“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

This article examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright’s attentiveness to what she terms “the cultural hegemony of the vertical” (37) in considering Milkman’s embodied resistance to existing paradigms of progress. By positing a vertical conceptualization of racial uplift ideology, the Dead family ancestry, and the journeys North and South between Michigan and Virginia in Song of Solomon, I demonstrate how Milkman’s very corporeality comes to signify the importance of African American cultural preservation and moving “counter-to” in re-visioning liberatory, counter-hegemonic routes of progress. My reading unfolds from a critical moment in chapter 2 of Song of Solomon; in this scene, the Dead family journeys northward in Milkman’s father’s Packard toward the wealthy white neighborhoods of Honoré, meanwhile Milkman demonstrates a remarkable preoccupation with what lies behind him. Situating Milkman’s embodied opposition to the journey’s progress as a point of departure, I examine how Morrison disrupts various paradigms of progress throughout Song of Solomon.