Thoughts About Song of Soloman

When Mrs. Valentino said this is a book that doesn't make sense until the very end, she wasn't kidding. Throughout the story it constantly seems as though things cannot possibly get weirder, and yet they do. After reading chapters 12 and 13, however, it seems as though things are finally starting to come together. It's happening really fast, though, so I thought I'd recap here, to make more sense out of it all. 
In chapter 12, Milkman has discovered that the song the children are singing is actually the story of his family. Solomon and Ryna were Milkman's great-grandparents. They had "twenty-one children, the last one Jake" - Jake being Milkman's grandfather, the first Macon Dead. My interpretation of the lines "[Solomon] left that baby in a white man's house...Heddy took him to a red man's house" is that when Solomon "whirled about and touched the sun" (escaped slavery), baby Jake was left with the slave owner, but then was eventually taken in by Heddy. And maybe Heddy wasn't Indian herself, but Sing's father was? Meanwhile, Ryna was upset because Solomon left but she was still enslaved ("O Solomon don't leave me here/cotton balls to choke me"). Buckra was the name of the slave owner, I'm guessing. Anyways. Jake married Sing, Heddy's daughter, and their children were Macon and Pilate. And since this is all so confusing, I was sure that someone must have made a family tree or something to clear things up, and sure enough...
Someone did! Thank you!

In this chapter we also begin to understand the significance of the title. Solomon did what everybody else wanted to do at the time - escape slavery. In the song this is described as "touch[ing] the sun", going back to the theme of flight. (Also relating to flight, the last name "Bird".) The song commemorates his journey and is a way to pass the story on orally, as was the tradition back then. Milkman notices that "Everybody in [Shalimar] is named Solomon", and they are all unrelated. Perhaps many people of Jake's/Sing's generation named their children Solomon after the great Solomon who was able to fly to escape? 

I guess we'll just have to wait and find out!

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