“Some glad morning when this life is o'er, // I'll fly away. // To that home on God's celestial shore,// I'll fly away.” It was that sorrowful refrain that rang out at the funeral of Freddie Gray, the young man who was murdered by police in Baltimore in this April. The hymn played is full of the same flight imagery and symbolism that laces Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. This theme defines the novel and is tied into Morrison’s message of hope for the black community.
Much of black folk music is similarly full of stories and images of flight. These ideas inspired slaves, imagining themselves flying away from bondage on earth. Yet in Morrison’s novel, set way after the fall of slavery, such imagery crops up repeatedly. In the very first couple of pages Mr Smith a black tax collector attempts to fly off of the roof of a building. Of course he failed to break the bonds of gravity. This event takes place at milkman’s birth, his whole life seems to become a road on the path to flight. He wants to be a pilot when he is young and he eventually learns of the story of his grandfather Solomon’s own avian exploits. At the end of the novel Milkman himself attempts to fly. It is left ambiguous whether or not he succeeds but considering how he has evolved over the course of the novel, from a man who is like his father a bourgeois land owner with no qualms to a caring young man aware of history it is clear that Morrison is trying to present flight, not as a method of escape, but as symbol of ascension, of enlightenment for the black community. “Learn your roots, reject capitalism,” she is saying “and you too can fly into the heavens like Milkman”
As someone who is obviously not part of the black community I will defer to Morrison’s judgement. If she believes that the route to salvation for her community is through introspection and anti-capitalism than it probably is. It certainly is an appealing stratagem. I hope that one day her vision comes true.
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