Kamryn Kobel, “‘You Can’t Just Fly Off and Leave a Body’: Cycles of Discovery in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon”
When something is moving in a circular motion, there is no beginning or end to the movement. A forward movement is simultaneously a movement through what has already happened, as the same path is being followed repeatedly. When you move in a circle, what is in front of you is also what is behind you. In this way, in a cycle, the past, present, and future are inseparably connected. Throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, cycles of both time and movement are prominent. The main character, Milkman, journeys in a cyclical movement through both space and time as he follows the path of his ancestors back and forth between the North and the South, and consequently, between the past and the present. Through these circular movements, Milkman achieves a better understanding of himself and of his role within his family and community. By the end of the novel, Milkman discovers that nothing is ever truly lost within a cycle—and that the discovery and re-discovery of the past is connected to the formation of the self in the present. Through Milkman’s physical journey, Morrison portrays how time is a cycle where aspects of the self cannot be lost, only discovered, and through that discovery, be returned more fully both to the self and to community.
The majority of Song of Solomon follows Milkman’s childhood and young adult years. During this period of Milkman’s life, he is stagnant and unmoving. He stays in his hometown in Michigan well into his adulthood, never moving out of his childhood home. While Milkman is stuck in his birthplace, he is also stuck within the cycle of time and self-realization. Milkman’s state of stagnation within the cycle of time is shown when, as a child, he is forced to face backward and look out the rearview window while he travels in the car with his family. Milkman says that “…riding backwards made him feel uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going—just where he had been—troubled him” (Morrison 32). This “backward” view of the world removes Milkman from the circular motion of time because all he can see is “where he had been” instead of “where he was going,” which is evidence of a straight, linear movement, not a cycle of repetition and connection. Indeed, Deborah Guth notes Morrison’s connections between present and past throughout her work in the article “A Blessing and a Burden: The Relationship to the Past in Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.” In this article, Guth argues that,
The relation of present to past in Morrison’s work is thus neither a question of simply “going back” to a traditional world and denying the present, nor of sealing off an “unspeakable” past to make way for a new order, but rather of continuously exploring the hidden intersections between the two time-spans… Mainly, as her narrative constructions make clear, the dialogical integration of the past into an ongoing narrative opens up semantic recesses which give depth and new direction to the understanding of the present. It restores an alienated present to itself and provides that sense of cultural self-possession which for her is the bedrock of identity. (589)
Guth notes that to “[understand] the present” one must “continuously [explore] the hidden intersections” between the present and the past. For Guth, the present and the past must be in conversation with each other for understanding and identity to be possible. Having the past and present interact in such a way insinuates a circular understanding of the movement back to and through self as the past and present are “intersecting” and contain “integration” that intrinsically connects them to each other. Young Milkman, who is only capable of seeing the past, cannot engage in this circular conversation between past and present because he cannot conceive of any connection between them. Instead, he can only see the things that he has already passed by, and not things that surround him in the present or the future. Milkman’s disjointedness and disconnection prevent him from engaging in a cyclical movement of time, which prevents him from reaching that “bedrock of identity” that Guth identifies. He is stuck; the world moves around him, but he is not a part of that movement.
Only once Milkman is well into his middle adulthood does his stagnancy end as he undergoes a journey to discover gold that he believes his aunt, Pilate, has hidden somewhere further south, where their family hails from. Milkman travels from North to South, and then back again, creating a circular loop connecting his current home with his ancestral one. He begins in his Northern birthplace of Michigan, then travels to Danville, Pennsylvania, where Pilate and Milkman’s father, Macon II, were raised (Morrison 226-227). From Danville, he continues following his ancestral line southward to Shalimar, a town in Virginia where his grandfather Jake and grandmother Ryna lived. He arrives in Shalimar (Morrison 261), spends a few days there, and then closes the cycle by returning North to Michigan (Morrison 329). However, his journey does not stop there; he returns once again to Shalimar at the end of the novel, creating a repetitive loop as Milkman travels across the country in a circular motion (Morrison 335). His journey acts as a sort of reverse migration; as he travels, he goes back to where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather originate from. He traces their movement backwards, and then follows their journey North, finally circling back to the South where the novel ends. Milkman’s circular movement across the North and South is exemplary of a circular movement through time; as he goes South, he also goes back in time as he discovers things about his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, with each stop in his trip going further South as well as further back in his family tree. He eventually returns to the “present,” which would be his life and family in Michigan, but then continues the circle by again revisiting the “past” in Shalimar, where he had left off. His physical journey reflects a cyclical journey through time and history—a journey where, along the way, Milkman discovers truths about himself and his community.
