Song of Solomon: Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

In her foreword to Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison says that the initial description of Smith’s note is meant to sound dry and dull, like something you’d skim in the newspaper. She’ll spend the rest of the novel unpacking this initial description. There is a great deal of symbolism in the idea of a “flight” from the South to the North as the journey from the American South to the North is the path that many Black people took during the period in which the novel is set and was associated with the idea of freedom. It’s also no coincidence that Morrison’s novel begins at a place called Mercy. Mercy is often strikingly absent from her characters’ lives, but granting it is also a moral act that emerges as being critical to her characters.

Slowly, Morrison begins to explain Smith’s flight. In the process, she establishes a key theme of the novel, the importance of names. In just a few paragraphs, she describes the history of a name: “Doctor Street.” The first conflict between Black people and white people in the novel is a conflict over what to name a place: though Black people live on the street and want to name it after an important Black person who lived there, white people insist on giving it a bland, generic name. The message is clear: only powerful people have the right to name things — in short, naming is power. Yet though the town’s Black community fails to establish the name “Doctor Street,” they find a way to rebel against the white officials by giving the street an informal name, “Not Doctor Street.” Names can be a tool of oppression, but they can also be tools of rebellion, they can be a way of hiding a culture, but they are also things that a person or community can make their own. It’s interesting, then, that Morrison doesn’t (and won’t) reveal the name of the town where her novel is set — it’s as if it could be happening anywhere.

There are no named white characters in the novel. Yet the existence and oppressive power of institutional white racism is established in these earliest scenes of the novel. And in the fact that the hospital might have started taking Black mothers because of Smith’s action, that Black people's attempts to “fly” can have impacts.

For the second time so far, Morrison establishes a conflict between the novel’s Black and white characters. The white characters run the hospital, and treat their Black patients and neighbors with contempt, dismissing their behavior outside the hospital as a “ritual.” The white people also view the Black people as inarticulate and foolish, are clearly not —Guitar, a child, is a better speller than the nurse. It’s important to note that when the nurse doesn’t understand what “Guitar” means, neither do we — in fact, Morrison goes out of her way to confuse us, putting this proper name at the beginning of the sentence so that we’re not sure if it’s a proper name or not. This is a message to readers: the town community effectively speaks a different language, and it will take some time before we can understand it.

It remains a mystery why Smith jumps; not even the community that watches him understands what’s going on, so the reader certainly doesn’t, either. This is a common tactic of Morrison’s, to reveal an event and then loop around and slowly reveal its significance so that it resonates within the larger structure of the novel. In this case this opening gives Morrison the opportunity to introduce the community and its tensions and a sense of its history, and to establish the importance of the ideas of flight and of song and the specific song of “O Sugarman.”

After Smith’s failed attempt at flight, we begin to understand how imprisoned the townspeople are. They’re imprisoned by racism, which keeps them poor and living in the same segregated community. But even with the Black community, some people are freer than others. Ruth, whose wealth seemingly gives her more freedom, is actually less free than her neighbors.

Ruth spends so many years with Macon Dead that she comes to expect and in some ways depend upon his abuse — this is a common occurrence among women in abusive relationships. One can take the water mark to symbolize a few different things. Ruth depends on this external, insignificant thing for her own worth — much as she relies on an unkind husband. At the same time, Ruth’s decision to hide the water mark suggests the way she tries to repress her own sadness, an action, which only makes her sadder, just as the water mark only gets larger.

By making a beautiful bowl, Ruth seems to be trying to connect with her husband, to share her own joy with him. Because Macon rejects the bowl, Ruth retreats into herself and gives up trying to connect him.

Ruth’s interactions with her son may be difficult to comprehend, since they both are and aren’t typical motherly behavior. Ruth is close with her child, and seems to want him to stay a child forever, rather than grow into a man like her husband; this is why she tries not to look at his legs. At the same time, Ruth’s relationship with her child seems intensely sexual; bizarre as it may sound, Ruth seems to turn to her child for sexual pleasure because her husband refuses her any. That she knows what she is doing is wrong is obvious — this is why she recoils when someone sees her.

Again, we see the power of names. By spreading a nickname around town, Freddie inadvertently names someone else’s child, and changes that child’s relationship with his parents. We see the changes in particular between Milkman and his father — Milkman’s name alienates Macon from his child. And it establishes Milkman in a way as someone who doesn’t have his own name; and much of the second half of the novel will involve him searching into his past and finding names to connect it to.

