Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature

[Home is] this world, the world of which we are normally aware … the social setting in which man may expect to find his secure place. [The unhomely, t]hat which is ‘secret’, and that which usually remains hidden but is brought to light, is the unconscious mind of the individual, and through and beyond this is a wider region of the unconscious that we find embodied in myths, legends and fairy tales throughout the world; it is the realm of primitive fears, of what has been forgotten and left behind, yet returns on occasions to plague us; it is the sense of alienation, of things we have made turning against us, of historical and social forces that we are helping to shape and that yet escape our control and even our knowledge; and it may also be a sense of the ‘wholly other’ invading our lives.

In Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Ishmael Reed muses about the possibility of “blackness” sweeping the country like a contagion of pandemic proportions. Reed suggests that during the 1920s, inspired by the rhythms of black cultural productions, the United States succumbed to its urge to jelly roll, betraying its white façade by exposing its dark underbelly. In this satire, Reed paints a picture of a nightmarish plague that the establishment is unable to quell.

The infestation is not, however, a foreign agent introduced to a virgin population. Instead, the phenomenon arises from inside the nation. It is a repressed part of our national identity manifested as blues, ragtime, jazz, returning to seize control of the dominant consciousness. The “alien” black presence so vital to building and maintaining the nation, in Reed’s vision, spreads beyond white supremacist stopgaps and Jes Grew out of control. Funk infests the country and alters its pulse to match the rhythm of the soft-shoe that reveals more than a trace of resemblance to the African foot stomp upon bare ground. Without regard for accepted norms and practices, people began to show their color; otherwise “good” people began to “act black” in their style of dress, music, speech, and performance.

For a time, Jes Grew emerged from the recesses of our consciousness and proved itself a crucial part of our national identity. In this parody, Reed shows what is at stake for a country and a people still struggling to define itself as home for African Americans only a few generations removed from slavery. Even the suggestion that Jes Grew’s elusive Text ever existed challenges ontological beliefs about racial divisions within society. Such categories are not hermetic. The distinctions between communities were becoming increasingly difficult to identify by the tracks that had previously separated them. Reed’s notion of Jes Grew is important because knowing where we are cartographically relies upon knowing who we are as a people. These, of course, are not new questions, and they continue to permeate the writings of successive generations at least in part because they are so difficult to answer.

Reed’s critique and his reference to Jung’s observation about the European American “going Black” provide a convenient metaphor upon which to anchor the concept of home. American national identity is founded upon formulations of race. Consequently, we utilize the language of race to help us articulate the ways in which we inhabit the land. As a result, home is built upon metaphors of racial identity. But what might appear at a great distance to be simply black and white becomes infinitely complicated the more closely it is examined.

While not overtly concerned with addressing the needs of a white audience in the ways reflected in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison creates an unapologetically black home place that nevertheless manages to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of race. The natural world of borders—walls, fences, streets, streams, and mountains—that define home in Song of Solomon is accompanied by the ghettoized world of breast milk, bones, peaches, blues, and ghosts. Unfortunately, the credence lent to the world of borders by the authority of maps, government agencies, and other institutions usually occludes the significance of the ghetto.

The ghetto is, of course, a portion of the city assigned to disenfranchised members of society who generally share a common racial identity. But in the African American vernacular, “ghetto” is also a characterization for something or someone, or an act or behavior that is identified with the place of the ghetto. It is both a particular material site identified in terms of spatial markers like street signs and housing projects and the more arbitrary label assigned to nearly anything “black” that might be associated with that locale. To be “ghetto” is to act flagrantly out of one’s impulses in spite of the presence of strangers. For example, in Song of Solomon, Porter’s public display of drunkenness, shouting and urinating out of an attic window, might be called “ghetto.”

In Song of Solomon, the city itself becomes “ghetto”—not in the sense of Bigger Thomas’s segregated and impoverished Southside, which he knows intimately but which refuses to know him, nor in the sense that Invisible Man’s Harlem is a black jungle that keeps slipping out of view. I do not want to dismiss the standard usage of the term; obviously, the word “ghetto” denotes slums African Americans were forced by economic pressures to occupy. What I am suggesting, however, is that in its standard usage the term is pejorative; the derivative from the vernacular includes this connotation but is inflected with a broader meaning. These black cities can barely house the protagonists and are not home to them. To be “ghetto” in the vernacular sense is to have a home even if it is an illegitimate nonplace that emerges alongside that which appears to be more natural. Song of Solomon’s Southside, for example, is ghetto because it is the dark underbelly that is home to the characters’ blacker selves.

In this chapter I will examine the ways in which Morrison signifies on the leitmotif of the earlier novels and reconfigures the places of the city, the kitchen, and the womb in terms that are more livable. The representation of home, drawn as an irresistible attraction toward increasingly smaller sites—the city, the kitchen, the womb—in the previous works, breaks free and explodes in Corregidora. Morrison gathers the pieces Jones scatters and in Song of Solomon inverts the pattern, leading us out of the womb rather than into it. The womb is dead; the kitchen opens outward; and the city becomes ghetto. Rather than being a black place because it is so interior that there is an absence of light, as is the case with Baker’s black hole, home becomes a black place because of the presence of all color. To be at home, then, Morrison suggests in Song of Solomon, the African American community must embody the blues paradox of holding its opposite within itself. The novel declares that home is untenable, yet it must be defended even at the cost of life itself. The protagonist, Milkman, having gained the knowledge of how to integrate the material world embodied by his father with the ghetto symbolized by his aunt, can finally fly home.

