Song of Solomon: Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Milkman no longer cares about money; he’s progressed to less material concerns, such as his family’s name and history

Milkman’s desire to bathe in the “sea” suggests a new expansiveness to his vision of himself and the world. Now that he has a past he wants to connect with all the world, rather than protect himself behind money. Bathing in the water suggests a Christian baptism — he’s born again. Yet even with this happy news, there’s a shadow of menace cast over the scene, since we know that Guitar is still looking for Milkman, and still thinks he stole the gold.

The news that brings Milkman such great pleasure is empowering for a few reasons. He seems to believe that flight is literally possible, but what’s equally empowering for him is the knowledge that he comes from somewhere, that he descends from a family with a notable history. Milkman wanting to share this news with Guitar, who he knows wants to kill him, shows his changing worldview, how he wants to share this history with others as an empowering thing.

Milkman’s bus ride gives us more information about why he’s so happy about his great-grandfather — he’s finally learned his name, and thus taken control over his own life. What’s remarkable about this section is that it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know — Morrison has made it clear from the first page of Song of Solomon that names are power — names can be a form of political rebellion, a form of subjugation, a form of liberation. The realization, then, is Milkman’s not ours.

In the past, Milkman has been optimistic about his friendship with Guitar, thinking that Guitar is benign even when he’s clearly bloodthirsty. After his baptism, Milkman is more honest with himself, and his honesty is rooted in a more acute sense of right and wrong. Thus, he’s not afraid to think that Guitar is wrong to kill innocent white people. Even more basically, he recognizes what he’d refused to acknowledge before: Guitar must be responsible for the recent murders in Michigan.

Pilate’s act of knocking out Milkman might at first seem shocking, especially as he was coming to her to bring such good news. But it is important to look at it in context. Pilate knows that it was Milkman’s abandonment of Hagar that killed her. But Pilate does not kill Milkman in return—she does not practice an eye-for-an-eye. Guitar wants to kill Milkman over money. Pilate only knocks him out in response to Milkman’s role in her granddaughter’s death.

Milkman’s ability to figure out what happened marks his increased empathy. His guilt speaks to his growing sense of responsibility. Both of these new traits stem from his journey and his discovery of his family history.

Once again it is revealed that a character has misinterpreted an event. But while previous misinterpretations seemed damaging, this misinterpretation isn’t at all: Pilate has continued to sing, bringing joy to others, even Macon Dead. Just as the song about Solomon became a song about Sugarman, the ghost of Jake’s reference to his wife has become Pilate’s inspiration to sing. The past and its traditions and stories, the novel suggests, are not static: they can change and grow, and whether they grow toward something bountiful and joyous or the opposite depends on what one does with them.

Again, Milkman guesses what’s happening with very few clues — he seems to know what the shoebox contained right away. This contrasts sharply with his mistaken theft of the bones (which he now recognizes to be his own grandfather’s). Hagar despised her own hair, seeing it as a symbol of her Blackness and her separateness from Milkman and white culture — but in death, it’s how Pilate wants to remember her.

Milkman’s reunion isn’t as purely happy as he’d thought it would be, showing that epiphanies don’t solve everything. Ruth and Macon will continue to mistreat each other, and Lena will continue to hate him. Milkman can’t make up for the things he’s done wrong; he can only try to be a different person now that he knows better. Most of all, then, his epiphany is of use to himself, not to other people. The revelation that Smith, whose jump from the hospital began the novel, was a member of the Seven Days vigilante group is interesting. It suggests a number of possibilities: that being in the group drove Smith crazy, perhaps. Or that Smith felt that by being in the group that responded to white racism with eye-for-an-eye vengeance gave him some sort of power that mirrored the abilities of “Sugarman” (i.e. Solomon). Yet Smith’s jump failed, and Smith died, suggesting that the logic of the Seven Days leads not to flight but to destruction, that it is a dead end.

Pilate’s mysterious earring, which contains all the names of her family, is finally being put to rest. It’s as if she’s been carrying a burden (a cross?) for her entire adult life, and now, thanks to Milkman’s help, she doesn’t have to anymore. What was this burden? One could say that Pilate was carrying the burden of her family’s legacy — all the troubled relationships and affairs and deaths that had characterized her ancestors, and which, perhaps, could not be laid to rest because there was no past in which to rest them without a link to Solomon. Now that Milkman has traced these things back to a starting point — Solomon — she doesn’t need to carry them.

As Pilate undergoes a Christ-like death (and Milkman holding the dying Pilate in his arms is purposefully similar to the image of the dying Christ in the arms of Mary), Milkman realizes that she lived unencumbered by the circumstances of her life – her soul is “free,” even though her body has obligations to work, eat, sleep, and help other people. Pilate responded to the world with love – the opposite of both Macon’s cold search for safety in money, and Guitar’s balancing of hate with hate through eye-for-an-eye vengeance, and here this love is connected to flight. It is a different flight than Solomon’s, which involved abandonment. It seems like a more feminine flight, of freedom without leavetaking.

Milkman risks his own life — curiously, Guitar doesn’t shoot him. Will the two former friends reconcile, even after the enormous evil Guitar has committed? Milkman’s question alludes to the speech Guitar has made about how everyone wants a Black man’s life. Previously, Guitar has used this mantra as a justification for his violence against white people and Black women — the two groups he deems most guilty of wanting a Black man’s life. Here, Milkman makes it very clear that Guitar is no better than the people he criticizes: he, too, wants “a black man’s life,” insofar as he wants to kill Milkman.

Morrison leaves it up to us whether or not Guitar and Milkman will fight or reconcile. What’s clear from Milkman’s final words, though, is that he no longer cares about himself — he’s become as selfless as Pilate. And, in contrast to Smith who jumped and died to start the novel, and who as a member of Seven Days certainly surrendered to nothing, Milkman finds that flight comes not from force of will but by giving yourself to the wind, just as being a part of history and community comes by giving oneself to those things, by surrendering to them as Pilate did.