I first read Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison’s coming-of-age story of a black middle-class man, when I was living on a commune in upstate New York. There are layers of irony built into this account of reading. I was devouring the novel in a tipi on stolen land, unconscious of the history of indigenous people and unconscious of my white privilege as I searched the pages of the novel for something that might relate to my working-class background or even my life on a rural commune. With a blanket for a coat and no job or income, I did not feel privileged, would have laughed at the idea that I was privileged, but at the same time took it for granted that I could drop out of society—never once asking where all the people of color were.
Surrounded by a foot of snow, the tipi was insulated with a ring of hay bales, which was either a rather smart and inexpensive protection against the cold or foolish tinder—you decide. At the risk of seeming even more ludicrous, I need to confess that the tipi was tethered to our main cabin by a fifty-foot extension cord, allowing me to read into the night. There were two other tipis on the commune, as well as yurts, wickiups, and various shacks. I loved and spent time in all of them. To me, they were all magical with shimmery decor from around the world. Indian bedspreads were very popular, as were Mexican blankets, batik prints, and, of course, tie-dye. Man, do I feel white talking about this now, but I’ve got to include the embarrassing stuff if there’s any hope of understanding what it was like then and what happened later.
I’m not sure when I started to think about my whiteness, but I would like to say it began in that tipi, with a paperback edition of Song of Solomon, and the warmth of a woodstove that got too hot. I will talk about the fire later in this account, but for now I need to sort out how a single novel could create such a transformative experience. Being immersed in Toni Morrison’s world was not unlike attending a crowded party in Brooklyn and discovering—as I did one night—that I was the only white person in attendance. These two experiences—to be the only white person at a party and to read Song of Solomon—I would wish for every white person. I would not expect miracles from the experiences, but that’s all I’ve got to offer the white world.
It is with amusement that I refer to “the white world,” as if it is something monolithic, recognizable in its dress, and unrelated to me. But it is my world, in part a concept in my mind as well as a very real place with many open doors to the privileges that I (and all white people) have. To try to make sense of what happened, I need to recount what it was like to be drawn to black culture and music in the first place, and in doing so I will try to convey my excitement, respect, and love of the music but also my naïveté and ignorance of white privilege. Of course, many white people have found themselves entranced by African American music for centuries—at best showing appreciation and at worst culturally distorting and appropriating. But along this continuum of appreciation and appropriation, where was I?
When I was listening to my favorite artists—Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin—I was listening with no sense of black history. But music does not appear out of nowhere; it has roots. Some people inhale that history through family and community, and some come to it through various conduits—or not at all. In the seventies, I was just another clueless white boy, flipping records onto my turntable without a thought about black culture or the day-to-day experience of black people in America. When I later read Song of Solomon, it felt like both an open door but also a disturbingly shut and locked door to some secret thing I was missing. The novel, from start to finish, is full of music, but instead of making me feel like I belonged it made me feel like an outsider, and this was the very thing that was transformative.
It is most logical to start with the day Soul Train first aired in my neighborhood in 1971, bringing a radically different exposure of black culture to those of us who saw only two or maybe three black people in the same frame on the television shows of the time. I was less than two years away from graduating high school, fully into puberty and of course the turmoil that it can bring. Although I had always loved music and dance shows such as American Bandstand, I had never seen anything like the explosion of blackness that Soul Train pumped into my suburban home. Through the miracle of television, something that was not taken for granted back then, I studied the latest dance moves of the era—the mashed potato and the ridiculous funky chicken—by watching many other shows. But Soul Train was altogether different. There I learned dance moves that felt dangerous.