While Baker’s theoretical framework in Blues Ideology erases the mother by subjugating the productive space of the biological womb to the male-engineered matrix, Song of Solomon resists such a reading by privileging the woman’s body. Although the womb is clearly a hostile place that can be invaded by potentially lethal forces, Morrison refuses to let the reader forget that the womb is located within a woman’s body. She creates dynamic characters with individual personalities not easily ignored, even when the novel moves from the literal womb into metaphor. In Song of Solomon, representations of the womb are repeated and revised in a range that spans the mythical, the literal, and the metaphorical. The most obvious example of a mythical womb is, of course, Pilate’s emergence from Sing’s dead womb. Milkman’s life is literally threatened when he is still in Ruth’s womb, and as an adult he helps to destroy Hagar’s barren womb. Finally, the novel offers the Butlers’ house as a metaphor for a decaying womb through which Milkman reconnects with his ancestral past.

Although much has been written about Pilate’s mythic origins, I return to this point because her birth is a clear demonstration of Morrison’s concern for the womb as it relates to the quest for home. Even Pilate’s brother, Macon Dead II, who, in his pursuit of material gain, has become estranged from his sister and detached from his ancestry, recognizes Pilate’s link to the past. He tells his son, Milkman, “If you ever have a doubt we from Africa, look at Pilate” (54). She represents the African who was wrested from her homeland only to be denied the liberty of establishing a home in the new land. The struggle in the novel to acquire an estate to pass on to future generations is similar to the contest depicted in Corregidora to “make generations” that “bear witness” of the past. In an attempt to liberate Ursa from the perverse dogma instituted by her great-grandmother, Jones literally cuts the womb out of the woman’s body. However problematically, the hysterectomy and its precipitating violence free Ursa from the cycle of maternity and allow her to withdraw from the marriage circuit in an effort to redefine her relationship to home. The womb and fetus lost in Corregidora are reclaimed in Song of Solomon. While Ursa’s fetus is premature and discarded along with the womb, Sing’s baby matures to full term.

Morrison understands the need to reconfigure the role the female body plays in the African American construction of home. The novels discussed in the previous chapters become increasingly critical of the effort to retreat into the womb. Morrison revises Jones’s violent dismemberment, which radically alters the place of Ursa’s body, by keeping the womb intact even while insisting that it not be considered a viable home. Morrison accomplishes this by allowing the woman to choose death over the responsibilities of motherhood. Pilate declares, “People die when they want to and if they want to” (141). Unfortunately, in choosing to die before Pilate is born, Sing literally holds the future captive in her womb. Pilate’s sheer determination to live overcomes death. She delivers herself from the cavern of dead flesh that might have been her tomb.

In this birth, Morrison posits a paradox that is characteristic of the blues expression that will come to shape Pilate’s life. Pilate embodies the blues sentiment expressed by lyrics like “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” growing out of the slave past. Slave families were torn apart and children routinely denied a relationship with their mothers. This terrible reality is supported, perhaps ironically, by an equally heinous law supporting the institution of slavery, which mandated that children “follow the condition of the mother.” This law in conjunction with governing practices functioned to erode the natural right of a black individual to control access to her own body and her offspring. In “Mama’s Baby,” Spillers maintains that “Under these arrangements, the customary lexis of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are thrown into unrelieved crisis” (272). I have already discussed at some length how the blues emerges from this troubled past and works to impose meaning upon the chaos of black experiences. In fact, the blues is one of the few narrative traditions that can accommodate the hyperbole and truth, hope and angst, of a mother who dies before the child is even born. Sing’s womb, then, is a blues crossing, that black (female) place Baker might call a “black hole.” Pilate must overcome the condition of her mother—and her own quintessential blues condition of being a motherless child—before she can claim the right to be alive.

The black hole that Baker describes is indicated by the X, the sign of the railway juncture. The X, however, evokes the image of America’s mechanization and thus diverts attention from the female body. However, Pilate emerges from her mother’s dead womb bearing no mark of this crossing at all. The narrative describes the scene of Pilate’s birth from Macon’s perspective:

The absence of a navel suggests the polar opposite of Baker’s junction. Pilate’s smooth belly brings to mind anything but the man-made. The absence of a navel bears witness to her mother’s death, but it also indicates an unnatural break with the past. Morrison moves toward resolving the dilemma of the absent mother by rein-scribing her in Pilate’s flesh as the absence of a navel. Pilate is unmarked by her mother’s death. Like Adam, who as the first man has no need for a navel, Pilate with her smooth belly signifies originality. Further, she is given dominion over the tools that will reconnect the next generation with its past. This heritage transcends the black hole of her mother’s womb and reaches beyond the vortex of the Middle Passage to an African past. Consequently, that “captive flesh,” which had been “seared, divided, ripped-apart … riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or escaped overboard” (Spillers 260) in the ancestral past, is permitted to begin again. In this way, Pilate’s belly becomes a blues paradigm simultaneously signifying the problem and the solution.

Morrison reinforces the idea that the womb is a hostile place through the figures of Macon’s wife, Ruth, and Pilate’s granddaughter, Hagar. These women desperately long for a viable home that will nurture their embattled psyches. The devaluation of the womb corresponds with the dynamics established by their respective homes: Ruth’s is too big and Hagar’s is too detached. As a result, the womb again emerges as a sign of home and its dysfunction.

Ruth is the lonely daughter of the first African American doctor in town. She never discovers any meaningful ways of expressing herself in the overwhelmingly masculinist space of Not Doctor Street and her father’s house. Southside residents integrate the doctor’s home into their cultural landscape but they do not accommodate Ruth; and the house that justifies the expanded reading of African American space for the community at large collapses in upon his daughter. Without a sense of ownership, Ruth belongs to the house. Consequently, the social space that might read as an expanded site of power for the African American community in general, Ruth finds nearly impossible to negotiate. As Lefebvre explains, “The subject experiences space as an obstacle, as a resistant objectality: at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall, being not only extremely difficult to modify in any way but also hedged about by Draconian rules prohibiting any attempt at such modification” (57). Because the house is expansive, it seems available to be encoded at will, but instead of yielding itself as a void, it refuses to be fitted to Ruth’s female sensibilities. Her efforts to resist the sense of smallness her home imposes upon her are ineffectual and usually result in negligible changes in her mundane routine. The birth of her son, Milkman, is her only significant victory over the conditions that shape her life.

