Justice and Citizenship in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 1, 2002 Justice and Citizenship in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Dana Medoro They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. […] I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. –Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X Deconstruction keeps open the “beyond” of currently unimaginable transformative possibilities precisely in the name of Justice. –Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit Published in 1977, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon remains haunted by the debates and struggles of the previous two decades. Her characters seem to represent or embody different positions from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conjuring in both oblique and explicit ways the words of its prominent spokesmen: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. While the novel is often read as an account of the trauma wrought by racial injustice, it is, at the same time, an attempt to express an idea of justice loyal to this experience.1 This paper focuses on the figures of Guitar and Pilate, contending that each articulates and develops a concept of justice in Song of Solomon, and that each informs – or exerts pressure on – the other’s configuration of justice. Although the text does not ultimately sustain Guitar’s eye-for-an-eye directive, as the scholarship on the novel concurs, neither does it entirely dismiss or discredit it. Guitar has his say in two separate, lengthy dialogues; he also speaks on behalf of consequence in the enaction of justice: “’The earth is soggy with black people’s blood,’” he says about his involvement in the deadly Seven Days. “’And before us Indian blood. [ … ] I had to do something’” (Song 154). Pilate, I will argue, gestures toward a promise of justice, an ever-arriving ideal outside or beyond the necessity of force or retribution. In Morrison’s words: “She is something we wish existed on a wider scale” (Conversations 140). If Pilate stands for an ethical ideal, Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 2 with an attendant ontological reconfiguration, Guitar stands for the reality of its absence in African American lives, announcing the force of law that often accompanies an ethical portal in an unjust world. With the violent death of a father in their pasts, Pilate and Guitar also sketch divergent responses to severed kinship ties or bloodlines. Their losses are indicated in the novel’s dedication, simply “Daddy,” which functions as a kind of intimate appeal or entreaty, a consecration of a bond. From the beginning, this bond at once generates and raises questions about the novel’s genealogical quest. It also grounds a rudimentary precept: that while white America’s political self-image may rest on a myth of being “happily bereft of ancestry in the garden of the New World” (to quote R.W.B. Lewis), black America’s does not (American Adam 5). In Song of Solomon the American Eden is in turn a slave plantation , a battlefield, and the turf of the Ku Klux Klan. For African Americans it is often a dangerous place where orphanhood is not a metaphor for innocence or liberation. In a sense, Morrison puts this metaphor on trial, asking as she does in Playing in the Dark: “What are Americans always so insistently innocent of?” (Playing 45). The novel’s historical allusions establish a world in which African Americans pay a heavy price for the Faulknerian might-have-been of America’s innocence. Structured by flashbacks and progressions through antebellum and post-reconstruction America, Song of Solomon marks its temporal periods with the devastating loss of fathers and ancestors, including Ruth’s and Guitar’s as well as Macon’s and Pilate’s.2 It is not until Milkman asks about his grandfather’s killers that he begins to understand why everyone around him seems haunted or unhinged: “Did anybody ever catch the men who did it – who killed him?” Reverend Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Catch?” he asked, his face full of wonder. “Didn’t have...