African-American Storytelling ADMAshe 17 April 1995

Naming and Storytelling in Morrison’s Song of Solomon

In her novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison explores the intricate

connection between names and stories, and between the related processes of

naming and storytelling. The novel’s protagonist, Macon Dead III, or Milkman, is a

young man out of touch with his familial roots and his own identity who struggles to

uncover his true name while discovering his past. In Milkman’s case, searching for

his story is equivalent to searching out his name. With each story he hears about his

ancestry, he moves closer to reclaiming the ante-bellum identity of his forefathers.

This knowledge is necessary to his becoming what his father calls “a whole man.”

Without the story of his family, without his true name, Milkman’s life would be

rootless and empty, a life which values gold more than self-knowledge and,

ultimately, self-love. Milkman’s search represents the significance of names and

naming to the many characters in the novel whose names allude to personal history

or cultural mythos, and who fight to supplant the connotations of their names with a

new story of their own creation. It is through these new stories that many

characters frame their own identities and recover either their real names or their

names’ true meaning.

Morrison’s epigraph introduces the reader to the novel’s two most

predominant themes: flight and names. The words hint at some mysterious

knowledge, a hidden truth, that a new generation will attain about the old. They are

at once a prophesy and a history, a melding of the past, present, and future that will

come to characterize the novel’s progression through time. “The fathers may soar/

And the children may know their names.” We learn from the chapters that follow

that the children will know their names, i.e. the names of the fathers, through

storytelling. With these opening words, almost before the novel begins, Morrison

connects stories to names. The novel proper opens with a man ready to soar in his

own way, Mr Smith, the depressed insurance agent who, clad in blue silk wings,

prepares to leap from the roof of Mercy Hospital. For Morrison and for the

community, Smith’s name speaks to his character. A most common name

disseminated to the point of meaninglessness, Mr Smith has little or nothing

outstanding about his character. His life is so mundane, even as he is on the verge

of suicide, Morrison’s narrator cuts away from the tragic scene to discuss the

controversial history of a street’s name. In so doing, Morrison seems to place her

emphasis less on the story of a sad yet predictable suicide than on the more

interesting events which lead to the renaming of (Not) Doctor Street, a commentary

on the importance of Dr Foster’s remarkable life relative to the almost

inconsequential existence of Robert Smith, Insurance Agent. That a community

chooses the act of naming to honor a citizen whom many did not even like

highlights the function of names for the people. Each time they referred to Doctor

Street or refer to Not Doctor Street, they acknowledge the story of Dr Foster. “With

Not Doctor Street, they were paying respect to whatever it was that made him be a

doctor” (329). The name comes to represent a story.

Milkman’s early years seem to center on names and naming. Only Mr

Smith’s story (which includes the subsequent renaming of Mercy Hospital to No

Mercy Hospital) and the tale of (Not) Doctor Street precede Milkman’s birth in the

text. We first see Milkman as a nameless child sucking on his mother’s breast, “too

young to be dazzled by her nipples, but…old enough to be bored by the flat taste of

mother’s milk” (13). Ruth is pushed to fantasy by the feeling of her son’s lips,

pictures herself as “issuing spinning gold” and likens herself to “the miller’s daugh-

ter—the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power

Rumpelstiltskin had given her” (13-14). The reference evokes the most archetypal

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of naming stories, that of the captor Rumpelstiltskin who insists that only the

knowledge of his name would grant freedom. That ancient fable serves as a model

to the figures in Milkman’s lineage, who understand the power of a true name.