The fact that Macon never fully undresses Ruth even during intercourse suggests the separation between them. Similarly, the fact that Macon remembers the underwear but not Ruth herself suggests that he was never attracted to Ruth herself, only to external things about her, like her wealth. The detail about Macon’s unnamed sister establishes her as different as other people, and also as less affected by either fear or shame.

The persistence of the obsolete “Sonny’s Shop” sign is yet another signal that Song of Solomon is about the importance of names and, more specifically, about the disagreement between names and the things they’re supposed to describe. Macon believes in the existence of “true” names, but it’s unclear if such a thing is even possible. Morrison’s characters live in a world where they don’t have access to “true” names; in other words, they either have to make do with the names they’re given, or find a way to create new names. Macon’s family uses randomly chosen Christian names, a clear echo of the way slave masters used to name the people they enslaved. By preserving this naming system, Macon seems to accept the structures of power and domination that kept his ancestors in bondage just as he accepts and never changes the “Sonny’s Shop” sign. It’s not totally clear why Macon has so much respect for a naming system that’s clearly a relic of slavery, but based on what we know about him, it seems that Macon is in favor of power and domination. Even if white people dominate him, he’ll dominate his wife and children.

Macon’s father’s attitude toward the process of naming is important to understand: he’s more devoted to the process itself (randomly choosing a Bible character) than he is to the “rightness” of the name itself. Since the process of naming he uses is essentially the process the slave masters used, Macon’s father indicates that he’s unable to shake off the ways of thinking he learned as an enslaved person. It’s here that we first get a sense of how people might better deal with the problem of naming. Pilate over time “reshapes” her name into art — she doesn’t reject it (it’s still her name), but she doesn’t respect it as something handed to her and therefore unchangeable. Her engagement with her name is more active. She makes it into her own.

Pilate remains a mystery in the first chapter. Macon doesn’t like Pilate, but since Morrison presents Macon as clearly flawed, we as readers are not sure how to feel about her. The argument at the cave is a mystery that the novel will slowly unravel. Meanwhile, Pilate here is also established as less conventional than other female characters, as she engages in typically male work and is also the head of her own family of women.

The Black townspeople may be the victims of white oppression and racism, but they also victimize each other. Morrison’s novel isn’t a simplistic study of Black versus white; it’s a nuanced look at the clash between women and men, the rich and the poor, as well as white people and Black people.

Morrison hints at Doctor Foster’s incestuous desire for his own daughter, a desire that we’ve already seen echoed in Ruth’s apparent desire for her own child. Macon thinks he needs to be successful and prosperous to marry Ruth when in fact Dr. Foster would accept any suitor. That Dr. Foster dislikes Macon’s name is interesting (presumably he dislikes the “Dead” part of it). Macon’s name really is dead, in the sense that it was forced on him and he has done nothing to make it alive.

Freddie’s mistake is one that various other characters in the novel will make: mistaking internal anguish for external aggression. Thus, Porter’s anger at the world begins as anger with himself. We see Macon’s inner sadness in this section: everything reminds him of his sister. Macon’s insistence that he get his rent shows how cold and callous business has made him.

Porter’s behavior in this scene might symbolize the failure of masculinity. We’re given various signs of masculinity — a gun, for instance — that don’t work. Porter’s gun doesn’t shoot straight, suggesting, perhaps, his weakness and impotence. More broadly, though, Porter’s clumsy handling of his weapon (it goes off after he falls asleep) suggests how people who hate themselves become a danger to others.

The navel is a symbol of lineage — it’s the first sign that a human being has parents. We’ve seen Macon imprisoned in issues of his lineage — repeating the same naming ceremony that his father used before him — so for Pilate to lack a navel suggests that she has a kind of freedom. Yet her freedom also makes her strange, almost frightening to other people.

Macon tries to convince himself that Pilate is suffering; in this way, he’s trying to convince himself that he needs to be wealthy and powerful to be happy. But it’s clear that Macon doesn’t entirely believe this — the way he looks wistfully at Pilate and listens to her singing shows that he’s secretly dissatisfied with his life and wishes he could escape from it, as Pilate seems to have done.