Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon

Pilate looked up from a fourth-grade geography book she was reading and closed it. Slowly, it seemed to Milkman, she walked over to a shelf that hung over the dry sink, put the geography book on it, and removed a knife. Slowly still, she walked out the front door—there was no back door—and as soon as she did, Milkman could hear Reba’s screams and the man’s curses.

It didn’t occur to him to stop Pilate—her mouth was not moving and her earring flashed fire—but he did follow her, as did Hagar, around to the back of the house, where, approaching the man from the back, she whipped her right arm around his neck and positioned the knife at the edge of his heart. She waited until the man felt the knife point before she jabbed it skillfully, about a quarter of an inch through his shirt into the skin. Still holding his neck, so he couldn’t see but could feel the blood making his shirt sticky, she talked to him.

“Now, I’m not going to kill you, honey. Don’t you worry none. Just be still a minute, the heart’s right here, but I’m not going to stick it in any deeper. Cause if I stick it in any deeper, it’ll go straight through your heart. So you have to be real still, you hear? You can’t move a inch cause I might lose control. It’s just a little hole now, honey, no more’n a pin scratch. You might lose about two tablespoons of blood, but no more. And if you’re real still, honey, I can get it back out without no mistake. But before I do that, I thought we’d have a little talk.”

The man closed his eyes. Sweat ran from his temples down the sides of his face. A few neighbors who had heard Reba’s screams had gathered in Pilate’s backyard. They knew right away that the man was a newcomer to the city. Otherwise he would have known a few things about Reba, one of which was that she gave away everything she had and if there was a case quarter in that house she’d have given it to him; and more important, he would have known not to fool with anything that belonged to Pilate, who never bothered anybody, was helpful to everybody, but who also was believed to have the power to step out of her skin, set a bush afire from fifty yards, and turn a man into a ripe rutabaga—all on account of the fact that she had no navel. So they didn’t have much sympathy for him. They just craned their necks to hear better what Pilate was telling him.

“You see, darlin, that there is the only child I got. The first baby I ever had, and if you could turn around and see my face, which of course you can’t cause my hand might slip, you’d know she’s also the last. Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all. And you know how mamas are, don’t you? You got a mama, ain’t you? Sure you have, so you know what I’m talking about. Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don’t like they children. First real misery I ever had in my life was when I found out somebody—a little teeny tiny boy it was—didn’t like my little girl. Made me so mad, I didn’t know what to do. We do the best we can, but we ain’t got the strength you men got. That’s why it makes us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us. You know what I mean? I’d hate to pull this knife out and have you try some other time to act mean to my little girl. Cause one thing I know for sure: whatever she done, she’s been good to you. Still, I’d hate to push it in more and have your mama feel like I do now. I confess, I don’t know what to do. Maybe you can help me. Tell me, what should I do?”

The man struggled for breath and Pilate eased up on his throat but not his heart.

“Lemme go,” he whispered.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Lemme go. I…won’t never…put a hand on her. I promise.”

“A real promise, sugar?”

“Yeah. I promise. You won’t never see me no more.”

Reba sat on the ground, her arms around her knees, staring through her unswollen eye at the scene as though she were at a picture show. Her lip was split and her cheek was badly bruised, and though her skirt and hands were stained with her effort to stop the blood pouring from her nose, a little still trickled down.

Pilate plucked the knife out of the man’s shirt and took her arm away. He lurched a little, looked down at the blood on his clothes and up at Pilate, and licking his lips, backed all the way to the side of the house under Pilate’s gaze. Her lips didn’t start moving again until he was out of sight and running down the road.

All attention turned to Reba, who was having difficulty trying to stand up. She said she thought something was broken inside in the place where he’d kicked her. Pilate felt her ribs and said nothing was broken. But Reba said she wanted to go to the hospital. (It was her dream to be a patient in a hospital; she was forever trying to get admitted, since in her picture-show imagination, it was a nice hotel. She gave blood there as often as they would let her, and stopped only when the blood bank was moved to an office-type clinic some distance away from Mercy.) She was insistent now, and Pilate surrendered her judgment to Reba’s. A neighbor offered to drive them and off they went, leaving Milkman to buy his wine from Hagar.

He was delighted with the performance and followed Hagar into the house to laugh and talk excitedly about it. She was as tranquil as he was agitated, as monosyllabic as he was garrulous.

“Was that something? Wow! She’s two inches taller than he is, and she’s talking about weak.”

“We are weak.”

“Compared to what? A B-52?”

“Every woman’s not as strong as she is.”

“I hope not. Half as strong is too much.”

“Well, muscle strength is one thing. I meant women are weak in other ways.”

“Name some. I want you to name some for me. Where are you weak?”

“I don’t mean me. I mean other women.”

“You don’t have any weakness?”

“I haven’t found any.”