Immediately following the mention of Rumpelstiltskin, Milkman earns his

own name. Freddie the janitor witnesses the too-old boy nursing and confronts

Ruth. The words come to him almost magically, as if a muse had given him the boy’s

true, and until then, unrevealed name. Freddie’s naming of the boy foretells, maybe

determines, Milkman’s future with women. “He found the phrase he’d been

searching for. ‘A milkman. That’s what you got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman

if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come’” (15). It is important to note

that while this moment is origin of Milkman’s nickname, there is no instant change

from his christened name to his new one. Instead, the name must move from person

to person in the form of Freddie’s story of what he saw that day. At first, only in

Freddie’s mind has the boy been dubbed “Milkman.” When he returns to Southside

and tells more and more eager listeners about what he saw at the Dead’s, listeners

who in turn seek out others, then the boy’s name becomes, firmly, Milkman.

“Freddie carried his discovery not only into the homes in Ruth’s neighborhood, but

to Southside, where he lived, and where Macon Dead [II] owned rent houses” (15).

We later learn “Freddie was as much a town-crier as Southside had” (23) so it is

appropriate that he assumes the role of name-giving storyteller. This process

contrasts markedly with ordinary means of naming, i.e. christening and/or hospital

paperwork, and emphasizes the underlying break between oral and written

discourses, a break that is foregrounded in the later discussion of Macon Dead I’s

name-change.

The naming of a person may not only comment on a person’s developing

story, but complicate it. For example, the mere naming of Milkman alters the

relationships between Milkman and his mother, Milkman and his father, his father

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and his mother, and his mother and the community. The power of a name, then, is

not only in personal freedom and autonomy, but in the force that name carries

between people. After Milkman’s renaming, “Ruth kept close to home…to keep from

hearing that her son had been rechristened with a name he was never able to shake

and that did nothing to improve either one’s relationship with his father” (15). As

Morrison’s narrator moves from Ruth’s perspective to her husband’s, we see the

truth of this statement. The name and the way people use it distance him from his

son and cement the distaste he feels for his wife and their son. Macon Dead II tells

himself a story to conform to his abhorrence of his wife and son. “Without knowing

any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by

hatred, that…the name was not clean.…Wherever the name came from, it had

something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when

thinking of her, coated with disgust” (15). Milkman’s father loses a certain intimacy

with his son because of the name, which townspeople and schoolchildren use freely

and with only a trace of irony. He is further distanced from his community because

everyone refuses to tell him the derivation of the name. Freddie’s naming story,

then, has isolated both Ruth and Macon from the flowing discourse of the town. “No

one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was

a difficult man to approach,” even more difficult now that his son was marked with a

story of near-incestuous shame that may have bolstered his wife’s reputation for

physical intimacy with relatives.

Perhaps most significantly, the renaming of Milkman alienates the youngest

Dead from himself. As soon as Freddie discovers him nursing, Milkman is seized by

the notion that something about his relationship with his mother was “strange and

wrong,” that he was too old and too big to be engaged in that activity. He suffers by

living the next several years with a name whose meaning he, like his father, can

only guess at, knowing that there lingers something “strange and wrong” about it.

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On the same night he punches his father, and learns the shameful tale of his

mother’s sucking on her dead father’s fingers, he is thrown into his deepest guilt.

He begins to remember the time Freddie saw him sucking his mother’s breast. The

dominant image is laughter and shame. “Laughter. Somebody he couldn’t see, in

the room laughing…at him and at his mother, and his mother is ashamed” (77).

Milkamn, in a daze, wanders the street eventually finding his friend Guitar, who he

hopes will share with him the story of his name, restoring a sense of self that was

lost when the family’s dirty secrets were revealed to him. In that conversation, he

makes explicit his self-loathing. He demands of his friend, “How come they call me

Milkman?” (84). Guitar refuses to tell him, perhaps understanding the force of

names and knowing that relating the story would push his friend over the edge.

Milkman admits, “No. I don’t like my name,” but Guitar reassures him not so much

of his name, but of the process of naming, as though that process mattered as much

as its product. “Let me tell you something, baby. Niggers get their names the best

way they can.…The best way is the right way” (88). The way that Guitar refers to is

the way that resulted in both his own name and Milkman’s, and he is confident that

it is superior to the naming methods of non-Blacks, or more specifically, the whites

whom he holds in such contempt. Guitar implies that he and Milkman got their

names through events and subsequent storytelling, not through the arbitrary

completion of a form or certificate. This way, the names carry real meanings.

