The Power of Names Theme Analysis

From the first page of Song of Solomon, it’s clear that names have enormous power. Names tell stories, record history, and build community. The name Doctor Street, for instance, celebrates Dr. Foster, the first wealthy, influential Black man to live in the town. By repeating this name, the townspeople honor their hero and celebrate their race and their culture. Government officials are completely aware of the power of names — that’s why they insist on calling the street Mains Street; Doctor Street would give Black people too much pride. The “compromise name,” in which the Black community ignores the official name of the street and instead calls it “Not Doctor Street”, is a way for Black people to mock government officials while both making clear white power’s efforts to efface Black history and keeping that history alive. Names, then, aren’t just arbitrary sounds describing arbitrary things. The right name, chosen for the right reasons, can change the way people think, and even change the thing it’s describing.

Although names have power, much of the novel shows how names can also imprison people. Milkman, whose given name is Macon Dead III, feels trapped by his own family name. He’s named after his grandfather, who was accidentally given the name “Dead” by the Freedman’s bureau. By carrying the name “Dead,” Milkman feels that he’s been condemned to live the same life that his father and grandfather lived, working at the family business, living in the same town, etc. In part, Milkman’s dissatisfaction with his name is just another way of saying that he feels trapped in his obligations to his family. But in another sense, it is the name itself that imprisons him. As he tells Guitar many times, he feels “Dead” because his name is Dead.

As he grows up, Milkman begins to see that his entire family is trapped by their names, too. Macon, like his father before him, names his children by randomly choosing a name from the Bible, even a very unusual name like “First Corinthians.” Though Morrison doesn’t explicit say this, this is similar to the method slave owners would use to name the people they enslaved. By repeating the slave owner’s naming system, the Deads are effectively acknowledging that slavery continues to shape their thinking and their behavior.

When Milkman goes to Virginia in search of his aunt Pilate’s gold, he comes to realize that learning his family’s names is a far greater reward than the gold could ever be. After discovering that his great-grandfather’s real name was Solomon — and that people and places all over the country are named after him — he’s ecstatic, and thinks to himself that every name in the world tells a long, complex story. For most of his life, Milkman had no understanding of his own story — he had no history and no culture. Now that he understands the history of his names, he feels invincible.

Milkman’s journey, then, brings him to the realization that learning a name can be a liberating experience. Where before the knowledge of his family name had made him feel small and confined, the knowledge of his family’s “true” name, Solomon, makes him see that his family history is something to be proud of, and that like Solomon, he has the power to travel across the country, spreading his name and his culture to new places.

Yet it’s important to note that Morrison also complicates the idea of the power of names. Consider Pilate, who has spent her entire life singing and bringing joy to her family because she misinterpreted what her father’s ghost told her when it visited her and said “Sing,” as “Sing” was the name of his wife, not a command for her to continue to sing. Pilate misinterpreted a name, but her misinterpretation didn’t imprison her; on the contrary, it encouraged her to live a better life. Everyone enjoys her singing — even Macon, who doesn’t speak to his sister.

In all, Morrison forwards a complex point about names, and their history and power. One must seek out the true meanings of names, she seems to suggest, and the rewards for doing so can be enormous. At the same time, she portrays deriving power from a name as an act of creation as well as investigation — to some extent, one can invent what names mean, one can give them new power beyond what they inherit from history, and so in this way names both carry the history and culture of the past to the present and act as vessels through which the present can interact with that past, engage it and build and shift it, and carry that culture and history into the future.