The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Toni Morrison · a novel in two parts · Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 · scored on Morrison’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Family chronicle turned quest romance; a novel of the recovery of a lineage, with the marvellous told in the same voice as the real
Mythos
The flying Africans, the enslaved who rose and flew home; the hero’s quest for gold that finds a story; Circe, the enchantress, in a ruined mansion; names taken from scripture by dropping a Bible open
Phase
From Milkman’s birth in 1931 to his early thirties in 1963, with the murder of Emmett Till and the Birmingham church bombing in the background, and the family’s past reaching back to the elder Macon Dead killed for his farm at Lincoln’s Heaven and to the ancestor who flew
Presentation
Fiction in two parts, the first in the North, the second in the South; dedication “Daddy”; epigraph “The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names”
Register
A level, plainly told third person, close to Milkman and passing at length into Ruth, Macon Jr., Guitar, Hagar, Corinthians and Pilate; broad comedy, domestic rancour, murder and elegy under one voice; several registers of Black speech in the barbershop, at Pilate’s house and in Shalimar
Scale
One family across four generations and two regions, a Black community in a Northern city, and the history of slavery and its aftermath reached through a song
Governing Proposition
On the day before Milkman Dead is born an insurance agent in blue silk wings leaps from the roof of a hospital in a Michigan city on Lake Superior; thirty-odd years later Milkman, idle and spoiled in his father’s house of rents, goes south after gold and finds instead, in a children’s ring game in a Virginia village, the names of his own ancestors and the story of a man who flew. The wager of the novel is that a self cannot be known until the names and the story of the people it comes from are recovered, that slavery and its clerks stripped that knowledge away, and that the flight which frees the men of the line is the same act as the abandonment that breaks its women.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.” He is Robert Smith, and on the day before Milkman Dead is born he goes up on the roof of the hospital in blue silk wings. Below him a woman sings, of Sugarman; red velvet rose petals lie scattered on the white. He leaps, and does not fly.
The book is in two parts, and this is the first of its two leaps. The tone of the first sentence is the tone of the whole: comic, grave, and told plainly, as if a man in wings on a roof were a civic event like any other. Over the novel stand a dedication, “Daddy”, and an epigraph: “The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names.” The rest of the book unfolds the epigraph’s two lines, the soaring and the knowing, and the price of each.
The song the woman sings under the leap is the book’s key, and the book has heard it before it understands it. Its hero will hear it again, sung by children in a Virginia village, and only then know what it says. The novel is built to go from the first hearing to the second, and from the failed flight at its opening to the flight at its close.
Movement II
The city is in the North, on Lake Superior, and the North of the first part is a place of property and of the dead. Its hospital is called No Mercy; its street is called Not Doctor Street, and the naming of it, told as civic history, is a comic set piece with an argument underneath. The family’s name is itself a clerk’s error. A freedman was written down as “Macon Dead”, and the name has come down three generations to the boy, Macon Dead III, called Milkman.
His father, Macon Jr., owns houses and collects rents, and his creed is to own things, so that the things he owns can own other things. The Dead house is a house of starved lives: Ruth, First Corinthians, Magdalene called Lena, and Corinthians’ affair with Porter. Their names were taken from scripture by dropping a Bible open, so that scripture is inherited as accident. Macon tells the past in long monologues, and so does Ruth, and the house lives in rancour.
Milkman grows up idle and spoiled, and cannot walk straight, with one leg shorter than the other. His friend Guitar is the other pole of his youth. In the barbershop the men argue, and the radio brings the news of Emmett Till’s murder. Guitar belongs to the Seven Days, who answer each killing of a Black person with a killing of their own, by arithmetic; the book lets him argue it at length.
Movement III
Across the city lives Pilate, a woman without a navel. At the boy’s first visit she peels an egg and tells him of her father’s ghost, who visits her. She keeps a green sack hanging in her house, and bones in it. She wears an earring made of a small box, and in the box is the scrap of paper with her own name. She is ageless, she sings, and she is the moral centre of the book: a woman who flies without ever leaving the ground.
