Solomon (Shalimar)

Solomon — known as Shalimar in the Virginia community that bears his name — serves as the spectral patriarch of Song of Solomon, appearing throughout the novel, yet absent as a living man on its pages. He is the great-great-grandfather of protagonist Milkman Dead, an enslaved African who, according to community legend, rose into the air one morning and flew back to Africa, leaving behind his wife Ryna and their twenty-one children. Morrison presents him through layers of mediation: a children's street song, a landscape marked by grief, a town's very name, and the slow archaeological work Milkman undertakes in Part Two of the novel. Solomon is myth before he is man, and Morrison maintains this distinction — half-divine, half-responsible for generations of damage.

Solomon’s arc exists only in retrospect, reconstructed rather than dramatized. The novel reveals through the Shalimar community's oral tradition that his flight was an act of radical self-determination rooted in what Morrison frames as distinctly African spiritual power — a supernatural capacity that slavery could not fully extinguish. His motivation, as suggested by the legend, is a profound longing for freedom and origin. He tried to carry his youngest child, Jake (Macon Dead I), with him but dropped the infant, an act that is both tender and catastrophic. That dropped child — the origin of the Dead family line — represents the first consequence of his departure, with every subsequent generation inheriting some version of that fall.

The pivotal moment involving Solomon occurs in Chapter Thirteen, when Milkman finds himself stranded in Shalimar after his car breaks down and hears local children singing a ring game. The song — "Jake the only son of Solomon / come booba yalle, come booba tambee" — decodes Milkman's entire genealogy. Sitting in the dirt, contemplating the syllables, Milkman recognizes the song as a family history: Shalimar is Solomon; Ryna's Gulch depicts the wife driven mad; Jake is the dropped infant who is Milkman's great-grandfather. This recognition scene is one of the novel’s emotional crescendos, where Morrison intertwines myth with lineage and lineage with identity. Earlier, the geography of Shalimar serves as a monument to Solomon: Ryna's Gulch — described as a ravine from which a sound like wailing rises — makes his abandonment a permanent feature of the physical world, internalizing the grief he caused.

Solomon and Milkman shape the novel's quest structure. Milkman travels south ostensibly for gold but ultimately leaves with a sense of ancestry. Solomon becomes the destination Milkman never knew he sought; decoding the ancestor's story enables Milkman to feel "his own self" rather than merely a dead man's name or his father's shadow. The inheritance is dual-edged: Solomon's ability to fly inspires Milkman, while his capacity for abandonment — particularly of Hagar — implicates him as well.

Solomon and Pilate are separated by two generations yet remain spiritually interconnected. Pilate, Solomon's granddaughter, carries bones and memory across decades, serving as a living counter-force to his disappearance. While Solomon fled upward and away, Pilate is rooted, grounded, and deeply present to those she loves. Her uncanny qualities — the absent navel, her self-sufficiency that creates unease in every community she enters — are inherited traits of Solomon's apartness, transformed into protective love rather than escape.

Solomon and Macon Dead II illustrate a generational inversion. The great-grandson translates spiritual transcendence into material accumulation: where Solomon ascended above the earth, Macon Dead II clings to it through deeds and rents. His emotional detachment from Ruth and his children represents, in this light, Solomon's abandonment solidified into everyday cruelty.

Solomon and Ryna/Hagar highlight a line of female grief. Ryna loses her sanity — her wailing becomes geographic in Ryna's Gulch — while Hagar's self-destructive collapse after Milkman's rejection echoes that original abandonment. Morrison exposes a wound that spans generations along the women's line of the family.