Milkman’s journey as a cyclical traversal through time and space is made evident through the gradual deterioration of his watch as he moves southward. At the beginning of his journey, before he arrives in Danville, Milkman notes that “According to his watch, the gold Longines his mother had given him, it would be another twenty minutes” (Morrison 226). Prior to his first stop in the South, he wears his watch and reads it to tell the time. At this point in the novel, Milkman understands time linearly; he follows what the watch says and calculates time based on what he reads from it, understanding that there are twenty minutes left in his journey. However, as he continues to move south, the watch breaks, separating Milkman from linear time. While in Danville, as Milkman is traveling through the woods searching for his grandfather’s farm, the watch cracks. Milkman notes that “It ticked, but the face was splintered and the minute hand was bent” (Morrison 250). Because it is broken, he is unable to read the watch, so he “…look[s] at the sky to gauge the hour” (Morrison 253). Here in Danville, Milkman can no longer follow time as it is linearly constructed through numbers, and he must try to figure out what time it is through the sun’s position in the sky. The sun moves across the sky as the Earth circles around it, which further connects Milkman’s conception of time with circular motion.
This removal from linear time grows as Milkman continues traveling to Shalimar, where the watch is eventually stolen. In the article “Gold and Bones: Remains of the Quest in Song of Solomon,” Claudine Raynaud discusses Morrison’s use of gold throughout the novel and argues that the symbolic meaning of the gold changes between the beginning and the end of Milkman’s journey. Raynaud notes that “The watch, now broken, is finally stolen by Grace Long, Susan Byrd’s nosy friend, and Milkman leaves it at that, abandoning with it both the gold of the quest and the linear time that the watch no longer keeps” (458). Milkman loses the watch to Grace Long, and as Raynaud notes, this expels him fully from the confines of linear time and returns him to its cyclical movement instead. In Shalimar, the southernmost point in his circle of travel, Milkman “abandons” linear time, as Reynaud puts it, and instead follows the circular timekeeping of travel through the past and present locations of the North and South. This is significant because it shows how the movement of time and the movement through place are connected throughout Milkman’s journey as he utilizes these cycles to understand the self.
Milkman’s physical journey through the cycle of time begins in Danville, Pennsylvania, where he believes he will find the gold on the farm where his father and aunt grew up. When he first arrives in town, he feels “ridiculous” and out of place as he does not know what to do with himself or how to find the farm (Morrison 227). However, his feelings of estrangement come to an end when he meets Reverend Cooper, who helps him find the house. Upon meeting Milkman and hearing who his father is, Reverend Cooper exclaims to Milkman: “I know your people!” (Morrison 229). Until this moment, Milkman had never thought that he had people to know, and Reverend Cooper’s geniality brings a newfound understanding of community to Milkman. He comes to realize that “It was a good feeling to come into a strange town and find a stranger who knew your people. All his life he’d heard the tremor in the word… But he hadn’t known what it meant: links” (Morrison 229). This epiphany about what the concept of “his people” and community means is only possible for Milkman to comprehend once he experiences it firsthand—and the only place he can experience it is in Danville, where his “people” are. The folks who live in Danville are linked to Milkman through their memories of his forefathers, again demonstrating how his journey to the South is also a journey through time, where he can revive connections with a community that his father made before him and that are still meaningful. Milkman moves towards the past by coming to Danville, but by visiting this town, he gains new knowledge and understanding of what community means. Like his childhood spent looking out the rearview window, Milkman is immersed in the past; however, this time, he gains understanding as he connects and “links” the people of Danville to his own identity. Due to this cycle of discovery and rediscovery, these people are not just any people—they are his people.