Nevertheless, Ruth would not have been able to conceive Milkman without Pilate’s assistance. Pilate arrives in town after discovering that her granddaughter, Hagar, is not like her daughter, Reba, or herself. Hagar’s appetites cannot be satiated by wandering. She needs a home, so Pilate seeks to reconnect with her more conventional brother. The reunion is brief, just longer than the time it takes Milkman to grow from conception to birth. When Macon discovers that Ruth is pregnant, he initiates a regimen designed to induce an abortion. While Milkman has not yet become “real” to her, Ruth is terrified by the possibility of aborting the fetus. Nevertheless, she is unable to resist her husband and submits to castor oil, scalding pots, soapy enemas, and knitting needles. When he punches her in the stomach, she finally looks to Pilate for help.

For Ruth, the womb is not a haven; nor is it perverted into a record through which she can “bear witness” of the past. With Pilate’s assistance, Ruth asserts the sovereign right to control access to her body. Her womb, under siege by Macon, characterizes the struggle of African American women to liberate themselves from oppressive domestic dogma that seems to extend the reach of male governance to the female body. When paired with Pilate, Ruth no longer serves as the malleable conduit for expanding and maintaining male territory. Rather than functioning as a mere kin source, Ruth begins to exercise dominion over her life and affect the lives of others. She manipulates Macon into impregnating her and she manages to resist his threats long enough for her son to be born.

Within a larger context, Song of Solomon contains none of the nostalgia associated with Ruth, as mother, found in some of the earlier literature. For example, we cannot imagine Milkman running and jumping over puddles of milk to get to Ruth in the way the narrator does in his attempt to get to Mary Rambo in Invisible Man. The dark hole into which the invisible man falls during the Harlem riots is a surrogate for Mary Rambo’s body. The basement apartment is simply an extension of this same association. The apartment reads as Baker’s matrix, a womblike blues home wherein the narrator can withdraw from his experiences in the world. Morrison reconfigures Ellison’s vocabulary—man, milk, mother, home, and womb—and inflects the terms with new meaning. Milkman’s experiences quell the optimism associated with a retreat into the womb. The womb, in Song of Solomon, does not bear even the trace of romance. For Milkman, home must be a broader place, located elsewhere. The womb is not safe for Milkman as it was not safe for Pilate.

Pilate says that Milkman “come into the world tryin to keep from getting killed” (140); but this reality seems to have made him selfish. He treats Pilate’s hungry granddaughter, Hagar, with the same callous disregard his father gives his mother. Ultimately, Hagar drowns in a pool of her own longings, manifested as a mad desire for Milkman. Though he falls in love with Hagar the moment he sees her, over the course of time his lust wanes; meanwhile, her passion for him becomes more concentrated. Although the bodily consequences are just as severe for Hagar as they are for Sing or Ruth, she begins to move the conceptualization of home out of the womb. She does not produce a child (in fact, the novel infantilizes her). And unlike Great Gram in Corregidora, who looks to the womb to produce hope for the next generation, Pilate rests the future of the Dead family upon Milkman’s shoulders.

Hagar begins a ritual rampage, ostensibly to kill Milkman, after their breakup. News of this threat to her son’s life once again sends Ruth to Southside, seeking to defend him, where she confronts Hagar. Hagar is hurt and disappointed by Ruth’s hostility. She tries to explain her motivation for stalking Milkman: “He is my home in this world”; Ruth retorts, “And I am his” (138). They are both wrong. Hagar cannot curl up inside Milkman any more than he can crawl back inside of Ruth. Ruth’s womb was inhospitable even when his presence there was appropriate. Yet, in employing this imagery, Morrison signifies on Eva Peace in Sula—in this case, the mother would have the son come “home” to her womb, but he refuses to accept her on those terms. It is Pilate who states the wrenching truth neither woman wants to acknowledge: Milkman “wouldn’t give a pile of swan shit for either one of you” (138).

This exchange encapsulates the inconsistencies that make it impossible for Ruth and Hagar to be at home and rooted. The scale they use to measure home is too restrictive because it begins and ends with the body—Hagar uses Milkman’s and Ruth uses her own. Beyond the obvious futility of an attempt to do what is biologically impossible, both women fail to recognize that the nature of the womb is to thrust outward rather than to draw in. Despite the resonance of Baker’s argument, the womb is not a vortex, “charged with extraordinary attractive force” (154–55), and any home conceived in these terms will not long endure. Home must be configured as a broader model that can accommodate progress and growth. The shortcomings of these women are not individual and personal; rather, they indict the African American literary tradition for its insistence upon the preeminence of patrimony over a woman’s life and for its failure to appreciate the needs of the whole community in search of home.

Milkman’s apathy toward Hagar is typical of his attitude toward women and reflects a social pattern that offers males privilege without responsibility. He no longer feels a connection to Hagar, so he responds to the threat she poses to his life by imposing his will upon her. His will invades her embattled psyche, displacing her desires with his. Milkman finally decides upon an ultimatum, “Either I am to live in this world on my terms or I will die out of it. If I am to live in it, then I want her dead” (129). It is a simple binary: she goes or I go. This dichotomy, however, demonstrates his failure to integrate the blues sensibilities embodied by his aunt, which disrupt simple dualities. Neither is Hagar equipped with a language adequate to express her overwhelming emotions. Instead, paralyzed by her desire, Hagar is unable even to release her arms holding the knife above her head.

