Song of Solomon

would try to blow his head off. He stood up.

“Guitar!” he shouted.

Tar tar tar, said the hills.

“Over here, brother man! Can you see me?” Milkman cupped his mouth with one hand and waved the other over his head. “Here I am!”

Am am am am, said the rocks.

“You want me? Huh? You want my life?”

Life life life life.

Squatting on the edge of the other flat-headed rock with only the night to cover him, Guitar smiled over the barrel of his rifle. “My man,” he murmured to himself. “My main man.” He put the rifle on the ground and stood up.

Milkman stopped waving and narrowed his eyes. He could just make out Guitar’s head and shoulders in the dark. “You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Toni Morrison

SONG OF SOLOMON

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

Also by Toni Morrison

FICTION

Love

Paradise

fazz

Beloved

Tar Baby

Sula

The Bluest Eye

NONFICTION

The Dancing Mind

Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

BELOVED

In Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, set in post–Civil War Ohio, Sethe, an escaped slave, has wrenched herself from living death, has lost a husband, and buried a child. She now lives with her daughter, her mother-in- law, and the disturbing apparition called Beloved.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3341-1

JAZZ

Joe Trace shoots to death his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. Richly combining history, legend, and reminiscence, Morrison captures the ineffable mood and the complex humanity of black urban life at a crucial moment in history.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-7621-8

SULA

Sula and Nel meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. They share everything until Sula escapes the Bottom, their hilltop neighborhood of fierce resentment. After roaming America, misfit Sula returns to find Nel acculturated to life in the Bottom.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3343-8

TAR BABY

Jadine, Sorbonne educated and comfortably well off, meets a black American street man and finds herself moving inexorably toward him; he is a kind of man she has dreaded since childhood: uneducated, violent, and contemptuous of her privilege.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3344-6