Finished: Song of Solomon (Morrison) Toni Morrison just has a way of writing so beautifully that she takes you completely into whatever world or characters she has created and you pretty much live the story with them. In Song of Solomon, Macon "Milkman" Dead III is born on the same day that his mother, Ruth, and two sisters, Corinthians and Magdalena called Lena, watch as a neighborhood insurance man tries to unsuccessfully "fly" from the window at the top of a building across from the "whites only" hospital in their Michigan town. Milkman is born into a family full of a rich array of characters. His father, Macon Dead II, is the richest black man in town, but rather than take that self-made wealth gracefully, he lords it over the town both literally and figuratively. All he cares about are appearances and making more money to maintain his status. Milkman's mother, Ruth, the only daughter of the now-deceased doctor for the community, is trapped in a loveless marriage, also both literally and figuratively. She takes solace in her last child, and out of loneliness, breastfeeds him until he is four years old. When a nosy handyman and town gossip spies Ruth breastfeeding her son, he instantly saddles him with the moniker Milkman, which stays with him the rest of his life. The book follows Milkman from his boyhood years to his adult life, as he struggles to be more than just a follower in his father's footsteps, and works to fit in with his best friend, Guitar, who grew up in the poorer side of town, one of the many renters of his father's low-rent housing. He is enamored with his father's estranged sister, Pilate, and her granddaughter, Hagar. Pilate was named when her illiterate father pointed to a word in the bible and asked the midwife what name he pointed to. She told him Pilate, but that he couldn't name his sweet baby daughter after Pontias Pilate...that he was literally the man who condemned Jesus to death. The stubborn father named her Pilate anyway. Pilate and Macon Dead II's father is killed in front of them when they are young teenagers, and they survive together for awhile, but soon go their separate ways because of a fight...their two very different senses of morality already showing at this early age and driving a wedge between them. It is the eccentric Pilate who has sparked in the now thirty year old Milkman the desire to find his family roots....but initially for selfish reasons. He believes that Pilate has hidden bags of gold she found in a cave in Virginia as a child. As he goes on this journey, what he finds along the way instead of gold is his actual heritage. He discovers who his grandfather, Macon Dead I, really was and finally the name of his grandmother who had died giving birth to Pilate. Her name was Sing, and not black like Macon, she was Native American, and together they'd traveled in a wagon full of former slaves north to make a life for themselves. Milkman feels more of a connection with the people he meets along the way than he ever did with his overbearing father or his mother and sisters. In a side story, we find out that Guitar is part of a clandestine group of black men who takes revenge when black people are killed and no justice is served. This group takes an eye for an eye. If a young black boy is killed, they will take the life of a random young white boy, and so on. When Guitar finds out that Milkman has gone in search of gold and will split the gold with him, he becomes irrational and distrusting when Milkman takes so long on his journey and believes he's been double-crossed. He actually goes to find Milkman and tries to kill him by uttering the group's secret murder phrase "Your day has come". While trying to kill Milkman, Guitar accidentally shoots Pilate, who Milkman has taken back to Virginia to bury the newly discovered bones of her long dead father in the land where they've finally discovered they are from. In the ending scene, Milkman "flies" from one rock across to the other where Guitar is standing and prepares to die or die trying to stop Guitar. Apparently who succeeds doesn't matter, but the journey and Milkman's ability to finally fly do.