Like many gay teens in a hostile world, I was already well on my way to feeling like an outsider in my own family and so perhaps I was searching for other outsiders. I realize this may not speak to the experience of other white gay teens, but I have to risk saying this boldly: the closet led me to black music. I don’t have any other explanation for why my record collection looked so different from those of my siblings and how that music saved me. And if I were to choose one song for my provocative theory it would be Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar.” There it is. I’ve said it. I’ve given it a theme song, which is about the same as already committing to an argument. And I don’t care if people think it’s a ridiculous argument because it makes sense to me and allows me to explain something I’ve been trying to figure out for some time: why black culture has mattered so much to me.
In his 1965 appearance on Hullabaloo, a lean and very cool Marvin Gaye snaps his fingers as he walks toward us, coming out from the darkness to ask, without appearing to have a care in the world, “How can love grow from pain?” And as if speaking directly to my tortured soul, his refrain (“Ain’t that peculiar”) would have seemed the most sensible response to the trick life had played on me: I was not part of my family. Life certainly was peculiar, and I wouldn’t really understand how until I came out. Nevertheless, as I sang the song’s repetitive hook without a shred of irony, the queer gods must have been laughing their heads off and wondering if I would ever make the connection between the lyric and my own peculiarity. I would first need a more radical sense of social justice, and I still needed to survive my last two years of life in a family that openly ridiculed gay people and showed no love for black people. It is, however, one of the unique experiences of being gay (in contrast to many other marginalized identities) that LGBT individuals frequently find the most dangerous spaces to be not outside but inside—sitting on the sofa, frying an egg over the stove, and in all the cozy corners of the home.
With no sense of whether homophobia was also a part of black families of the time, I looked to their sense of community and connection with envy. As I increasingly felt like a stranger in my white family, I casted around for other places to imagine myself. The great diversity of the world was unknown to me, but what could be more unsafe than home? I was in danger. From myself and from my family.
No one deserves more credit for saving me from self-harm than Sly and the Family Stone, who delivered one positive message after another in songs like “Everybody Is a Star” and “You Can Make It If You Try.” If Sly were on a talk show, I watched. If he appeared on a magazine, I gazed. I loved his hats. I loved his smile. But mostly I loved his funk. Even when my brothers were dangerously close to bursting in on my mornings with Soul Train, I had to jump, twist, and pop to Sly’s “Dance to the Music” or “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” With his special brand of funk, I responded like those religious fanatics dancing in the church aisles, endangering themselves and others. With Sly, I was totally free. I levitated to his music.
If I was lucky, I could find him on other shows as well, but I could never get enough of his funk and so I would frequently use the phonograph part of our old console in the basement to practice my moves. Although there was a newer television upstairs (with living color), I chose to watch my dance shows on that old black-and-white console, and that is where Don Cornelius welcomed me into a world that was predominantly black and seemed to offer liberation.
There, alone, I would strike a pose—legs spread wide and hands on hip—and wait for the Soul Train theme song and its train bouncing across the screen, signaling that the dancers would soon be hitting the floor and I, standing five feet from the screen, would be right there with them. And I dressed for it too, wearing my lime-green hip huggers, which my brothers ridiculed, and my powder-blue Nehru shirt, which could not have been worn to school if I ever hoped to avoid the bullies and survive the last two years.
Sometimes I stood still and watched Soul Train, recognizing the threat of my brothers coming in and surprising me. Often I would force my feet to hold ground as I studied the long brown bodies zigzagging across the cracked screen of the console, but then a funky song would come on and I would no longer be able to hold myself back, my own legs and spidery arms shooting out toward what felt (despite the suburban tragedy of my life) rhapsodic.
Almost fifty years later, I don’t have to imagine what I looked like: my brother told me one morning, appearing suddenly between me and the RCA console television, snarling: “Turn that nigger music off. You look ridiculous.”
Even as shame was coursing through me, even with the painful recognition that most of my friends would have agreed with him, and even with an internalized sense that straight-was-normal and gay-was-abnormal, I knew he was wrong—wrong about the show and wrong about me. Somewhere deep inside, I knew what I looked like. I looked like a young person moving farther and farther away from his family. I was only a few years away from reading Toni Morrison for the first time and being transformed by its message: ain’t that peculiar.