Additionally due to this traversal backwards in time, Milkman is also able to move forward and grow as a person as he comes to understand his role within the Black community. While he stays in Danville and immerses himself within the community that resides there, he discovers aspects of himself that were lost to him in Michigan. After the Danville townspeople tell him that his grandfather’s murder went without punishment or justice, Milkman wonders why “He hadn’t felt angry about it when he first heard about it. Why now?” (Morrison 232). Only while he is in Danville, surrounded by this community of Black people who have connected with him through his family history, can Milkman feel these emotions and understand them to be a part of himself. This moment of anger is shown to be a moment of growth, as it contrasts how Milkman feels about racial injustice while he is in Michigan. Before his journey south, “He was bored. Everybody bored him. The city was boring. The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all” (Morrison 107). While stagnant in Michigan, Milkman expresses his boredom with the city and his apathy towards racial injustices, despite being a Black man himself. However, once he is physically immersed in the community and the history of his identity, he begins to grow as a person and can feel this empathy that has eluded him for so long. In Danville, racial injustice makes him feel angry and emotional, something that is unknown to him before meeting this community. Again, although traveling to Danville is a reverse migration into the past, Milkman is able to discover meaning and importance within the aspects of himself —namely, his identity as a Black man.
Milkman’s next stop in his cycle through time and space is in the town of Shalimar, Virginia. Shalimar represents another layer of depth within Milkman’s journey, as Shalimar is where his grandfather and great-grandfather originate from. Coming to Shalimar places him a generation further back in his ancestral timeline as well as farther south than he was in Danville, entrenching him even deeper within the cycle. While in Shalimar, Milkman goes hunting with a group of older Black men that live in town. During this hunt, Milkman describes physically moving in a circular motion through the woods. He says that “He believed they were circling now, for it seemed to him that this was the third time he had seen that double-humped rock in the distance. Should they be circling? he wondered” (Morrison 275). As he is hunting with this community of men in Shalimar, he is “circling” around, which is another example of Milkman moving through circles as he goes south. Once he tires of running in circles, Milkman sits on the ground and “…[begins] to wonder what he [is] doing sitting in the middle of the woods in Blue Ridge country” (Morrison 275). As he sits, he comes to a series of realizations and epiphanies about himself and his position within his community. He thinks back on his actions and, for the first time in the novel, Milkman comes to understand how unfairly he has treated the people in his life. As he thinks about his mother and father, he asks “…why shouldn’t his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who?” (Morrison 276). Here, within this circular journey through his grandfather’s birthplace, Milkman reassesses his actions and his relationship with his parents as he has never done before. He acknowledges the selfishness in pushing his family away, something that has impacted his ability to engage with them. He notices the error of his ways within his relationship with Hagar, too, realizing that “…Hagar, who knew him and whom he’d thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone—she had a right to try and kill him too” (Morrison 276-77). As he sits in Shalimar, after having circled around the woods of his great-grandfather’s home, Milkman realizes his feelings of regret over his past actions. Like he did in Danville, Milkman comes to empathize and better understand his family and members of his community in the North as he travels south. His circling (both through the woods of Shalimar and through the North and South) leads him to these epiphanies of self and community that he would not have come to in Michigan. Milkman circles through physical space, but he also circles through memories of how he has treated people in his life, and by returning to examine his past actions, he is able to recognize the errors in his ways and come to understand the situations more empathetically. Again, although he is technically moving backwards through this migration, the cyclical nature of time allows him to make connections between his past and his present, aiding his discovery of important aspects of himself such as his faults and flaws.
