Content area
Full Text
AT THE END of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, in the aftermath of the hatred and violence that has felled Pilate, Milkman cradles his indomitable aunt's head as she makes a dying admission: "I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more."1 It is this moment, arguably more than any other in the novel, in its remarkable insistence on love in response to the deranged Guitar's rancid vengeance, that triggers Milkman's triumphal leap into the "killing arms of his brother" (SS 341). Yet, while transformative for Milkman, Pilate's near-death sentiments nevertheless have received relatively light scholarly treatment, most likely because they are upstaged by Morrison's dazzling finale, which celebrates Milkman's bravado even as it confounds readers with the indeterminacy of his fate. Pilate's last words, however, resonate, not just within the pages of the novel, acting as the exclamation point on the central motif of agape love, but also outside of it, harkening back to Walt Whitman, whose own quest for the all-illusive universality of the human soul seems to have engendered, at least in one specific linguistic utterance, simpatico in Toni Morrison. The striking example of their camaraderie, to borrow a coveted Whitman term, is found in section 6 of "Song of Myself," "A child said What is the grass?"2 In it, the speaker attempts to capture the essence of nature's most mundane but ubiquitous manifestation. Calling it hope, the visible evidence of God, the offspring of vegetation, and an ancient language spoken by, hence connecting all humanity, the speaker than abruptly shifts course, coupling grass with death, the "uncut hair of graves " (LG1891 33). At this point, the speaker ceases his phenomenological musings about grass to focus on all those in graves carpeted by it. The contradiction between the vibrant "curling grass" springing from the corpses of "young men" appears to be too much for the speaker as he sighs about the deceased, in words nearly identical to Pilate's, "It may be if I had known them I would have loved them" (LG1891 33). Here the speaker's longing for the young men appears singular, separate from his subsequent reflections on all others who have died, suggesting perhaps, given...