Hagar is the cost of Milkman’s selfishness: he leaves her. Every month she tries to kill him, with whatever knife or ice pick comes to hand. Her last act is a spree of shopping, ruined in the rain, and she dies of it. At her funeral Pilate cries out that the girl was loved. In the book’s second disclosure Hagar is the first of its women to pay for a man’s flight.
Macon and Milkman come to believe that gold hangs in a cave in the South. The belief, the sack and its bones, the earring and the song are all planted in the first part, and all are paid out in the second; little planted in the first goes unused.
Movement IV
Milkman goes south after the gold, to Danville, Pennsylvania, and on to Shalimar, Virginia, and the South takes from him his suit, his watch and his car. The form turns with him, from chronicle into quest and from summary into scene. In the ruined Butler mansion, among Weimaraner dogs, he finds Circe, a woman who should be dead, named for the enchantress of the Odyssey. Behind the history stands the elder Macon Dead, killed for his farm at Lincoln’s Heaven.
In Shalimar he is tested. On a night hunt, alone in the woods, he hears the men talk to the dogs and feels the earth. He does not find the gold. He finds, instead, in a children’s ring game, the thing he has been carrying since before he was born.
The children sing “Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone”, and the song holds names: Solomon, Ryna, Jake, Sing. It is his family’s history, kept in a game. Solomon was the ancestor who rose and flew home, as the enslaved in the legend flew, and he left behind him Ryna screaming in the gulch that bears her name, and twenty-one children. Milkman decodes the song, and the decoding is the climax of the quest: the treasure is a story, and the story is his name.
Movement V
The knowledge has two sides, and the book will not let either go. The flight that is freedom for the man is abandonment for the woman and the children; the men of the line keep doing it, and Hagar is its latest cost. Pilate is the answer to it, and Pilate dies in Milkman’s arms, saying that she wished she had known more people, and that she would have loved them all.
Guitar, whose love for Milkman the Seven Days give something to betray, turns betrayer. His arithmetic of revenge and Macon’s rent book are two ways of turning grief into a system, and both kill. The last scene is on Solomon’s Leap, and Milkman leaps toward Guitar.
The book ends on the sentence: “For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” The leap that opened the novel failed; this one is told as flight. Whether it is death or transcendence, whether Milkman flies or falls, the book does not say, and has been read both ways. What it has said is that he knew, and that knowing the name was the condition of the flight.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book resists it in its spine and yields to it at the edges. The spine is made of necessities: Macon Dead’s rents and his creed of owning things; Pilate’s green sack and the bones in it; the gold that Macon and Milkman believe hangs in a cave; the children’s song that turns out to be the family’s history. Each pays out in the second part. Remove Hagar and Milkman’s selfishness has no cost; remove the Seven Days and Guitar’s love has nothing to betray it. This is the lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the edges: the first part is long before the quest begins, Milkman’s idle twenties repeat one fact several times, the Seven Days’ logic is explained more than once, and Corinthians’ affair with Porter could be shortened without loss. Perhaps a tenth of the book could go.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man cannot know himself until he knows the names and the story of the people he comes from, and for African Americans that knowledge was stripped by slavery and by the clerk who wrote a freedman down as “Macon Dead”. Its recovery is the recovery of a self. The second disclosure is harder, and the book does not soften it: the ancestor who flies leaves Ryna screaming in the gulch and twenty-one children behind, and the men of the line keep doing it, so that male flight and female abandonment are one act seen from two sides. Hagar dies of it; Pilate, who flies without leaving the ground, is its answer. A third runs under both: property and the arithmetic of revenge are two ways of turning grief into a system, and both kill. Held below the top because the Seven Days are argued in speeches more than disclosed in action, and the women are seen chiefly as they bear on Milkman.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The heights come often, and in several kinds. The opening: a man in blue silk wings on a hospital roof, a woman singing below him, red velvet rose petals scattered in the snow. Pilate at the boy’s first visit, peeling an egg and telling of her father’s ghost. The terror of Hagar’s monthly attempts on Milkman’s life with whatever knife or ice pick comes to hand, and the pity of her last shopping, ruined in the rain. Circe among the Weimaraners in the ruined Butler mansion, a woman who should be dead. The night hunt at Shalimar, where Milkman, alone in the woods, hears the men talk to the dogs and feels the earth. Pilate’s death in his arms. The last sentence, “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Held below the top because stretches of the first part run level, in domestic rancour and in the barbershop’s debates.