These epiphanies of self-reflection and community are not the only ones Milkman arrives at while he is in Shalimar. The day after the hunt, Milkman decides to “…walk around a little…” until his car is ready to be driven (Morrison 299). As he walks and moves throughout the town of Shalimar, he notices some children playing a game. As he watches them, he notes how “The boy in the middle of the circle (it seemed always to be a boy) spun around with his eyes closed… Round and round he went until the song ended…” (Morrison 299). The boy who is spinning in the middle of the circle is implied to be a representation of Milkman himself. The mention that the child in the middle of the circle “seemed always to be a boy” references how Song of Solomon is Morrison’s first novel that centralizes the story and journey of a male character—that character being Milkman. Additionally, Milkman says that when “The children were starting the round again… Suddenly he was tired, although the morning was still new” (Morrison 301). Here Milkman feels the physical effects of the children’s game, as though he is playing it himself and is tired from the exertion. Finally, when Milkman talks to his romantic partner, Sweet, about the children’s game, he says “I can play it now. It’s my game now” (Morrison 327). Milkman feels the physical exertion of the game and claims it as his own; this spinning game, where the children go around in circles, is his now. He reclaims the self, the game, and the story of Solomon, all of which become his to carry with him and share with the rest of his community. This circular game and Milkman’s acquisition of it leads him to reach another epiphany pertaining to his family and himself—the meaning of the song of Solomon.
As Milkman listens to the children playing this game, he recognizes that they are singing a song that includes names and phrases that are familiar to him. Specifically, he recognizes the names of people and places that he has encountered and learned about during his journey south. As he listens to the children sing their song, he thinks: “Why did the second name sound so familiar? Solomon and Ryna. The woods. The hunt. Solomon’s Leap and Ryna’s Gulch, places they went to or passed by that night they shot the bobcat” (Morrison 302). Milkman comes to understand the true meaning of what the children are saying, recognizing that “These children were singing a song about his own people,” because he had physically been in the places that they sing about in this song (Morrison 304). The song is about Milkman’s great-grandfather, Solomon, and his great-grandmother Ryna, and Milkman can put together these names and stories because his movement through time allows him to discover them and physically experience them. The song about his ancestors would not make sense without having traveled through Danville and Shalimar, to Solomon’s Leap and Ryna’s Gulch, and without engaging with the communities within each to learn about them. Without Milkman’s circular movement through space and time, he would be unable to understand the children’s song, and thus unable to understand the story of his great-grandfather. In Shalimar, Milkman returns to himself in the form of a child playing a game. In turn, the game that the child plays then returns him to his ancestry as he sings about Solomon. These connections form a cycle through time and generations, returning Milkman to himself and the stories of his great-grandfather. The song is coming out of his child-self’s mouth, and now, as an adult, he is returning to it by returning to Shalimar. It is as though he is picking the story up where he had left it, or where it had been left for him to rediscover. Milkman looks forwards into his past self, gaining knowledge from him, and again demonstrating the circularity of time and discovery.
The cycle of his travels starts anew as Milkman returns to Michigan with a newfound self-awareness and understanding about the importance of community. His return to Michigan marks his return to the present as he migrates back North and forward through time to his present life and community. Once in Michigan, Milkman comes to another epiphany about himself and his family. He thinks about a phrase that Pilate had said Jake’s ghost told her: “You just can’t fly off and leave a body” (Morrison 332). The developments and discoveries that Milkman has undergone throughout his journey lead readers to understand the phrase with a new meaning. At the end of the novel, the words “You can’t just fly off and leave a body” become literal. Jake is not saying that it is morally wrong when he says “you can’t just” leave someone behind—he’s literally saying that it is impossible to leave someone behind once they have impacted you as a person. If you are moving in a circle throughout time and place, as Milkman does, you literally can’t leave something behind because the cycle will always come back around to it. Since time is a circle, the discovery and re-discovery of people, events, and places from the past are inevitable, as Milkman has demonstrated throughout his travels. Milkman cannot leave Solomon or his Southern roots in the past because they are aspects of his identity, and time will always return him to these aspects, no matter how long ago or physically far away he is removed from them.