The tension between varying methods of naming and the puzzle of where the

“real name” lies dominates Macon Dead II’s thought early in the novel. His

assessment of naming is at odds with Guitar’s in many ways, but shares some

essential similarities with the younger man’s beliefs. Both preoccupy themselves

with revealing the truth behind identity, and both realize the connection between

the name and one’s power. While convinced that “Milkman” was somehow the

wrong name for his son, he does not seem much more content with the name

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“Macon Dead,” a name reserved and required for the first son in the Dead line.

Macon resents the nickname because it isolates him from his son and is more

powerful than him. “The nickname…stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or

acknowledge it” (15). Ruminating on his son’s nickname, Macon’s thoughts wander

to his family’s naming ritual in general. His practical side, the side that rejects

much of what the rest of his community values, is ill at ease with the ritual that

encompasses names. “The giving of names in his family was always surrounded by

what he believed to be monumental foolishness” (15). That “monumental

foolishness” entails the drawing of or “picking blind” names from the Bible for

daughters and the automatic assignment of a name born of a white man’s clerical

error—Macon Dead—for the first-born son. Nonetheless, the foolishness is part of a

tradition he felt compelled to subscribe to, and it seems almost caught up in a

transcendent power, akin to fate. “He had cooperated as a young father with the

blind selection of names from the Bible for every child other than the first male.

And abided by whatever the finger pointed to” (18). The use of the Bible as a source

and the notion that the act of naming was a forfeiture of agency (“whatever the

finger pointed to”) indicates that naming is tied up with a host of other-worldly

phenomena, that somehow God might be contracted to assign a true name from his

book, and that name would determine the individual’s character, from birth

forward. Macon kept in mind “every configuration of the naming of his sister,”

Pilate, who was as treacherous as her Biblical predecessor only in Macon’s mind.

“She’s a snake,” he tells his son, referencing not only Pilate’s actions in the Bible,

but Satan’s in Eden. Even with the case of his sister, this process is not entirely

satisfactory, especially in light of the confused issue of his own name, which he and

his son both regard not as a trick of fate, but as the incompetent, maybe malicious,

error of an ignorant white man. When he first encounters Dr Foster, the doctor

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equates Macon Dead’s name with his identity or story: “I don’t know anything about

you,” he says. “Except your name, which I don’t like” (23).

Macon Dead II likewise associates names with his own story, with the series

of events that comprise his familial and personal history, and he is aware that his

rightful, or natural name, had, at the close of the Civil War, been robbed from him.

This fact troubles him in nearly the same way the name “Milkman” shames his son.

Macon’s own name is somehow dirty, or caught in the muck of a failing white

bureaucracy. Macon, who believes so wholeheartedly in not asking anything of

whites is ashamed because his name—by extension, his identity—came from them,

inextricably linking his story with theirs. His name, he implies, is false, and so, too,

might his ideas of success, accomplishment, and freedom be. In the past, was a

figure whose name was not given by the whites, whose name was full of

significance and self-possession. “He thought he and his sister had some ancestor,

some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a

name that was real” (17). This name, he imagines, was “given to him at birth with

love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name”

(17). His faith in such a name, and his postulation that a true name can be

determined at birth, before opportunities arise for jokes and disguises, directly

opposes the method of naming favored by the rest of the community. That method

is made manifest much later in the novel, after Milkman discovers his family’s

history, and considers the beauty of names “got from yearnings, gestures, flaws,

events, mistakes, weaknesses” (330). With some degree of irony, Macon thinks all

this in his office marked “Sonny’s Shop,” a name he cannot escape.