Hagar proves incompetent at killing Milkman. Rather than attempting to understand her motivations or to show compassion, Milkman is relentless: “‘If you keep your hands just that way,’ he said, ‘and then bring them down straight, straight and fast, you can drive that knife right smack in your cunt. Why don’t you do that? Then all your problems will be over’” (130). The knife becomes a surrogate for Milkman’s penis, invading and violating Hagar’s vagina. He wills her death by directing her to mutilate the passage that leads to her womb. Milkman is so completely self-absorbed that he is blind to his responsibility for Hagar’s behavior and unaware of the power he wields over her life. His behavior mirrors Macon’s toward Ruth, although Hagar’s womb, which might hold the promise of the future, is apparently barren. Even her vagina has been emptied of pleasure. The journey to and from the uterus is a dangerous passage, threatened by male agents who show little regard for women or the fruit of the womb. Sing’s womb is the cavern of dead flesh from which Pilate must escape and Ruth’s womb is the site where Milkman’s life is threatened by his father. Milkman’s last encounter with Hagar signifies the continuing threat to the womb. But by not actually involving the uterus, choosing instead to operate on the plane of wit and will, this encounter also provides the segue that leads out of the body.

Finally, Morrison reinforces the image of the dead womb first represented in Pilate’s birth and repeated and revised in the figures of Ruth and Hagar by moving into metaphor. The Butler mansion is a womb site that speaks of death and the Dead family past. “If metaphor,” as Susan Willis maintains, “and much of Morrison’s writing in general, represents a return to origins, it is not rooted in a nostalgia for the past. Rather, it represents a process for coming to grips with historical transition” (264). The collapsing ruins of the Butler house suggest a gangrenous womb, but the house also serves to shift spatial orientation away from the female body toward the materiality of the built environment. Retracing Pilate’s steps in his search for a secret cache of gold, Milkman soon finds his way to the Butler’s mansion, out of reach by car. Milkman must go the distance from the road on foot. He makes his way down a dark tunnel into an interior site deep in the woods. “He looked back down the path and saw the green maw out of which he had come, a greenish-black tunnel, the end of which was nowhere in sight” (240–41). It is a primordial place that is literally and figuratively larger than his mother’s womb. He steps into the past, a time before his birth, into a place large enough to hold clues to his father’s past and his grandfather’s past too.

His unwitting quest for home begins with an allusion to the German folktale, Hansel and Gretel. While the familiar childhood characters salivate over a witch’s gingerbread house, Milkman vomits from the stench of a different witch’s house before Circe comforts him (as the two fictional forebears were similarly comforted) with the smell of ginger root. Now the only human occupant, Circe literally steps out of the past in a moment of what Susan Willis calls “funk.” Willis defines “funk” as “nothing more than the intrusion of the past in the present” (280), but such moments play a vital function in helping Milkman to overcome major failings of his past. This “funk” also reads as the uncanny, which indicate for Siegbert Prawer “that we are nearing that dark, transpersonal realm of … [Jung’s] collective unconscious, that realm of mythological forms where things and persons become magical, taboo, dangerous and yet full of the promise of enrichment and salvation” (14). Circe is far too old to be alive, yet she remains to watch the Butlers’ house decay and to feed the dogs so that they can help assure the demise of this property. She wills herself to live in order to see this process through.

While Mary Rambo is an archetypal maternal figure serving to expand the male sense of home by staying in her place, Circe transcends that archetype. At the end of the novel the narrator of Invisible Man intends to run home, where presumably Mary remains available to receive him. Like Mary’s, Circe’s obligation is also in the home, but she transcends the limitations of her assigned black (female) place simply by staying there too long. The invisible man cannot return to Mary (in the body) although he retreats into her surrogate womb. Macon II, on the other hand, can literally return to Circe through the eyes, feet, and mouth of his son. This crucial distinction helps Milkman make the transition from egocentrism to social responsibility. Carl Jung asserts that our efforts should be to “connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it” (157). The consequence of missing this sort of connection is “a kind of rootless consciousness” (157)—the kind that characterizes Milkman’s life. As a signifier of the maternal, Circe recalls the past and provides Milkman with tangible evidence of his place within it. She is the cord that reaches through time and keeps the past from slipping away. That is why this midwife who never lost a baby (and only one mother) smells like “ginger root—pleasant, clean, seductive” (241).

More than magic, the smell of ginger suggests deep, strong roots, like those found in Southside. The luxury of air conditioners deprives the upwardly mobile middle-class African Americans of the smell that rides into open windows of Southside on the air: “there the ginger smell was sharp, sharp enough to distort dreams and make the sleeper believe the things he hungered for were right at hand” (185). The scent of ginger suggests the hope that the women of Corregidora believe is offered only in the womb. This root, like the herbs Ruth uses to bewitch Macon, works like black magic, enticing Milkman into the dark hull of the Butler house.

Milkman has an erection when he enters and climbs the stairs to meet Circe’s embrace (242). He is aroused and succumbs to her seduction. In this seminal moment, Milkman enters and becomes present in his ancestral past. It is similar to the scene at the end of Corregidora when the distinctions between identity and time collapse for Ursa—“I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora” (184). Ursa’s epiphany is the recognition that the ability to gain control over our past “had to be sexual.” It has to be because rootedness is sexual; it is the present act we perform with our bodies to invoke the past and reach into the future through the process of reproduction. The womb, in this final configuration as the rotting shell of the Butler mansion, emerges as a place of thinly veiled yearning—the desire to be remembered, the longing to be productive, the need to live on one’s own terms—placed in constant jeopardy by the corruption of material culture. Time threatens to destroy both the material environment produced as a monument to this yearning and the human life the womb promises to bear. The womb, first metonymic of the African American woman, becomes synecdochic for home and ultimately reads as a sign of decay brought on by the supreme investment in material culture. By demystifying the womb, the novel frees Milkman to go elsewhere in his journey home.