It seems impossible and even hilarious now to imagine myself—hair past my shoulders, beard braided with a feather tucked in, no worldly goods but always a place to stay. I was a walking stereotype of a hippie. It would have been 1977, not more than six years after my brother called my music nigger music, but in those six years I had put a lot of distance between me and my family. I had left home, joined a commune, and hitchhiked all over the country. My hair, beard, and clothes had made me physically unrecognizable to those who had known me in high school, and there was nothing recognizable in my speech, which was now stronger and finally willing to address the taboo subjects of my youth—racism and homophobia. Just six years earlier, I was feeling like an outsider in my own family, and now I looked and talked exactly like an outsider. But on the commune, we had flipped the idea of “inside” and “outside” and laughed at the ways of the masses, which I grew to see as the real outside. But the ties of family are not so easily broken, and when I visited my parents and five siblings I would float through the house like a participant-observer, both an insider and an outsider.
I am embarrassed to say that in these visits I viewed my family with condescension, never really turning a critical eye on myself, only on them. And despite all the changes in my life, I was still rather innocent and inexperienced. Many people critical of the optimism of the communal experiments might argue that we (I should say I) exchanged one white, middle-class, privileged experience for another. What did I know, for example, about the black people whom Marvin Gaye was singing about? What had Soul Train really taught me about race? Rather than exploring my own whiteness, it could be argued that I was identifying with black culture from a safe distance and without attempting to really learn about black life and listen to its everyday realities.
I had not yet had a significant relationship with a black person (or any person of color for that matter), but my white friends were putting the books of Bobby Seale and Dick Gregory into my hands and they were powerful words to read. It was inevitable that one day someone would thrust a Toni Morrison novel into my hands and say, “Read it. It will blow your mind.” That novel was Song of Solomon, very different from the strident political books I had been consuming, but it made me sit up and say, “Damn. I’m white. What am I going to do with this?”
The novel begins with Robert Smith, who seeks freedom by attempting to literally fly (“on my own wings”) from the roof of Mercy Hospital across Lake Superior. The opening tableau that Morrison creates is full of visual power—Smith atop Mercy Hospital, a pregnant woman dropping red petals in the snow, and a crowd of white people inside who are relieved to learn that the crowd of black people on the outside were not protesting or promoting “racial uplift.”
The white people may be “inside” the hospital, but they are outside this extraordinary black world. Was I inside or outside? Outside may be an uncomfortable place for most people, but I had already spent my entire childhood feeling like an outsider in my own family and I had dropped out to live on a hippie commune. I felt outside from both communities that Morrison described. And there was something to learn from being outside. I was paying more attention to being white than I had ever done before, and I did not want to see myself as one of the white people inside that hospital, cowering with their prejudice and misinterpreting any congregation of more than two black people as a riot. But I clearly was not among the black folk. Where was I in the novel?
Morrison says that she does not write for white people, and so it is not surprising that I should feel like an outsider when reading her novels. But Song of Solomon may be particularly artful in creating this feeling in its white readers and it is easier to explain where I was not than where I was. It is a novel obsessed with oral traditions—the passing on of information through storytelling, gossip, word-of-mouth, and—most importantly—song. In my family, we didn’t talk or sing. We didn’t tell stories, and instead we ridiculed each other for even humming a few notes. It was easy to eat dinner (no interruptions) and it was efficient at holidays (no speeches or stories) and we did not go caroling, staring in awe at the people who would subject themselves to such a public display.
On the first page of Song of Solomon, Morrison reproduces a note that has been tacked to a door announcing Robert Smith’s intention to fly across Lake Superior. It is a symbol of literate culture that contrasts the other forms of orality (word-of-mouth and song). For example, Mr. Smith times his flight to occur in “the middle of the week [when] word-of-mouth news just lumbered along.” This miscalculation results in Mr. Smith failing to get an audience nearly as big as Lindbergh received for his flight four years earlier. Morrison is having fun with the distance between oral cultures and literate cultures, and she dramatically emphasizes the primary theme of the novel as the importance of oral traditions to the black family.