The tension between these two naming rituals, one rich in “seriousness,” the

other in stories and “weaknesses” underlies the stress Milkman feels between the

values of his father (property, gold, wealth) and the values of other members of the

community, particularly his aunt Pilate (love, family, nature). Macon worries,

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though, that his families true name is a mystery forever lost, buried beneath paper

or earth in the Old South. He conflates the conceptual relative’s story with his

name. “Who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him

from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name.” Where he was going, what he

did, is as significant to Macon as the ancestor’s name. He cannot understand why

his own parents chose to further cover his identity beneath a false name when they

may have had the opportunity to grant him a “real name.” What he seems to miss,

however, is the attempt of his parents (Macon Dead I and Sing Bird) to begin a new

ritual or tradition after Dead I’s time in bondage. “His own parents in some mood of

perverseness or resignation had agreed to abide by a naming done to them by

somebody who couldn’t have cared less” (18). Eventually, we discover that Sing’s

motivation in insisting that her husband retain his new name, even though it was

created by “a literal slip of the pen,” was that the new name had the power “to wipe

out the past…wipe it all out.” (Macon Dead I was, after all, only trying to indicate

that his father, representative of his own past, was dead). In other words, Sing

viewed the renaming as a ritual cleansing or rebirth, a fateful turn as random (or

destined) as choosing blind a name from the Bible, while her son felt the whites

maintained power over him and his progeny by having given him his name. The

belief in rebirth-through-renaming might be augmented by the Bible, whence

Macon Dead I’s initial name (Jake) could have been drawn. After wrestling with an

angel/Jesus/God, Jacob emerges with a new identity, characterized by a new name:

Israel, which means “the prince that prevails with God” (Peloubet 274). As with

Jacob/Israel, Jake underwent a great trial (slavery), and emerged with a second

identity, one which Sing might have felt granted him the same freedom as his

Biblical precursor. Morrison appeals not only to Biblical tradition, however, in her

treatment of Jake: she introduces an element of African name-ritual, as well.

Linguist J.L. Dillard reports that, “In many parts of West Africa, every man who

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leaves his traditional setting and family is given or takes on a new name when he

travels or works away from home” (Dillard, 25). As Macon Dead II, or Morrison’s

narrator, considers the family line beginning with his father, his phrasing pastiches

the Book of Genesis, slipping out of Biblical diction only to reveal Macon’s personal

feelings on the matter, a philological move which again highlights the role of the

Bible and names in the characters’ self conception. “Macon Dead who begat a

second Macon Dead who married Ruth Foster (Dead) and begat Magdalene called

Lena Dead and First Corinthians Dead and (when he least expected it) another

Macon Dead, now known to the part of the world that mattered as Milkman Dead”

(18).

The string of names interspersed with commentary from Macon suggests a

rich history behind or embedded in the names, each name speaking story adapted

from the Bible or other mythic source, and injected with creative energy of the

individual characters and their author. It is perhaps too often the tendency to forget

the presence of that latter force, the author, when considering the meaning of

names in the novel and in the lives of the characters, particularly because we know

a nearly everyone’s parent drew a name, often at random, from the Bible. This

knowledge might lull us into the suspicion that the seeming indiscriminate nature of

this act is without meaning. Ignoring the depth behind so many of the names and

the process of naming in the novel, Ruth Rosenberg suggests the names are

“lexically opaque,” that we cannot guess at their meaning because there is no

meaning there. She posits that since Song of Solomon describes “the Black use of

the white Book,” wherein “stressing the self-referentiality of her names, she

protects the integrity of her fiction.” Rosenberg further maintains that the novel

“can only be explicated on its own terms, not on ours” (Alvarez-Altman 215). Her

claim that the Bible is exclusively a white book, and any black person’s use of it is

“subversive” is troublesome in itself, but it also eliminates from Morrison’s cache of

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tropes the use of allusion, which given Morrison’s proven ability (indeed nearly any

writer’s) is preposterous. While by no means can a white readership explicate the

text on only its own terms, the awareness that the Bible is, especially in Song of