In Song of Solomon, the black hole is not the nostalgic, restful haven into which men fall to recuperate; instead, it is more directly identified with the black woman’s body as a womb. Likewise, kitchen places are complicated by the presence of men who conspire, laugh, and talk through late evening hours. While there are numerous scenes that occur in the kitchen, I will discuss two brief passages: Circe’s confrontation with Milkman about her commitment to the Butler household and Pilate’s description of a man falling off a cliff in his kitchen. Together, these two scenes help us understand how Morrison continues to redefine the terms given to represent home by making the kitchen into a site of resistance. While Morrison demystifies the womb by reading it more literally, she mystifies the place of the kitchen by asking to suspend our disbelief. Analysis of these scenes will not provide a complete picture of home; however, it is a concise reading of the dynamics at work within the place of the kitchen and how those dynamics differ from kitchen scenes represented in the previous novels.

The kitchen is, of course, that place of domestic servitude within the white household assigned to the African American in the racist past. It is also an interior site crucial to developing kinship within the place of home. The kitchen fosters connections that help alienated people like Bigger Thomas or the narrator of Invisible Man to feel at home. For a moment, even Bigger lets down his guard when he sops his plate with his bread in the Daltons’ kitchen. But Mary Rambo’s and Mrs. MacTeer’s blues kitchens offer only meager resistance to a huge white supremacist apparatus that distorts notions of home to its own ends. This apparatus continues to demand that an individual stay in her place (even when removed from an occupation as a domestic servant), which sexism and the legacy of slavery insist, for African American women at least, remains the kitchen. The blues kitchen that gives a measure of comfort to the invisible man proves unable to penetrate the madness that ensues in The Bluest Eye, a short time after Pecola’s father rapes her on the kitchen floor. Cat Lawson, in Corregidora, is more aware than any of the other characters of how the kitchen works to victimize her. Unfortunately, awareness alone is not enough to compete with that despotism. Awareness must be accompanied by an effective means of resistance that might function, like the blues, to comfort individuals who are able to identify with this mode of expression; or that, like Circe (and her deep ginger roots), works to dismantle the authority given to the material environment of the kitchen altogether.

The image of the kitchen plays a significant role in America’s historical development and expansion. It is not hyperbolic to assert that Circe’s presence within the Butler household has global implications. While I am certainly not suggesting that a line leads from Circe to World War II, Amy Kaplan argues, after examining the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, that domestic rhetoric is a vital counterpoint to nationalist rhetoric. During the mid-nineteenth century, in particular, the language of domesticity suffused debates about national expansion. Kaplan says, “Women’s work at home … performs two interdependent forms of national labor; it forges the bonds of internal unity while impelling the nation outward to encompass the globe” (587). Domestic discourse both redresses and reenacts the contradictions of the empire through its own double movement—to expand female influence beyond the home and the nation, while simultaneously contracting the woman’s sphere to police domestic boundaries against threats from within and without. The movement inward, which in African American literature is a movement into the body, like the trend represented in nineteenth-century discourse, is really a subset of a larger, masculinist expansion. This outward thrust is fueled, in part, by African American domestic labor. Circe, then, arises out of this discourse as the localized black female figure who serves as the mechanism of American expansion. She must somehow become larger than her assigned station, root herself deeper than the nationalist movement, or simply outlive it in order to challenge the meaning of her place within the kitchen.

Although Circe does not actually appear there, the kitchen is a station that dictates how she is permitted to act within a given environment. Circe’s assigned place in the Butler household is the black (female) kitchen, traditionally designated for African American women. Just as William Faulkner laments in his grotesqueries the emaciated landscapes in the fallen South and wrestles with the implications of race and servitude, Morrison depicts a sophisticated dynamic at work in the now defunct Butler household. Like Clytie in Absalom, Absalom!, Circe’s presence within the household complicates our reading of the power relationships set in place to perpetuate and to disrupt racial hierarchies. As Homi Bhabha describes, “In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the border between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (445). The subjugated, eternal black presence within the household invites the question: Whose side is she on?

Circe disrupts the myth of the “loyal servant” who holds no personal ambitions by, among other things, harboring the children of the man the Butlers killed. She is a defiant figure who clearly understands her social responsibilities. Yet she endures like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury to see “de first en de last” (375). Milkman misinterprets this dedication as her love of the Butler family and their home. When he confronts her with this perspective, Circe responds curtly, “They loved it. Stole for it, lied for it, killed for it. But I’m the one left. Me and the dogs. And I will never clean it again…. Everything in this world they lived for will crumble and rot” (249). Circe’s dedication is not to the Butler family, but to overseeing the demise of their estate. When faced with financial ruin, the remaining Butler killed herself. Circe has witnessed the end of the family line, but she wants to see the material legacy destroyed, too. She and Milkman sit together in the last room in the house that has not yet been demolished. Her dedication is a triumph of the human spirit over the unconscionable pursuit of wealth.

Circe’s survival symbolizes the African American collective will to endure nearly insurmountable conditions. The rotting hull of the Butler mansion, then, represents the inevitable demise of an unjust system that dehumanizes its agents and contorts a testament of their strength into a sign of their weaknesses. Yet, in this mixed-up world of kitchens and home, Circe’s fate remains tied to that site. The kitchen is a cauldron built upon the myth of white supremacy, maintained by male dominance, and threatened by the potential for treachery. If the kitchen no longer can be trusted to serve the home, then the integrity of the home is compromised. By expanding Circe’s presence from background in the national landscape to foreground within the domestic portrait and by pushing the limits of mortality, Morrison creates a figure that is simultaneously real and mythical. When Milkman leaves Circe, the authority of the black (female) kitchen place is all but dismantled.

