Song of Solomon: Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Six months have passed since Milkman argued with Guitar. Milkman lies in Guitar’s bed, thinking about being stabbed by an icepick. Five hours earlier, he came to Guitar’s home, and the two of them talked playfully. Since their argument, they’ve been friendlier with each other, largely because Guitar has kept Milkman safe in the last six months, though the narrator doesn’t explain how.

As Milkman and Guitar talk, it becomes clear that Guitar has traveled through the North. Guitar muses that the North is only north because the South is south, even though they’re all part of the same country. Northerners, he admits, are different from Southerners in being pickier with their food. Guitar makes tea, and Milkman jokes about being a soft-fried egg, prompting Guitar to point out, half-jokingly, that a Black man can be a crow or a baboon, but not an egg.

Milkman asks Guitar if he can have Guitar’s room for the night. Guitar doesn’t believe that Milkman would want to be alone the night before his own murder; Milkman responds that he’s already “Dead.” Guitar mentions a woman with a knife who tried to kill Milkman, but doesn’t name the woman. He leaves Milkman alone in the room.

Milkman thinks about the time he hit his father years ago. He hasn’t done anything truly independently since then, he realizes. He thinks back to the previous week, when he followed his mother, who is now over sixty, at night. Milkman was coming back from a party when he saw Ruth boarding a bus. He followed the bus to a train station, where he sees Ruth climb onto a train — Milkman does the same, and gets off at Fairfield, where he follows Ruth to the cemetery where her father is buried.

Milkman confronts Ruth and asks her if she’s here to “spend the night” with her father. Ruth, addressing Milkman as Macon, explains that her father wasn’t a good man, but he was the only man who ever cared about her. She and Milkman’s father stopped having sex after her father died, before Milkman was born; it was at this time that Ruth began visiting her father’s grave to talk to him and feel at peace. Shortly thereafter, Pilate moved to town, and gave Ruth aphrodisiacs to put in Macon’s food. They worked, Ruth says, and Macon began having sex with her once again. Macon was suspicious, and threw Pilate out of the house. Ruth admits to kissing her father’s fingers, but says that she did so because they were the only part of his body unaffected by disease. When Milkman reminds her of how she nursed him after he was too old, she insists that she did no harm to anyone.

Milkman sits in Guitar’s room, thinking about his mother. He hears footsteps, and knows that Hagar is coming to see him. After Milkman broke up with Hagar, he began seeing another woman; the sight of this made Hagar so furious that she tries to kill him multiple times, failing on every occasion. Hagar thinks of Empire State, who married a white woman from France, then found her sleeping with another Black man, and was henceforth silent and mentally unstable.

Milkman listens as Hagar enters the house, and thinks that either she or he will die. Hagar approaches Milkman and gives him a small cut with a butcher knife. She raises the knife again, but can’t force herself to stab him. Milkman senses that he won’t die. He thinks back to the previous week, when Ruth learned from Freddie that Hagar was trying to kill Milkman, and that the two of them had been having an affair for years. Ruth is hurt, because she realized that Milkman had been keeping secrets from her for years. She remembers giving birth to him when he was only a pain in her body, nursing him until Freddie caught her, and admiring his beautiful hands, the only thing he inherited from Dr. Foster. She’s so upset by the realization that she doesn’t know Milkman at all that she tries repeatedly to close the cabinet door under the kitchen sink, angrily slamming it shut when it opens each time.

Ruth goes to Pilate’s house to talk with her. She hopes to learn that Freddie was wrong, that Hagar and Milkman aren’t having an affair. At Pilate’s house, she finds Hagar herself, and tells her that if she hurts Milkman, she’ll kill her. As she and Hagar argue, Pilate enters the room and tells them that they’re ridiculous for arguing over a man. The narrator notes how different Pilate and Ruth are: one is dependent on money, while the other is indifferent to it.

Pilate tells Ruth that some people choose when they want to die, and others choose to live forever. Ruth thinks to herself that her father wanted to die, but doesn’t admit that Pilate is right. Pilate says that she can barely remember her own mother. She tells Ruth about being 15 years old, living in a camp of migrant farmers, and sleeping with a man. The man told his friends that Pilate had no navel; later, a woman asked her about her body, and Pilate realized that she was different from other women. Afterwards, Pilate traveled to Virginia to look for her family, working as a washerwoman along the way. In Culpeper, Virginia, Pilate slept with a man who wanted to marry her; Pilate refused, since she was afraid that he’d be afraid of her missing navel. Still, she gave birth to a child, which she named Rebecca, or Reba for short, after asking others for a good Biblical name.

While traveling through Virginia, Pilate claims to have seen the ghost of her father, who told her, “Sing,” which she did, beautifully. She remembered her father’s death, and thought that she and Macon were responsible for it. Nevertheless, she continued to take good care of Reba, and acted the part of a healer and a peacemaker during her travels, frequently breaking up fights between women. She began making wine and whiskey to make a living.

As Reba grew older, she gave birth to her own child, Hagar, and so Pilate decided to find her brother Macon, who she thought would help to provide for them. She finds him, and is able to pay for travel to his town, since the wine-selling business is thriving during the Great Depression. In the present, Pilate sits with Ruth, telling her all this to distract her from Hagar.