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not alluded to, and the highest of the twelve. The load-bearing structure is the legend of the flying Africans, and the book makes it carry the plot: a children’s ring game in Shalimar, “Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone”, encodes the names of Milkman’s ancestors, Solomon, Ryna, Jake, Sing, and his decoding of it is the climax of the quest. Beside it the hero’s quest is built: a young man leaves home after gold, passes through a witch’s house, Circe named for Odysseus’ enchantress, is tested in the wilderness, and finds not gold but his lineage. The Golden Fleece stands behind it, turned so that the treasure is a story. Names carry myth, First Corinthians, Magdalene called Lena, Pilate, Hagar, chosen by dropping a Bible open, so that scripture is inherited as accident. The particular stays particular: a green sack, a Packard, an earring made of a box holding a name. Held off the top because Circe and the names lean toward allegory, and Guitar’s half is drawn by plot more than by myth.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the African American novel of Wright and Ellison, in which a young Black man’s coming of age is a protest against American society or an escape from it, and behind them Faulkner’s Southern genealogy. Morrison’s turn is to make the male quest run backward, south and into the past, with possession of history as its goal and not freedom from it; to make Black folk legend, the ring song and the flying Africans, the structure of a novel and not its colour; and to put an ageless woman without a navel at the moral centre of a realist book. The stake was real: after two short novels about girls and women, a long novel with a male hero, built on folklore and the supernatural, which could have read as quaint. Held at the bar because the family chronicle and the quest romance are proven paths, the marvellous was already in the field with García Márquez and Ishmael Reed, and the larger formal swerve in Morrison’s work came later, in Beloved.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two parts are the book’s argument. The North of the first part is a place of property, inertia and the dead, of Macon Dead, Not Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital, and Milkman cannot walk straight there, with one leg shorter than the other; the South of the second strips him of his suit, his watch and his car, and the form shifts from chronicle into quest and from summary into scene. The novel’s knowledge is shaped like the song it decodes: it has heard its own key on the first page, when Pilate sings of Sugarman under the agent’s leap, and does not understand it until the last chapters. The leap that opens the book is answered by the leap that closes it: failed flight, then flight. Held off the top because the first part is built as an accumulation of family histories, told in long retrospective monologues by Macon and Ruth, more than as a form that knows; it could be reordered without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over forty-nine years. The readings are many and they do not cancel one another: a Black bildungsroman and its critique; a recovery of African American folklore and naming; a feminist reading in which Pilate, Ruth, Hagar, Corinthians and Lena accuse the book’s hero; a reading of its politics through the Seven Days and the murder of Emmett Till, named in the barbershop; mythic and classical readings of the quest; studies of the names. Its questions stay open. Is the last leap death or transcendence, and does Milkman fly or fall? Is Guitar a villain or a casualty? Is flight freedom or abandonment? Each has been answered more than one way. Held below the top because, unlike Beloved, the book answers its chief question within itself, since Milkman learns his name, and a return to it confirms its design more than it discovers new ground.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the American novel of the 1970s. The force is high: the book showed that African American vernacular legend, oral history and the supernatural could carry the whole structure of a serious American novel, and that the history of a Black family in the twentieth century could be told as an epic quest. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1977; the standing it gave Morrison, in her own judgment and her readers’; and a line that runs through her own Beloved into later fiction that makes folk myth and the ghost load-bearing in the Black family novel, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) among them, with Colson Whitehead’s literalised metaphor in The Underground Railroad (2016). Held at the bar because much of that reach is shared with Beloved, which carried it further, and because the turn to folk myth was not this book’s alone: Ishmael Reed wrote in the same decade in which Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Forty-nine years, and the text is whole. On the desk’s table for modern books that span stands at the seam between the band for thirty-five to forty-seven years and the band from fifty, and the figure is taken there. The presence is of the widest: continuously in print since 1977, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, carried to a mass readership by Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, and sustained by Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The book has already outlived the 1970s and the Black Arts debates that framed its reception, and it is not fixed to a surface of its moment; the Seven Days are the one element that dates. Presence of that width earns a tenth at most, and the tenth is given; more would be scoring fame.