“I suppose you think you can whip me.” It was the seventeen-year-old’s constant preoccupation—who could whip him.

“Probably,” said Hagar.

“Ha! Well, I guess I better not try to prove you wrong. Pilate might be back with her knife.”

“Pilate scare you?”

“Yeah. Don’t she scare you?”

“No. Nobody scares me.”

“Yeah You tough. I now you tough.”

“Not tough. I just don’t let people tell me what to do. I do what I want.”

“Pilate tells you what to do.”

“But I don’t have to do it, if I don’t want to.”

“Wish I could say the same for my mother.”

“Your mother boss you?”

“Well … not boss exactly.” Milkman floundered for a word to describe the nagging he thought he was a victim of.

“How old are you now?” asked Hagar. She lifted her eyebrows like a woman mildly interested in the age of a small child.

“Seventeen.”

“You old enough to be married.” Hagar said it with the strong implication that he should not allow his mother to have any say about what he did.

“I’m waiting for you,” he said, trying to regain (or acquire) some masculine flippancy.

“Be a long wait.”

“Why?”

Hagar sighed as if her patience was being tried. “I’d like to be in love with the man I marry.”

“Try me. You could learn if you’d try.”

“You’re too young for me.”

“State of mind,” he said.

“Uh huh. My mind.”

“You’re like all women. Waiting for Prince Charming to come trotting down the street and pull up in front of your door. Then you’ll sweep down the steps and powie! Your eyes meet and he’ll yank you up on his horse and the two of you ride off into the wind. Violins playing and ‘courtesy of MGM’ stamped on the horse’s butt. Right?”

“Right,” she said.

“What you going to do in the meantime?”

“Watch the lump grow in a little boy’s pants.”

Milkman smiled, but he was not amused. Hagar laughed. He jumped up to grab her, but she ran into the bedroom and shut the door. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and looked at the door. Then he shrugged and picked up the two bottles of wine.

“Milkman?” Hagar stuck her head out the door. “Come in here.”

He turned around and put the bottles down on the table. The door was open, but he couldn’t see her, could only hear her laughing, a low private laugh as though she had won a bet. He moved so quickly he forgot to duck the green sack hanging from the ceiling. A hickey was forming on his forehead by the time he got to her. “What you all got in there?” he asked her.

“That’s Pilate’s stuff. She calls it her inheritance.” Hagar was unbuttoning her blouse.

“What’d she inherit? Bricks?” Then he saw her breasts.

“This is what I do in the meantime,” she said.

Their tossing and giggling had been free and open then and they began to spend as much time in Guitar’s room when he was at work as Guitar himself did when he was home. She became a quasi-secret but permanent fixture in his life. Very much a tease, sometimes accommodating his appetites, sometimes refusing. He never knew when or why she would do either. He assumed Reba and Pilate knew, but they never made any reference to the change in his relationship to Hagar. While he had lost some of his twelve-year-old’s adoration of her, he was delighted to be sleeping with her and she was odd, funny, quirky company, spoiled, but artlessly so and therefore more refreshing than most of the girls his own age. There were months when Hagar would not see him, and then he’d appear one day and she was all smiles and welcome.

After about three years or so of Hagar’s on-again-off-again passion, her refusals dwindled until finally, by the time he’d hit his father, they were nonexistent. Furthermore, she began to wait for him, and the more involved he got with the other part of his social life, the more reliable she became. She began to pout, sulk, and accuse him of not loving her or wanting to see her anymore. And though he seldom thought about his age, she was very aware of hers. Milkman had stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years. Hagar was thirty-six—and nervous. She placed duty squarely in the middle of their relationship; he tried to think of a way out.

He paid the clerk for the presents he had chosen and left the drugstore, having made up his mind to call it off.

I’ll remind her that we are cousins, he thought. He would not buy her a present at all; instead he would give her a nice piece of money. Explain that he wanted her to get something really nice for herself, but that his gift-giving was compromising her. That he was not what she needed. She needed a steady man who could marry her. He was standing in her way. And since they were related and all, she should start looking for someone else. It hurt him, he would say, deeply hurt him, after all these years, but if you loved somebody as he did her, you had to think of them first. You couldn’t be selfish with somebody you loved.

Having thought so carefully of what he would say to her, he felt as though he had already had the conversation and had settled everything. He went back to his father’s office, got some cash out of the safe, and wrote Hagar a nice letter which ended: “Also, I want to thank you. Thank you for all you have meant to me. For making me happy all these years. I am signing this letter with love, of course, but more than that, with gratitude.” And he did sign it with love, but it was the word “gratitude” and the flat-out coldness of “thank you” that sent Hagar spinning into a bright blue place where the air was thin and it was silent all the time, and where people spoke in whispers or did not make sounds at all, and where everything was frozen except for an occasional burst of fire inside her chest that crackled away until she ran out into the streets to find Milkman Dead.