In reading the novel, I could not help but think of all the silences in my family—with my closet homosexuality being just one of the many secrets. One day I asked my father about his father, and he said, “Heart attack,” and nothing more. When I asked my mother about her parents, immigrants from Italy, she shot back, “Why in the world do you want to know about that?” So she had her secrets too. We were a family intent on erasing itself. How fitting that the most memorable punishment from my childhood would be to have my mouth washed out with soap. This seems perfectly in keeping with my family’s interest in silence, restraint, erasure.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes, “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly,” but I don’t see my family in this list. They are neither wicked nor violent. Perhaps I don’t see my family at all—not understanding them and not wanting to be with them. Or perhaps I can extend Morrison’s quote to say that “reserved people love with reserve, and silent people love with silence.” Yes, that is where my family is. We are in the gaps and silences with a bar of soap in hand. I once told my sister that we were not a very good family, and she responded that we were a very good family: we did not shame each other for not showing up, we did not put expectations on each other, and we were quiet without all the drama.
With some reservation, I am willing to believe that white people’s families are as varied as black people’s families, even as Song of Solomon seems to suggest oral traditions offer some special bond through shared traditions and customs. If Song of Solomon’s opening scene highlights the tension between oral and literate cultures, that first chapter also concludes with the powerful gathering of the black community being marked by the forcefulness of a woman singing. It is a visually stunning scene built upon contrasts in black and white, which Morrison imagines as interrupted only by this singing woman, whose strong contralto is described as “defining and helpful,” not unlike “piano music in a silent film.” However, this public display of song only helps half the black crowd: the others “sniggered.” In this way, Morrison imagines music as having the potential to clarify and be transformative. But not for all.
The black spectators who find the song too public, raw, and inappropriate have adopted white standards of propriety and decorum—at least white standards that look like my family. “Woman, stop that singing,” my brother would have said about Pilate’s public display, throwing in a racial epithet while he was at it. And my mother—like half the people in the crowd—would have rocked her head back and forth, finding Pilate’s unsanctioned performance unseemly. But in the novel, Pilate keeps on singing, unconcerned about how she looks, and half the crowd is indeed moved by her song. Those who find her music clarifying embrace the sound of spontaneous singing in the public sphere, and that is which side I would like to fall on—regardless of my family. But I cannot think of any such moment in my life where I witnessed a spontaneous and public display of song and proved my willingness to support, celebrate, and even participate rather than reach for judgment and a bar of soap. There is, however, a moment deep in the recesses of my memory that might shed some light on where I might fall.
It was in the mid-1970s, and I was hitchhiking from southern Virginia to Detroit. I don’t know how I got dropped off in downtown Toledo because I should not have made it that far off the highway, but hitchhiking requires you to let go of plans. I had been standing on the side of the road for hours, and I didn’t think I was ever going to get where I was going before dark. I had no money for a hotel and there was no park nearby to sleep through the night. I started swaying like a drunken man where I had been standing for hours, hungry, demoralized, bored. I was having trouble staying awake. I must have looked worse than sleepy, not an appealing candidate for a ride, and it was getting so cold I was dropping my chin and even my nose into my jacket the way some birds pull their heads down into their feathers. I was losing hope, a characteristic I prided myself in having in abundance when it came to hitchhiking.
People who have hitchhiked long distances will tell you that the sight of a car slowing down after hours of waiting can be as enervating as getting the first four numbers of a lottery ticket right. And so when a car slowed down, I sprang awake and started running toward it. Was this my lucky number? I felt so relieved, thrilled really, but when the large white car flung open its door I saw that it was stuffed with people the way kids used to pile into phone booths. There must have been eight or nine people in that car, and they were all black. I had never been picked up by a single black person let alone a whole big extended family. Stepping reluctantly toward the open door, I watched three adults slide over to make room for me in the back and then I saw that they had placed a small child of three or four on the floor.