Solomon, a work that crosses race-boundaries should serve to explain the more

allusive and elusive aspects of the novel. (As it does with a African and Biblical look

at Jake’s name-shift, for example.) Rosenberg’s thesis of lexical opacity is not even

sustained by her own evidence. In support of her claim, she asserts that

Magdalene, First Corinthians, Rebecca, and Hagar’s names “were chosen not for

their sound but for the shape on the page,” and as such “they cannot be

semantically analyzed” (Rosenberg 217). Yet, Morrison’s narrator tells us that when

Pilate gives birth to her first daughter, she asks the attendants to read her some

names from the Bible. She settles on “Rebecca” because it is “nice sounding.” Pilate

chooses the name precisely because of its sound, and not because of its shape on

the page.

Furthermore, Rosenberg ignores the possibility that in a tradition other than

her own, orality could be understood as at least as important, if not more so, as

orthography. This possibility and necessary tension does seem to play a central role

in the novel. Besides this, Rosenberg misses the likelihood that whether they could

read or not, the naming agents in the novel could know the stories of the characters

from whom they borrow names. When reclaiming her father’s bones from the police

station, Pilate quotes chapter and verse from the Bible, surprising all who know her

with her knowledge. That should offer at least the slightest indication that Pilate

fully understood the connotations of her name and her daughters’, just as Macon

Dead II understood the “configurations” of his sister’s name.

Pilate’s name operates on multiple levels, and the event of her naming stays

with her throughout her life. The first of several characters whose names

commingle the two themes of flight and names, Pilate struggles to overcome the

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treacherous Biblical associations of her name, and develop an identity and a story

of her own. At his daughter’s birth, Macon Dead I consults a Bible to find a “strong-

looking” name to suit his daughter. He chooses “Pilate” which gives the appearance

of “a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees”

(18), a description which summons several images from the Bible, namely the

manner in which Christ dies at the hands of Pontius Pilate, and the word “princely,”

which refers to the meaning of Jacob’s name. But the image also appeals to an

African mythos, one in which the tree is a prominent symbol of protection and the

link between the living and spiritual worlds (Carmean 46). Morrison’s language,

which steeps Pilate’s name in myth when she has barely drawn her first breath,

grounds her in stories which she will follow or transcend throughout her life. When

Macon’s midwife looks at the name he has written down for her daughter and

declares, “You can’t name the baby this,” she says so (obviously) because of the

Biblical connotations of Pilate, who she feels was responsible for the death of Jesus,

and because she realizes the power of names to affect a person. The story of

Pontius Pilate manipulates her view of the name, and her expectation of what Pilate

Dead will be. But Macon misunderstands (or differently interprets) the

pronunciation of “Pilate” and asks, “Like a riverboat pilot?” (19). The connotations

associated with this latter form, the oral one, determine or comment on Pilate’s

character. Pilate, to every one but her brother, leaves the Biblical implications of

her name behind her, with the corpse of her mother. She becomes, in every sense, a

pilot, particularly for Milkman, as she guides him through his early and middle life

towards his ancestral history.

Pilate understands her father’s ability to name her as an act of freedom and

love, and she carries that freedom throughout her life: she characterizes the

liberation inherent in the act of naming by living a liberated life. The only word her

father ever wrote was her name, and his writing it becomes an oral story in itself.

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By folding up her name as her father wrote it, and ornamenting her ear with it, she

brings together the oral and written stories that make up her name. It as though

Pilate adapted Macon Dead II’s advice to “own things” and decided to own her

name, and not let go of it until she puts her father at peace and joins him in the

novel’s closing moments. She is successful enough in not only reclaiming the

original name of her father, but also in establishing the dominance of her name over

the connotations of the Biblical Pilate. The only time the Biblical associations of her

name catch up with her is when she nearly stabs with a kitchen knife the suitor of

her daughter. Pilate means “armed with a spear” (Peloubet, 519). Eventually, it is

her last name, not her first name, which makes people nervous. “Pilate had learned,

whenever she was asked her name, to give only her first name. The last name had a

