  “You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar.

  “They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said.

  “They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”

  “I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie.

  “You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.

  “Hey, man!” Again Freddie felt the threat.

  “South’s bad,” Porter said. “Bad. Don’t nothing change in the good old U.S. of A. Bet his daddy got his balls busted off in the Pacific somewhere.”

  “If they ain’t busted already, them crackers will see to it. Remember them soldiers in 1918?”

  “Ooooo. Don’t bring all that up….”

  The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. 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. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

  And Guitar. His animation had died down, leaving its traces in his eyes.

  Milkman waited until he could get his attention. Then they both left, walking silently down the street.

  “What is it? You looked pissed when you came in.”

  “Nothing,” said Milkman. “Where can we get a drink?”

  “Mary’s?”

  “Naw. Too many broads hasslin you.”

  “It’s just eight-thirty. Cedar Lounge don’t open till nine.”

  “Shit. You think. I’m tired.”

  “I got a taste at the pad,” Guitar offered.

  “Solid. Your box working?”

  “Uh uh. Still broke.”

  “I need some music. Music and a taste.”

  “Then it’ll have to be Miss Mary. I’ll keep the ladies working elsewhere.”

  “Yeah? I want to see you tell those ladies what to do.”

  “Come on, Milk. This ain’t New York; choices are limited.”

  “Okay. Mary’s.”

  They walked a few blocks to the corner of Rye and Tenth streets. When they passed a tiny bakery, Guitar swallowed hard and quickened his steps. Mary’s was the bar/lounge that did the best business in the Blood Bank—although each of the three other corners had a similar place—because of Mary herself, a pretty but overpainted barmaid/part-owner, who was sassy, funny, and good company for the customers. Whores worked her bar in safety; lonely drunks could drink there in peace; cruisers found chickens or hawks—whichever they preferred, even jailbait; restless housewives were flattered there and danced their heels off; teen-agers learned “life rules” there; and everybody found excitement there. For in Mary’s the lights made everybody beautiful, or if not beautiful, then fascinating. The music gave tone and texture to conversations that would put you to sleep anywhere else. And the food and drink provoked people into behavior that resembled nothing less than high drama.

  But all that began around eleven o’clock. It was practically empty at eight-thirty in the evening, when Guitar and Milkman arrived. They slid into a booth and ordered Scotch and Milkman drank his up quickly and ordered another before asking Guitar, “How come they call me Milkman?”

  “How the fuck would I know? That’s your name, ain’t it?”

  “My name is Macon Dead.”

  “You drag me all the way over here to tell me your name?”

  “I need to know it.”

  “Aw, drink up, man.”

  “You know your name, don’t you?”

  “Cut the shit. What’s on your mind?”

  “I decked my old man.”

  “Decked?”

  “Yeah. Hit hi
m. Knocked him into the fuckin radiator.”

  “What’d he do to you?”

  “Nothin.”

  “Nothin? You just up and popped him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For no reason?”

  “He hit my mother.”

  “Oh.”

  “He hit her. I hit him.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.” Milkman sighed heavily. “I know.”

  “Listen. I can understand how you feel.”

  “Uh uh. You can’t understand. Unless it happens to you, you can’t understand.”

  “Yes I can. You know I used to hunt a lot. When I was a kid down home—”

  “Oh, shit, do we have to hear about Alabama again?”

  “Not Alabama. Florida.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Just listen, Milkman. Listen to me. I used to hunt a lot. From the time I could walk almost and I was good at it. Everybody said I was a natural. I could hear anything, smell anything, and see like a cat. You know what I mean? A natural. And I was never scared—not of the dark or shadows or funny sounds, and I was never afraid to kill. Anything. Rabbit, bird, snakes, squirrels, deer. And I was little. It never bothered me. I’d take a shot at anything. The grown men used to laugh about it. Said I was a natural-born hunter. After we moved up here with my grandmother, that was the only thing about the South I missed. So when my grandmother used to send us kids back home in the summer, all I thought about was hunting again. They’d pile us on the bus and we’d spend the summer with my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Florence. Soon’s I got there I looked for my uncles, to go out in the woods. And one summer—I was about ten or eleven, I guess—we all went out and I went off on my own. I thought I saw deer tracks. It wasn’t the season for deer, but that didn’t bother me any. If I saw one I killed one. I was right about the tracks; it was a deer, but spaced funny—not wide apart like I thought they should be, but still a deer. You know they step in their own prints. If you never saw them before you’d think a two-legged creature was jumping. Anyway, I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. Now, I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it—and I was going real slow because I thought I might have to shoot it again—I saw it was a doe. Not a young one; she was old, but she was still a doe. I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man.”