They were drinking and smoking, and they were in very good spirits, loud and happy to be entertained by someone new. I must have looked a little scared because they all started speaking at once, offering me smokes and a drink, but then everyone shut up when I said that I neither smoked nor drank. I felt terrible letting this previously joyous group down, and so I started explaining, with too much earnestness, that I had never smoked and that I had never even had a sip of alcohol. Silence. This hardly made things better. I made a further mistake by saying, “It’s not you. It’s me. It’s just I never have.” I tilted my head to the open bottle of vodka.
“But you smoke weed,” someone finally said. “You’re a hippie, right?”
“Yes. I mean. No,” I said. “I’m a hippie who doesn’t smoke. I don’t do any drugs.”
I felt so ashamed for the first time in my life about this thing that had always made me unique in the world of freaks. I had never even had a toke of pot, I explained, and I certainly had never done anything stronger. (I was still talking too much and with too much earnestness.) When I had finished my second little temperance speech, I sank back into the worn upholstery of the car, the little sliver of space I had next to the window, and I felt about as unwanted as a white missionary without a bite of food or even a religious tract to hand out. I had nothing. And, even worse, I was accepting nothing.
Then the car got very quiet, and that is probably the closest I ever came to saying, “Okay. Why not?” In the past several years, I had turned down hundreds of offers to get high, ignoring the gentle teasing or coaxing of friends, but this wasn’t peer pressure; it was just disappointment. We were so tightly jammed into that car so that I couldn’t really turn to see the man who was sitting closest to me and when I did try to look him in the eye, I was overwhelmed by the smell of alcohol. And our legs were pressed together like we were in a three-legged race, and his girlfriend or wife had one leg stretched on top of his legs so that it was nearly touching mine. We were all together, just like that, cruising down the streets of Toledo when I suddenly realized that we had been driving in circles.
I should have realized this before because it was taking an awful long time to get back to the interstate. Perhaps realizing how seriously un-fun the new passenger was, the driver switched on the radio abrupty. I guess nobody wanted to hear anymore about all the drugs, alcohol, and even coffee that I had never tried. It was as if my refusal to take a single sip of alcohol was conveying judgment, and so I did not want to add to my offense by asking if we were driving in circles. But then I saw a sign that announced the renovation project of a civic building and I knew for sure the sign had flashed by my window several other times in the course of our thirty-minute cruise through the streets of Toledo. Something was “Coming Soon,” but I missed the smaller print, even though I twisted to try to decipher the rest. I thought if I could catch something more specific than the generic message of “Coming Soon,” I could say on our next pass around, “I think we have passed that sign already.”
Despite my growing concern about never getting back to the interstate, I stayed determined not to voice my concern or show that I was questioning the circuitous route. For me, it was very important to not display racism, to not make assumptions, to not be like other white people. I settled back into my tiny portion of the car, stopped looking for signs, and instead I found myself listening to the music on the radio. Suddenly—and with a great surge of joy—I heard “Ain’t That Peculiar” playing on the radio.
I looked down at the little kid on the floor of the car and I started snapping my fingers softly and then he started attempting to snap his chunky fingers, which made his mom smile. And then the man on the far side of her nudged her leg and looked over to me and started singing “Ain’t that peculiar” and so I started singing too, causing him to look over to me and say, with half a question in his voice, “You can sing.” And I knew this too, that I could sing, and we both sang to the little kid on the floor and to the whole car while the others listened. By the time the driver thought to lower the sound on the radio and offer a single line of “Ain’t that peculiar,” the song had ended and a new song had come on.