bad effect on people” (146). Perhaps she understood her name as an imperative

issued by her father, i.e. “pilot” or guide people through their troubled lives, in

much the same way she thought her father’s was telling her to “sing, sing” when he

was saying her mother’s name (208). When Milkman mentions her name to the men

in Shalimar, they ask, in a manner similar to Macon Dead I, “Pilate? She do any

flying?” (283), a question which reconnects her name with the theme of flight. The

theme is at once solidified and terminated as Pilot, shot by Guitar, collapses just

after removing her name from her ear, and a bird swoops down, grabs her name,

and flies off.

Another character whose name is directly linked to flight is Hagar, 1 whose

very name means flight (Peloubet 226). But unlike Pilate, she never overcomes her

Biblical counterpart. In a well-known incident from the Bible, Hagar was a black

concubine of Abraham, given him by his wife Sarah, who was unable to conceive

with the old man. After Hagar conceived a child, Sarah reproached her. A woman

1Some of the others being the Byrd (or Bird) family, Sing and Crow(ell). Also, Dillard notes that Hagar, a “very frequent” slave name, is similar to the Mende “Haga,” meaning “lazy” (Dillard 20).

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scorned, Hagar went on to live a mostly miserable life. And so it is with Morrison’s

Hagar who, humiliated and rejected by Milkman, dies of a broken heart.

Intriguingly, when the Biblical Hagar’s son, Ishmael, was about sixteen, he ridiculed

Sarah as he watched her nurse her young son Isaac,2 an occurrence which mirrors

Ruth’s experience with Freddie. Although in the Bible, this event causes Sarah to

demand the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, Morrison adapts the tale to her own

purposes, and Ruth is the one to feel expelled from the community. Freddie, the

latter-day complement of Ishmael, escapes to tell the story.

An important distinction between the role of names in the lives of Hagar and

many others characters in the novel, especially Milkman, is the lack of self-

consciousness Hagar has toward his name. Milkman and his father are endlessly

meditating on the meanings of their respective names, almost from the moment of

their inception. For Hagar, her name is just her name, and although she fulfills its

prophesy, she does so unwittingly and unwillingly. Milkman, on the other hand,

begins his life ashamed of both of his names until he and Guitar became friends

(38). He fills his late-teens to early twenties with meaningless conquests of women,

but then gains a certain irony about his name as he comes to conceive of himself as

an individual, able to play on the double-meaning of his last name on the one hand,

while exploring its origins on the other. The earliest signs of pride Milkman reveals

toward his last name come when he and Guitar visit Pilate for the first time. Her

comment that “Their ain’t but three Deads alive” provokes a heated response in the

young Milkman, who “heard himself shouting, ‘I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead! My

sisters. You and him ain’t the only ones.’ Even while he was shouting, he wondered

why he was suddenly so defensive—so possessive about his name” (38). Most likely,

Pilate’s statement was intended merely to provoke a response, one of pride and

2Incidentally, Isaac goes on to marry a woman named Rebekah. The story of their marriage can be found in Genesis 24 (Peloubet, 555).

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defense, in Milkman who, Pilate guessed, might be feeling ashamed of his name.

Only in Pilate’s mouth had the name sounded whole and “grown up.” “He was

behaving with this strange woman as if having the same name was a matter of deep

personal pride” (38). The boy’s feelings of pride in his name can be traced in the

African-American tradition at least back to William Wells Brown’s Narrative. In that

work, published 1848, Brown recounts the possessiveness he felt when his master’s

nephew, also named William, arrived at the plantation. “My mother was ordered to

change [my name] to something else. This, at the time, I thought to be one of the

most cruel acts that could be committed upon my rights; and I received several

very severe whippings for telling people that my name was William, after orders

were given to change it” (Alvarez-Altman 174). The connection between liberty and

naming, well known to Pilate, her father, and her brother, is revealed in this work,

written 120 years before Morrison’s. Like Milkman, the young Brown knew even at

his early age the significance and force of a name, of an identity: “Though young, I

was old enough to place a high appreciation on my name.” Indeed, Brown’s real-life

actions match the fictive ones of Milkman and his grand-father: “I resolved on

adopting my old name of William…So I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also

hunting for a name…” (Alvarez-Altman 174). The parallels between Brown and

Milkman’s family continue, as Wells (then just William) encounters a beneficent

Quaker who tells him “Thee must have another name. Since thee has got out of

slavery and thee has become a man, and men always have two names.”