In the same sense, Solomon does not leave his family behind as the legend claims he did. The children sing “O Solomon don’t leave me here” (Morrison 301), and just like Jake’s saying, the journey that Milkman goes through changes this phrase’s meaning to be literal. Solomon didn’t leave anyone behind when he “flew off” (Morrison 322). His story and his memories stayed there in Shalimar where he left them, waiting for his descendants to circle back around to find him and to learn his story. And, during his journey south, Milkman does learn his story. Milkman’s circular migration allows him to regain these histories that were left there for him to discover as the past connects with his present in each location he visits. The stories are not lost despite the Dead family moving north and generations of time passing. Instead, they are lying in wait, ready to be circled back upon.
Laura Dubek’s article “Pass It On!: Legacy and the Freedom Struggle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” discusses the Civil Rights movement in relation to Song of Solomon, but it also discusses Milkman’s discovery of self through the acquisition of Solomon’s stories. Dubek writes, “The key to Milkman Dead regaining this interest in himself is more than just the discovery of his great-grandfather Solomon’s flight: it is the acceptance that he carries within himself Solomon’s spirit (the “you” who does not have “to die”)” (92). As Dubek says, Milkman’s interest and understanding of himself and his place in society are discovered through his integration of Solomon’s story into his identity. Solomon is not in his past and cannot be left behind because he is a crucial element of Milkman’s self-concept. Solomon constructs Milkman, as his journey towards discovering Solomon’s story brings Milkman enlightenment towards certain aspects of himself and his humanity. Thus, he cannot be left behind or excluded from Milkman, as he is part of him.
The final connection that brings the entirety of Song of Solomon into a closed circle is Milkman’s flight. Milkman mirrors his great grandfather’s infamous action, both bringing readers back to the opening of the novel when Robert Smith “flies” off of the hospital building the day before Milkman’s birth (Morrison 9) and back to the origin and driving force of Milkman’s journey south: Solomon’s legendary flight. By the end of the novel, Milkman “…knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (Morrison 337). He identifies himself with his great grandfather and follows him in flight as he jumps off the ledge. In doing this, Milkman embodies the idea of the Flying African, which are figures of a diasporic return to the homeland of Africa. Throughout Song of Solomon, Milkman returns to multiple different homelands—he returns to his ancestral roots in the South, then he returns to Michigan, and finally he returns to Shalimar. This series of returns is concluded when Milkman makes this final, absolute return as he embodies Solomon and takes flight, possibly back to Africa, the terminating step in the process of Black return to origin. This extension of the cycle of time and identity beyond Shalimar and even further past Milkman’s great-grandfather demonstrates how there is always more to return to and more to discover about ourselves through the stories of our ancestry. Through Milkman’s journey, he not only discovers information about Solomon, but he also discovers his own ability to “ride” the air, which is something that he learns from uncovering the song of Solomon. Within this novel, Morrison demonstrates how connections between people, stories, and places are never ending, as what is behind us is also ahead of us, giving infinite wisdom and opportunities for self-reflection as we continue onwards through the cycle of time.
Works Cited
Dubek, Laura. “‘Pass It On!’: Legacy and the Freedom Struggle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 2, 2015, pp. 90–109.
Guth, Deborah. “A Blessing and a Burden: The Relation to the Past in Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 575–96, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.0197.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Plume, 1977.
Raynaud, Claudine. “Gold and Bones: Remains of the Quest in Song of Solomon.” Etudes Anglaises, vol. 72, no. 4, 2020, pp. 452–68, https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.724.0452.
This essay was written in ENL 320, with Professor Evans in the Fall semester 2022.