Pilate is another character who refuses to behave according to the demands of the kitchen. Having discovered that she is virtually alone in the world, she throws “away every assumption she ha[s] learned and beg[ins] at zero” (149). At an age when most people have already stopped imagining, Pilate discards her beliefs. She does not allow preconceived notions about people or places to dictate her experiences. This unburdening is the crucial step in “opening up” the kitchen for Pilate. Philosopher Martin Heidegger suggests that “spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man” (157). The kitchen maintains its authority over the lives of its subjects by obscuring obvious conflicts and functioning within a set of given expectations. Because Pilate has rejected those expectations, she is able to accept the improbable story her employer offers:

Pilate does not concern herself with the impossibility of falling off a cliff inside the kitchen of his home. Instead she opens up her mind to receive his version of events and enters into the scene just enough to attempt a rescue. Pilate is receptive to his belief that he is falling but resistant enough to remain standing safe in his kitchen.

This kitchen, like any other social space, is fraught with inconsistencies. Heidegger offers the following example to explain the quality that space has of becoming quite malleable given the right set of circumstances: “If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of … [a particular outdoor place], this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that … [specific site] that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location” (156). Personal experience with a particular site formulates an understanding that coalesces in the making of that space. The space becomes “real” in the present environment even when the physical site is at some distance.

As liberal as Heidegger’s reading of dwelling places is, Morrison manages to imagine something larger through the medium of fiction. In the kitchen scene Pilate describes, Morrison challenges Heidegger’s notion that building produces locations that “allow spaces” by moving further into the immaterial. Pilate asks, “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” (40–41). Regardless of what the built environment of walls and floors allows, belief is more powerful. The man’s belief in the cliff and Pilate’s investment in that belief defy the laws of physics operating inside the kitchen. The wife of the man Pilate is working for is not as receptive to her husband’s perspective. She makes Pilate release him before he feels safe on his own. Once Pilate lets go, it takes him “three whole minutes to go from a standing upright position to when he mashed his face on the floor” (41). Space, according to Henri Lefebvre, signifies “dos and don’ts;” but the logic of place that dictates that a man cannot fall off a cliff while standing in his kitchen is disproved by the incontrovertible evidence of the amount of time it takes him to fall.

The place of the kitchen is opened up for the man because it contains a dangerous cliff from which he is falling. It is also opened up for Pilate because she accepts this alternative viewpoint as viable. Once walls (or in this case, floors) are undermined as effective barriers that restrict what logically can happen in a place, they lose their authority. Lefebvre asserts that “rather than signs, what one encounters here [in a social space like a kitchen] are directions—multifarious and overlapping instructions” (142). Lefebvre’s “dos and don’ts” signify an infinite range of possibility; the viability of what is not real, in Pilate’s experience in this kitchen, undermines the legitimacy of what seems to be more tangible. The monolithic walls that seek to confine those assigned to a particular station, such as the kitchen, become permeable and wholly unreliable. The price of his wife’s disbelief in the possibilities is her husband’s death. What the location allows is challenged by the reality of that event. And truth moves beyond what has been built as a kitchen into what is experienced as belief.

Finally, the city returns to the notion that home is accompanied by a dark copy of itself. This copy usually remains a mere shadow, but at moments, the ghetto Jes Grew out of control. Then we see the blackening of the great white city in Wright’s Native Son—white made more palpable by its thick covering of blizzard snow. Funk erupts and uncannily forces us to confront the reality that the distance between the bourgeois aspiration of owning the “Erie Lackawanna” and giving up nearly everything there is to own is as thin as the flip side of a dime. The blues is one means ghetto inhabitants like Pilate use to reverse the field of play—submerging the city and recalling the ghetto.

In Song of Solomon, the city is neither an adversary, as it appears to be in Native Son, nor an obstacle course, as it is in Ellison’s Invisible Man. Nor does the city simply serve as the backdrop against which Morrison in The Bluest Eye and Jones in Corregidora can foreground the increasingly interior space of home. The first part of Song of Solomon is set in a modest-sized city in Michigan. The city is small enough for people to know who lives there but Northern enough to accommodate a burgeoning black middle class. It is here that the siblings Macon and Pilate Dead first appear. I have already discussed Pilate’s mythical birth and how she liberates herself from the tyranny of the kitchen. What remains is to situate Pilate within the framework of home.

In the introduction of Blues Ideology, Baker records an epiphany he experienced during his study of African American culture, “I found myself confronted with a figure to ground reversal. A fitting image for the effect of my reorientation is the gestalt illustration of the Greek hydria (a water vase with curved handles) that transforms itself into two faces in profile” (2). This metaphor describes for Baker the relationship vernacular productions have to dominant culture. While I have already offered an involved critique of Baker’s blues matrix in the previous chapters, I consider this image appropriately applied to the characters Macon and Pilate. If the novel, according to Morrison, is about “a journey from stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a complete man” (quoted in Grewal 62), then it bears upon Baker’s theoretical black whole.

A man becomes “whole,” in Baker’s terms, or “complete,” in Morrison’s, when he is immersed within a culture that knows its whole self. The play between the figure and the ground captured in the image of the Greek hydria is represented by Morrison in the interchange between Macon and Pilate. As Denise Heinze observes, “Pilate, as manufacturer of a pleasurable product and an adversary to squeezing money out of neighbors—though not necessarily of making it—is the aesthetic antithesis of her utilitarian brother who makes people pay dearly for a basic necessity so that he may live in comfort” (85). Pilate’s rejection of material concerns diametrically opposes Macon’s total investment in “owning things.” Yet neither character can be understood fully except in contrast to the other. Without becoming involved in the intricacies of rhetorical composition and design, I suggest that Macon is presented as the figure and Pilate as the ground (or vice versa); each is created through the play between positive and negative space. Together they represent the complete picture.