Putting aside for now the Quaker’s possible implication that prior to being a

fugitive, William was not actually a man, we can explore the way the notion of “two

names” functions for the Dead family. First, there are two names as the Quaker

meant it: first and last names. Much of Milkman’s work in Virginia is discovering

the original last name of his grand-father, Jake. That search falls under Macon Dead

II’s assertion that “if you want to be a whole man, you have to have the whole

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story.” The whole story, in Milkman’s case and in Brown’s, is the emergence of a

last name. Secondly, “two names” can refer to a christened name and a nickname.

The former, usually arrived at through Bible-fingering or an arbitrary choice,

predestines a person in one way, perhaps shapes his character. The second name,

however, is the nickname, which generally comes about through some event,

established character trait, or weakness. Figuratively, no person in Milkman’s

community becomes a whole man until he earns his nickname, and either lives up to

it or lives it down. This is the process Guitar refers to when he said Blacks get their

names the best way they can. For his own part, Guitar has at least three names.

Though he claims not to care (“I don’t give a damn about names”), he does

acknowledge that “Guitar is my name. It’s part of who I am” (160). He has his

christened name (something Bains), his nickname, and then his position as “The

Sunday man,” a member of the radical group the Seven Days. His third name,

appropriately, is perhaps most closely tied to his nationalist tendencies, as it

conforms to the African proclivity to use day names for newborns 3 (Dillard 19).

Finally, there are the two names of the Dead family. They are Dead; They are

Solomon. Milkman’s quest, and the conceit of his father, is to uncover and reclaim

this first name, so they might be at peace with their second. With that other name

(chronologically, the first), the Dead family will have the whole story and be

complete. They are hunting for freedom, and hunting for a name.

When Milkman rejects hunting gold in favor of hunting names, he finds the

name that tells his story in the children’s songs. Through full awareness of this

song, he accepts and takes pride in his familial history. The subsequent re-assembly

of the Deads in Shalimar, a place named for their ancestors, effects a unity—a

wholeness—that had been missing since Jake’s name-change. The phrase “Song of

3Dillard notes that African day/personal names were often translated or Anglicized in America. “Thus Cudjo might become Monday in one generation and Joe in the next” (Dillard 20).

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Solomon” takes on a double, even triple meaning, as the song matches the story of

Milkman’s great-grandfather and the eponymous Bible story, commonly interpreted

as a tale of “the victory of…love over the temptations of wealth” (Peloubet 105). The

title of the novel, the name of the song, signify the stories contained within. Just as

the names of the characters imply the lives to follow, so does Morrison in naming

the novel, foretell its story.

5581 words

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Primary Source

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume/Penguin, 1987.

Secondary Sources

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy, New York: 1993.

Dillard, J.L. Black Names. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Heller, Murray. “The Names of Slaves and Masters: Real and Fictional.” Names in

Literature: Essays from Literary Onomastic Studies. Ed. by Grace Alvarez-

Altman and Frederick Burelbach. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of

America, 1987.

Rosenberg, Ruth. “‘And the Children May Know Their Names’: Toni Morrison’s

Song of Solomon.” Names in Literature: Essays from Literary Onomastic

Studies. Ed. by Grace Alvarez-Altman and Frederick Burelbach. Lanham,

Maryland: University Press of America, 1987.

Peloubet, F.N. (ed.). Smith’s Bible Dictionary. New York: 1990.

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