“Here you go,” the driver announced. He had pulled the car over to the shoulder of an unfamiliar road—a highway. I was being dropped off on the interstate after all. I could see highway signs that announced how many miles to Detroit. I swiveled around and saw an exit sign for Toledo in the other direction. These were the signs I had been waiting for. I thanked the driver and everyone else profusely, still trying to make up for being such a wet blanket and maybe feeling like we bonded a little bit in the final minutes of the ride. Or maybe not. I’m not sure. Everything happens so quickly when you’re being dropped off: a wave good-bye is a twitch in flashing traffic and a final “thank you” the smallest pop in a hurricane. It felt terrible to offer nothing more.
Over the years, I’ve been picked up by hundreds of cars and trucks, but this ride in Toledo was unlike any other. There was something strange that I can’t put my finger on. This big family seemed so excited at first, not just doing me a favor but wanting to make a connection, but then everything became so sad and sullen for the remaining thirty-minute ride, until a single song and a bit of finger snapping brought the mood back up: ain’t that peculiar. I still don’t know what I would have done differently, but so much rests on what we will or will not share, what we can or cannot do, and how we choose and sometimes choose not to participate.
With the distance of the years, I am now imagining that this family was just cruising around without any place to be or any rigid goal for the night (a great hippie trait—in fact, they were more like hippies than I was), and it must have been very disappointing to pick up the one and only long-haired freak in America who was more like a Mennonite than a Deadhead, more like a Boy Scout than most Boy Scouts, more like Donny Osmond than Mick Jagger, and so I imagine I was the last white hitchhiker they ever picked up, after that day swearing off long-hairs for good.
As they drove off, their windows were all wide open, and they were singing to the next song on the radio and pulling across several lanes of traffic with their horn blaring, strangely not seeming at all aggressive but maybe just a little dangerous. Dangerous but musical too.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison emphasizes the power of song as something extraordinarily part of the everyday reality of black people. The singing woman in Song of Solomon turns out to be the protagonist’s aunt. Her song, in the words of the novel, is like “piano music in a silent film.” For those who have experienced silent film with an accompanying piano player, there is a sense of danger and risk in how the music unfolds, collaborative in how it responds to the shifting images on the screen and how the audience responds to it, acknowledging when it deepens our understanding or veers from our expectations. The piano player, spontaneously, is putting sound back into a form (early cinema) that has left out the noise of galloping horses or lovers running through a field. It puts sound back in but with melody replacing the everyday squeaks and squawks of life. What an extraordinary and dangerous wedding of music alongside of life!
In the opening scene of Song of Solomon, Pilate’s song is indeed also representative of dangerous music. But that’s not right either. It is only dangerous for some. At the end of the novel, Morrison comes back to the importance of Pilate’s song as transformative. Replacing the communal gathering at the beginning of the novel, Morrison creates a more solitary scene between the dying Pilate and the grieving Milkman. As Pilate lies in her nephew’s arms, she asks him to sing. It is the novel’s final symbol of the transference of knowledge from one generation to another. And it is a mournful song that he sings, a nursery rhyme he has heard in the village that he transforms into the blues: “Sugargirl don’t leave me here.”
Just as I was finishing the novel, the tipi caught fire, the canvas shell fully illuminated as if a switch had been turned on. We flew out of there with barely enough time to witness a thousand ashes spraying down and clouds of smoke billowing up. It was an instantaneous transformation of energy, leaving only the charred frame visible against the full moon. How immediate are some transformations? People who have died and come back to life can tell you this. They look down at their dead bodies, awakening (according to some) with great force and surprise and certainly a bit of cloudy wonder, everything shaking with the speed of the transformation. I am not saying that I died in that moment, but what happened in that tipi was strangely like what happened as Sly and the Family Stone turned something on in me, the music pulling me up and out of myself, and it was also like my experience reading Song of Solomon, that feeling of floating outside myself, giving me more than one perspective with which to view the world, while also permitting me to feel comfortable as an outsider.