Song of Solomon
Chapter 11
Communion
A Vertext by
Joe Scotese
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing.(259)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
Where he [Milkman] went, there wasn’t a white face around, and the Negroes were as pleasant, wide-spirited, and selfcontained as could be. He earned the rewards he got here. None of the pleasantness was directed at him because of his father, as it was back home, or his grandfather’s memory, as it was in Danville.(260)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He was his own director —relieving himself when he wanted to, stopping for cold beer when he was thirsty, and even in a seventy-five-dollar car the sense of power was strong.(260)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He’d had to pay close attention to signs and landmarks,because Shalimar was not on the Texaco map he had. (260)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
(the general store owner talking to Milkman) “Yeah. Said to tell you your day was sure coming or your day…something like that…your day is here. But I know it had a day in it. But I ain’t sure if he said it was comin or was already here.”(262)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He gazed up and down the dusty road. Shotgun houses with wide spaces between them, a few dogs, chickens, children, and the women with nothing in their hands. They sat on porches, and walked in the road swaying their hips under cotton dresses, bare-legged, their unstraightened hair braided orpulled straight back into a ball. He wanted one of them bad. (263)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
Milkman stepped off the porch, scattering the hens, and walked down the road toward a clump of trees near a building.(263)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
A boy in the middle, his arms outstretched, turned around like an airplane, while theothers sang some meaningless rhyme:
Jay the only son of Solomon
Come booba yalle, come booba tambee
Whirl about and touch the sun
Come booba yalle, come booba tambee…(264)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
It was the first time Milkman saw anybody really enjoy a fight. Afterward Guitar had taken off his baseball cap and handed it to Milkman, telling him to wipe the blood from his nose. Milkman bloodied the cap, returned it, and Guitar slapped it back on his head.(264)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
Milkman sensed that he’d struck a wrong note. About the women, he guessed. What kind of place was this where a man couldn’t
even ask for a woman? (265)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
What was all the hostility for? He looked at the men sitting around the store. “You think maybe one of them could help with the car?” he asked Mr. Solomon. “Maybe get another belt somewhere?”
Mr. Solomon kept his eyes on the counter. “Guess I could ask them.” (265)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
(Milkman talking about Saul, the man he fought with) “Cause I might have to knock the rest of them out.”
The man laughed. “Sheriff took the others—with the butt of a gun.”
“Yeah? Good.”(269)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
Who were all these people roaming the world trying to kill him? His own father had tried while he was still in his mother’s stomach. But he’d lived. And he had lived the last year dodging a woman who came every month to kill him, and he had lain just like this, with his arm over his eyes, wide open to whatever she had in her hand. He’d lived through that too. Then a witch had stepped out of his childhood nightmares to grab him, and he’d lived through that. Some bats had driven him out of a cave–and he’d lived through that..(270)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He had stopped evading things, sliding
through, over, and around difficulties. Before he had taken risks only withGuitar. Now he took them alone...(271)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
(talking to Milkman) “Take that change out your pocket,” said Calvin. “Makes too much noise.”
(272)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“If he [Milkman] was to grow accustomed to the dark, he would have to look at what it was possible to see.” (273)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“It took Milkman a while to figure out how to pick up his feet and miss the roots and stones…” (273)
“And he was getting clumsy—stepping over big stones rather than around them dragging his feet and catching them in humped roots” (275)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“It was the longest trek that Milkman had ever made in his life” (274).
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“he would not move until his heart left from under his chin and went back down into his chest where it belonged. He spread his legs…” (275).
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He had come here to find traces of Pilate’s journey, to find relatives she might have visited, to find anything he could that would either lead him to the gold or convince him that it no longer existed. How had he got himself involved in a hunt, involved in a knife-and-brokenbottle fight in the first place? Ignorance, he thought, and vanity. (275-276)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He didn’t deserve …
It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn’t deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He’d told Guitar that he didn’t “deserve” his family’s dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn’t even “deserve” to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he “deserve” Hagar’s vengeance. But why shouldn’t his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely 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 to kill him too. (276-277)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
There was nothing here to help him—not his money, his car, his father’s reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone.” (277)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He could barely see his own hand, and couldn’t see his feet
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
This [what Milkman is experiencing on the hunt] was what Guitar had missed about the South– the woods, hunters, killing. But something had maimed him, scarred him, like Reverend Cooper’s knot, like Saul’s missing teeth, and like his own father.(278)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
The sweet gum’s surface roots cradling him [Milkman] like the rough but the maternal hands of a grandfather…he sank his fingers into the grass. He tried to listen with his fingertips to hear what, if anything, the earth had to say, and it told him quickly that someone was standing behind him and he had just enough time to raise one hand to his neck and catch the wire… (279)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
he [Milkman] found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were small stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body extended down down down into the rock and soil…And he did not limp. (281)
Everyone open to page 281
What does this resemble?
Omar sliced through the rope that bound the bobcat’s
feet. He and Calvin turned it over on its back. The legs fell
open. Such thin delicate ankles.
“Every body wants a black man’s life.”
Calvin held the forefeet open and up while Omar pierced
the curling hair at the point where the sternum lay. Then he
sliced all the way down to the genitals. His knife pointed
upward for a cleaner, neater incision.
“Not his dead life; I mean his living life.”
When he reached the genitals he cut them off, but left the
scrotum intact.
“It’s the condition our condition is in.”
Omar cut around the legs and the neck. Then he pulled
the hide off.
“What good is a man’s life if he can’t even choose what
to die for?”
The transparent underskin tore like gossamer under his
fingers.
“
Everybody wants the life of a black man.”
Now Small Boy knelt down and slit the flesh from the
scrotum to the jaw.
“Fair is one more thing I’ve given up.”
Luther came back and, while the others rested, carved
out the rectal tube with the deft motions of a man coring an
apple.
“I hope I never have to ask myself that question.”
Luther reached into the paunch and lifted the entrails. He
dug under the rib cage to the diaphragm and carefully cut
around it until it was free.
“It is about love. What else but love? Can’t I love what I
criticize?”
Then he grabbed the windpipe and the gullet, eased
them back, and severed them with one stroke of his little
knife.
“It is about love. What else?”
They turned to Milkman. “You want the heart?” they asked
him. Quickly, before any thought could paralyze him,
Milkman plunged both hands into the rib cage. “Don’t get
the lungs, now. Get the heart.”
“What else?”
He found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest
as easily as yolk slips out of its shell.
“What else? What else? What else?”
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He [Milkman] found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell. (282)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Milkman.
“Eat him!”
A peacock soared away and lit on the hood of a blue Buick. (283)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
He [Milkman] made up the bed. She [Sweet] gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. (285)
Song of Solomon Chapter 11
“I don’t know. I can’t eat sweets.”
“You can’t?” Milkman was amazed. “Why not?”
“Makes me sick.”
“You don’t like nothing sweet?”
“Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don’t even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.”
(285)
Sweet