In other words, as a product of the ghetto—by which I mean a site encouraging the return of that repressed African identity—Pilate is unheimlich, while as an inhabitant of the city—by which I mean that normative metropolitan lifestyle involving work and play within a fairly densely populated built environment—her brother, Macon is heimlich. These German terms, unheimlich and its apparent opposite, have no ready equivalents in standard English. In a discussion about the uncanny in literature, Siegbert Prawer offers these definitions for the word unheimlich:

If Macon is the figure who has safely concealed that private, black part of his experience since his father’s violent murder, Pilate is the figure who exposes the same Africanist past. The siblings split after their father is killed defending his land from the jealous and greedy Butlers. Macon resorts to the city in order to build a place of his own that cannot be stolen, and Pilate retreats into a ghetto experience that keeps “her just barely within the boundaries of the elaborately socialized world of black people” (150).

Macon’s pursuit of things results in the acquisition of numerous properties that he manages from his desk in Sonny’s Shop. However, Macon lives on Not Doctor Street, which town legislators and town maps only acknowledge as Mains Avenue. The street was renamed by Southside residents, patients of the only African American physician in town, in part because none of them lived there. The African American community is largely housed within Southside until the doctor’s distinct social position situates him economically and geographically outside the predefined parameters of the general black populace. With his entrance the community has grown more complex than that which can be effectively contained within the Southside; so it must accommodate the doctor’s social and physical proximity, integrating him into the communal landscape. The doctor’s house expands the African American sense of place and Macon envisions himself, as a property owner, a suitable heir to his estate; “entertain[ing] thoughts of marrying the doctor’s daughter was possible because each key [in his pocket] represented a house which he owned at the time” (22). Macon’s success at integrating himself into the existing landscape suggests that he has found a place for himself in this growing city.

Macon’s labor to establish a place of his own culminates in considerable wealth, but it also alienates him from the other black people in the community. A man’s labor, according to Karl Marx, can take “on its own existence … it exists outside him, independently, and alien to him … it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force” (quoted in Prawer 18). Macon works to “own things” so that those things will “own other things” and he can own himself and “other people too” (55). Unfortunately, material gain alone is not enough to satisfy the human longing for rootedness projected onto the place of home. The physical distance of his house on Not Doctor Street from the properties in Southside is mirrored by his emotional and psychological distance from Southside residents. Ironically, his labor turns against him, holding him outside of the community that reaps the fruit of his harvest.

Macon hordes dwelling structures in an attempt to fix his established place within the city and makes routine public displays in order to maintain it. His behavior proclaims to those around him that he has a home; conversely, his behavior accuses them of being without. But this is not the perspective from the Southside. According to Homi Bhabha, “To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of the social life into private and the public spheres” (445). Bhabha is referring, of course, to the unheimlich, which I identify with the ghetto. Although Macon now lives in the house that expanded the horizons of the local African American sense of home, he feels challenged by Southside. Even the buildings themselves seem defensive at times: “Scattered here and there, his houses stretched up beyond him like squat ghosts with hooded eyes. He didn’t like to look at them in this light. During the day they were reassuring to see; now they did not seem to belong to him at all—in fact he felt like the outsider, the propertyless, landless wanderer” (27). Under the shadow of night, the black, ghetto place comes to the foreground. Macon, in his refusal to identify with it, becomes more clearly the disinherited city dweller, wandering aimlessly about someone else’s land.

Originally, ghettoes were ethnic enclaves carved out by Jews who settled in Italy, segregated communities where they could preserve their religious practices and culture. By the time of the Crusades, the increasingly militant medieval Christian church began to formalize the ghetto by imposing legal restrictions on Jews. However, as Louis Wirth observes, “The historians of the ghetto are usually inclined to overemphasize the confining effect of the barriers that were set up around the Jew, and the provincial and stagnant character of ghetto existence. They forget that there was nevertheless a teeming life within the ghetto which was probably more active than life outside” (19). In twentieth-century America, the ghetto has come to be associated with the disenfranchisement of African Americans. Yet, like the original Jewish settlements, the black ghetto is teeming with life. Like Bhabha’s description of the “unhomely,” the ghetto cannot be fixed within simple dichotomies. In fact, in this scene Macon is ghettoized by his status as outsider. The figure who is secured, both literally and figuratively, by the keys in his pocket slips into the background. In the evening shadows, Macon becomes dispossessed of his land.

Macon’s attempts to own property so that he can own himself and other people prove finally as impotent as Bigger’s carnivalesque inversion of the Daltons’ home. Bigger is thwarted most immediately by his ignorance of the furnace mechanics but more significantly by the larger institutional structures that predetermine his failure. The billboard’s policing eye, which insists that “you can’t win,” may be absent from Macon’s setting, but his wholehearted internalization of Eurocentric systems of power leaves him nearly as vulnerable as Bigger. While Macon’s response to his father’s murder may not be physical violence, it is far from self-affirming.

More remarkable in this context is his sister Pilate’s practice of respecting the people and things she encounters as she meets them within their own environment. Heidegger might define this quality as “sparing” and “preserving”: “Sparing … takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being…. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving” (Heidegger 149). Pilate spares by meeting an individual where he is (as she does, for instance, with the man in his kitchen) and preserves by respecting the contributions others bring to encounters. Thus Pilate, according to the terms laid out by Heidegger, dwells in the land.

