Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon Summary | Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

It is a cold day on Wednesday February 18, 1931 and Robert Smith, the local North Carolina Mutual insurance agent, is going to try to fly from Mercy Hospital to the other side of Lake Superior with a pair of homemade wings. As he stands high atop the roof of the Hospital, known as "No Mercy Hospital" among the local population because it does not admit blacks, a few people living in this unnamed Michigan town stand on the street below to witness the spectacle.

As the crowd gathers, the hospital staff sees what is happening and immediately starts trying to get control of the situation. In fact, someone calls the fire department to bring him down, but Robert Smith beats them to it. He leaps into the air and flaps but his wings do him no good. Instead, he dies as soon as he strikes the ground below.

The pregnant Ruth Foster is standing in the crowd in front of Mercy Hospital and she is about to give birth one month early. In a strange and fortunate twist of fate, the death of Robert Smith seems to motivate the doctors and nurses to do something kind and they admit Ruth Foster so that she can give birth to the first "colored baby" (9) to be born in Mercy Hospital.

In the days after she gives birth, Ruth Foster returns home with her son, named Macon after his father, and the women of the neighborhood come to her house to see the new child. Though the other women envy Ruth's rich lifestyle and large, beautiful home, only those closest to her know that she is in a sort of prison in the large house that she shares with her husband, Macon Dead. Though she has two daughters, Magdalene and First Corinthians, and now a son, her marriage and her life are terrible because her husband despises everything about her.

Ruth's husband Macon is a large, irritable man whom everyone in his family fears due to his quick temper. He works as a landlord, he rents out several houses and apartments to poor black people in the neighborhood and, by growing his business steadily and ruthlessly, he has built a good living for himself and his family. However, his success has done nothing to soften him either professionally or personally.

Ruth's years pass by in the misery of Macon's company, and her imprisonment in the expansive house leaves her feeling empty. She desires to have some sort of human contact and she gets it by continuing to breast feed her son until he is about 3 or 4 years old. However, when Freddie the janitor sees her doing it, Ruth is embarrassed and quits her daily ritual with her son. However, after Freddie sees Macon sucking on his mother's breast, he stamps the child with the name Milkman; a name that he will keep for the rest of his life.

Milkman's father Macon refuses to acknowledge the name, though he does not know how it came about. However, he notices the slur that is seems to carry with it, and he hates it. In fact, he hates just about everything about his son, especially the fact that Milkman is almost nothing like Macon.

As though hating his own wife and child were not enough, Macon Dead also hates his sister, Pilate Dead, who makes and sells wine in the neighborhood. Macon considers Pilate shiftless and lazy, but she does not seem to care about Macon's opinion, even when Macon banishes her from his home. However, Pilate continues to haunt Macon through her wine business. After all, Macon wants to keep up a good face to the public and the white bankers who loan him money, so having a good-for-nothing sister selling homemade wine out of her kitchen does nothing to increase his standing in the community.

One day when Macon is busy in his office, a young neighborhood informant by the name of Freddie comes running into the office to report that one of Macon's tenants, Porter, is drunk and crazy and he is waving around a shotgun and a wad of cash. Hearing this, Macon realizes that Porter must have just been paid and that means that he has the money for his rent. Therefore, Macon pulls his pistol out of the safe and walks over to Porter's house to get the money that Porter owes him.

Arriving at the house, Porter is standing at the upstairs window drunkenly demanding a woman to come upstairs and have sex with him. However, the women outside are unimpressed and they do not feel the least bit threatened by Porter or the shotgun he is waving around. In fact, several women are actually making fun of the man and his calls for a woman, so he is obviously not very dangerous. However, when Macon arrives and yells for his money, Porter threatens to shoot his landlord. Of course, Macon is not worried about Porter's threats either, so he simply waits until Porter passes out before sending Freddie upstairs to fetch the money.

As Macon returns home from this adventure, he passes by Pilate's house and he hears Pilate, Pilate's daughter Reba and Reba's daughter Hagar singing as they make their wine. Attracted to the sound, Macon stops under the window and listens, unnoticed, to the beautiful sound of their singing. Though Macon does not like his sister, he is still touched by the beauty of her voice.