Song of Solomon
Chapter 8 and 9
Milkman & Guitar
Porter and Corinthians
a Vertext by
Joseph Scotese
Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses (173)
Chapter 8
“Come on, old dude. Your pappy give you a good thing and you want to fight it.” (175)
Chapter 8
“Did you do it yet?...Do you now know what it’s like to risk your one and only self? How did it feel? Were you afraid? Did it change you?" (176)
Chapter 8
“You’re forgetting, Guitar, how Pilate got the gold in the first place. She waited in a cave with a dead man for three days to haul it out, and that was when she was twelve…what you think she’ll do now when she’s almost seventy to keep it?" (187)
Chapter 8
[talking about the pure white peacock they see on a Buick] “How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken? Milkman asked. “Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that sh**” (179)
Chapter 8
“What burglary? This ain’t no burglary. This is Pilate.” “So?” “So! They’re your people.”(181)
Chapter 8
“He tried hard not to swallow, but the clarion call in Guitar’s voice filled his mouth with salt. The same salt that lay in the bottom of the sea and in the sweat of a horse’s neck. A taste so powerful and necessary that stallions gallped miles and days for it.”" (183)
Chapter 8
“On autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An odor like crystalized ginger….Yet there was this heavy spice-sweet smell that made you think of the East and striped tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets" (184)
Chapter 8
“Tomorrow,” he [Milkman] said. Tomorrow night.” “What time?” “One-thirty. I’ll pick you up.” “Beautiful.” Far down the road, a long way from Milkman Guitar, the peacock spread its tail. (184)
Chapter 8
“The moonlight was playing tricks on him, for he thought he saw the figure of a man standing right behind his friend" (186)
Chapter 8
“Amanuensis. That was the word she chose, and since it was straight out of the nineteenth century, her mother approved.” (187)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Unfit for any work other than the making of red velvet roses, she had a hard time finding employment befitting her degree.” (187)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“High toned and high yellow, she believed what her mother was also convinced of: that she was a prize for a professional man of color.” (188)
“They wanted wives who would sacrifice themselves and appreciate the hard work and sacrifice of their husbands. Corinthians was a little too elegant." (187)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians’ main concern was simply that her family not know that she had been doing it for two years" (189).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Miss Graham was delighted with Corinthians’ dress and slightly uppity manners. It gave her house the foreign air she liked to affect…" (190).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Actually, the work Corinthians did was good for her. In that house she had what she never had in her own: responsibility. (190).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Being a poet, she (Michael-Mary Graham) could, of course, do little else. Marriage, children—all had been sacrificed to the Great Angony and her home was a tribute to her father’s will" (191).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“When Miss Graham first saw Corinthians, she was not at all impressed with her…But when she learned the woman’s name, Michael-Mary was so charmed by the sound of “Corinthians Dead,” she hired her on the spot" (193).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Then one morning he [Porter] dropped a white envelope on the seat beside her just before she got off the bus” (192)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
"Don't you see I love ya? I'd die for ya, kill for ya. I'm saying I love ya. I'm telling ya. Oh, God have mercy..." (Porter, 26).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians threw it [the card] in the brown paper bag opened for the day’s garbage…When evening came, she reached down through the grapefruit rind, the tea leaves…to find it brush it clean, and transfer it to her purse" (193).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians knew she was ashamed of him, that she would have to add him to the other secret, the nature of her work, that he could never set foot in her house. And she hated him a lot for the shame she felt." (194).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“He invited her to his room. She declined immediately and repeatedly for severyal days until he accused her of the very thing that was absolutely true; that she was ashamed of him" (194).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“It’s only my father…the way he is.” / “How is he?” / “You know as well as I do. He never wanted us to mix with…people” (195)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.” It was such a fake gesture to go along with her fake feelings of moral and filial commitment that she knew right away how foolish it seemed.” (Corinthians 195).
“I don’t want a doll baby. I want a woman. A grown-up woman that’s not scared of her daddy. I guess you don’t want to be a grown-up woman, Corrie" (Porter 196).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“You wanted a lady. Somebody who knows how to sit down, how to dress, how to eat the food on her plate. Well, there is a difference between a woman and a lady, and I know you know which one I am." (Corinthians, 197).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians got out and did her best to slam it, but the rusty hinges of the borrowed Oldsmobile did not accommodate her. She had to settle for the gesture" (197).
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“The moment she had put her foot on the step leading up to the porch, she saw her ripeness mellowing and rotting before a heap of red velvet scraps on a round oak table" (197).
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying…
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime, 15
You may for ever tarry.
To the Virgins to Make Much of Time – Robert Herrick
“A stretcher came at last for the doll-broken body…and finally a wheelchair for her mother, who was moving straight into labor.” (198)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians climbed up on the fender and lay full out across the hood of the car. She didn’t look through the windshield at him. She just lay there, stretched across the car, her fingers struggling for a grip on steel” (199)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“It was not yet midnight and hot—hot enough to make people angry, had it not been for a pleasant smell in the air, like sweet ginger” (199)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“This is…for you. Instead of roses. And silk underwear and bottles of perfume / Porter / Instead of chocolate creams in a hard-shaped box. Instead of a big house and a great big car…” (200)
And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ’em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either… Railroad Tommy from earlier in the book
to the very young Milkman & Guitar
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“What she assumed to be wallpaper as she entered and fell on the bed was in fact calendars. Row after row of calendars: S & J. Automobile Parts…But most of the were from the North Carolina Mutal Life Insurance Company” (201)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Some of them were large cards displaying all twelve months and on those she noticed circles drawn around dates” (201)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Corinthians moved close to him, tilted his chin up with her fingers, and planted a feathery kiss on his throat” (201)
Song of Solomon Chapter 9
“Now, after a whispered confession, she walked the four blocks, no longer afraid to mount the porch steps” (203)
I lean against the wall and grip my helmet and rifle. I hold them as tight as I can, but I cannot take another step, the staircase fades before my eyes, I support myself with the butt of my rifle against my feet and clench my teeth fiercely, but I cannot speak a word, my sister's call has made me powerless, I can do nothing, I struggle to make myself laugh, to speak, but no word comes, and so I stand on the steps, miserable, helpless, paralyzed, and against my will the tears run down my cheeks.
Paul Baumer returning home on leave � All Quiet on the Western Front
Part II – Chapter 10
When Hansel and Gretel stood in the forest and saw the house in the clearing before them, the little hairs at the nape of their necks must have shivered. Their knees must have felt so weak that blinding hunger alone could have propelled them forward. No one was there to warn or hold them; their parents, chastened and grieving, were far away. So they ran as fast as they could to the house where a woman older than death lived, and they ignored the shivering nape hair and the softness in their knees. A grown man can also be energized by hunger, and any weakness in his knees or irregularity in his heartbeat will disappear if he thinks his hunger is about to be assuaged. Especially if the object of his craving is not gingerbread or chewy gumdrops, but gold.
blinding hunger
No one was there to warn or hold them; their
softness in their knees
Hansel and Gretel
hunger
gingerbread
gumdrops
gold