This sense of dwelling is manifested in Pilate’s incessant wandering after her father’s murder and her subsequent estrangement from Macon. Her lack of attachment to any particular place is contrasted with her ability to locate and retain significant communal signposts. Pilate keeps the inheritance of her home literally in the form of her father’s bones and figuratively in the partial narrative of the blues text. She is an agent of the blues like the classic blues artists Angela Davis considers in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Davis explains, “The women who sang the blues did not typically affirm female resignation and powerlessness, nor did they accept the relegation of women to private and interior spaces” (20). Pilate’s journey continues to affirm the new pattern of expansion rather than retreat, supported by the expressive mode of the blues. “And Pilate embodies the image of the black blues woman, for her song of the lost man, flown away, departed, leaving the beloved behind in suffering and pain” (Skerrett 195).

That she continually interprets her world through the lens of the blues song (as she does on the day of Milkman’s birth at the opening of the novel) keeps her perspective from being forgotten. Gurleen Grewal, borrowing her vocabulary from Baker, suggests, “Pilate’s blues song and its referent, the historic/mythic flying African, depicts the despairing Robert Smith with blue wings; it succeeds in unifying, in ‘an Afro-American expressive field’ (Houston Baker’s phrase), people as far removed from each other as the genteel Ruth Foster Dead and the poor Mrs. Bains, Guitar’s mother” (70). The blues does indeed have the potential to unify disparate individuals into a community.

By using material wealth as a signifier of his superiority over those who do not have access to the same capital resources, Macon cuts himself off from the support of this community, leaving himself vulnerable in its presence. In his effort to hasten his trip from Southside, where he feels like an outsider, Macon passes in front of Pilate’s house, where her song meets him in the street: “He was rapidly approaching a part of the road where the music could not follow, when he saw, like a scene on the back of a postcard, a picture of where he was headed—his own home…. There was no music there, and tonight he wanted just a bit of music—from the person who had been his first caring for” (28–29). The sound of the voices lures Macon, under the cloak of darkness, to Pilate’s window, where he can secretly watch his extended family. Susan Willis suggests that Pilate’s house gains its value within the novel because of its contrast to Macon’s. “The utopian aspect of Pilate’s household is not contained within it, but generated out of its abrupt juxtaposition to the bourgeois mode of her brother’s household” (Willis 273). The music forces Macon to confront the image of his own home. Macon considers his own sense of isolation in contrast to Southside generally but to these women specifically. Yet, “as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness,” Heidegger maintains, “it is a misery no longer” (161). Macon recognizes his own homelessness and allows Pilate’s blues song to bridge the chasm between the siblings, at least for as long as the singing lasts. Scenes such as this one illustrate how borders become confused.

As children, Macon and Pilate face the world together, knowing that they are at odds with everyone else after their father’s murder (including Circe, who had harbored them for a short while); they make a coherent unit for the time being. Before long, however, the murderous disruption that initially set them together against the world destabilizes even that last remaining certainty. Their father’s farm having been stolen, their parents both dead, and their safety tenuous, when Macon and Pilate disagree on whether or not to take the mortally wounded hunter’s gold, the final thread of unity that bound them is nearly completely severed. Yet years later, as Macon is pushed into the background by the ghetto of Southside at dark, he seeks solace in the shadows beneath his sister’s window. While he may be standing outside the home, it is his identification with the people inside as family that resituates Macon in relationship to Southside. By allying himself with this household of women, he is able to use proximity and his ties to Pilate to identify with the ghetto and to assuage his feeling of loneliness.

As he stands outside Pilate’s window in the darkness, Macon’s sense of alienation melts away. For this instant, he becomes part of the ghetto. Meaning is created in the interchange between the siblings. This scene depicts a black whole—a fleeting moment of recognition that Macon and Pilate come from the same source. Unfortunately, this moment is tragically brief and leaves the distinct revelation that the city alone does not satisfy the yearning to be a “complete man,” and neither does Pilate’s ghetto lifestyle. But we see the potential for the same blues that draws Macon to the shadows outside Pilate’s window to bring him home.

So much of African American literature has been represented as a quest for home. I could have chosen any number of texts. For the sake of cogency, I have focused on a few works, drawn from a period in American history during the latter part of the largest mass migration the nation has ever known. African Americans were seeking a place of their own, and this postmigration literature depicts the struggle to deal with the knowledge gained in its aftermath. Hortense Spillers maintains that “Domesticity appears to gain its power by way of a common origin of cultural fictions that are grounded in the specificity of proper names, more exactly, a patronymic, which, in turn, situates those persons it ‘covers’ in a particular place” (266). Her reading of the domestic can be readily applied to Song of Solomon, with its central quest for the name of the father that has been lost over time through the carelessness of racism and the drive toward upward mobility. But in reaching for those material comforts that seem to be available to all who labor for them, we must be aware of what might be lost.

The nearly forty-year span of African American literature represented here culminating in Song of Solomon reveals that home is somehow beyond place, beyond life, and even beyond death. It is an un-selfconsciously black place where men and women live alongside the ghosts of their past. We cannot walk away without carrying the bones inherited from our years of struggle. Even so, we must be able to encode those experiences honestly, in order to pass the complete story to the next generation. Home is a whole place captured sometimes in song, sometimes in fleeting moments of recognition.

The blues, these authors seem to suggest, is the expression that best represents the African American’s peculiar position within the mid-twentieth-century American landscape. The city that looms so large in the literature produced during the Great Migration is not home. The kitchen is far too stultifying and the womb is little more than a romantic notion. Yet these sites form the basis of an African American vocabulary about home. We are left with the ghetto—the poor, black enclave nevertheless teeming with life—and the blues. Morrison seems to be saying finally that we must be willing to accept the possibility that we may be damned to walk beside home in a nether region of shadows and ghosts—lurking near but apart from the place we call home. This realm belongs to the ghetto.