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on Morrison’s English, with no translation between. The prose is commanding. The first sentence, “The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.”, sets the book’s tone in one move, comic, grave and plainly told. The naming of Not Doctor Street, told as civic history, is a comic set piece with an argument under it. The dialogue in the barbershop, at Pilate’s house and in Shalimar catches several registers of Black speech exactly. A large cast is managed across fifty years and two regions without confusion, and details planted early, the earring, the bones, the song, pay out hundreds of pages later. Charged: in places the narrative tells what the scene has shown, above all in Milkman’s reflections in the second part; Guitar’s exposition of the Seven Days runs as debate; and the summary of Milkman’s twenties drags. A long way from thin, and short of the top.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Macon Dead’s rent book on one side, and on the other a woman with no navel who talks with her father’s ghost; or the barbershop’s radio report of Emmett Till’s murder, and the ancestor who flew. They obey one law. The book’s physics is that the past is present and acts, as a ghost, as a song, as bones in a sack, and the realist and the marvellous are both its forms: the economy of the Dead house is a haunting as much as Circe’s mansion is. The tones, broad comedy in the naming of streets, domestic rancour, murder and elegy, hold together under the narrator’s level voice. Held below the top because the Seven Days pull toward a political thriller whose logic is argued in another register, and because the closing leap opens a question the book’s law does not fully settle.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders, and most of them integrated. Consciousness: Milkman’s, and also Ruth’s, Hagar’s and Guitar’s. The family, across four generations. Property, rent and class within a Black community. History, from slavery through Reconstruction, when the elder Macon Dead was killed for his farm at Lincoln’s Heaven, to the 1950s and to 1963, with Till and the Birmingham church bombing as Guitar’s motive. The state and its violence. The sacred, through names, ghosts and flight. The natural order, in the hunt and in the land of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Held below the top because white society is present almost only as cause, off the page, and labour beyond Macon’s landlording is thin.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.8. A myth built and made to carry the plot, the legend of the flying Africans encoded in a children’s ring game that holds the names of the hero’s ancestors; and a disclosure that holds, that a self is known only through the recovered names and story of its people, and that the flight that frees the men of the line is the abandonment that breaks its women.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: a spine of necessities, the rents, the sack and its bones, the gold, the song, all paid out in the second part, but a first part long before the quest begins, Milkman’s idle twenties told more than once, and the Seven Days explained more than they need be. Next above it, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5: a real departure by proven paths, and a reach shared with <i>Beloved</i>, which carried it further.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition stand on it at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.3, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6 on a sum of 103.6.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, her third novel, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1977, and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in that year. It is scored as the novel as published in 1977, in two parts, with its dedication and epigraph, which are part of the work. English is the original; no translation is in question. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first and last sentences, the dedication, the epigraph, the first line of the children’s song, and the name the clerk wrote down. Words of Macon, Pilate and the narrator that could be recalled only closely are given in paraphrase. Oprah’s Book Club (1996) and Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature (1993) are named as records of the book’s presence and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of chapters in each part, the page count of the first edition and the range of its translations, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.