The South in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Initiation, Healing, and Home

Abstract Song of solomon, Toni Morrison’s third novel in an increasingly varied and rich body of work, is a remarkable narrative. The novel’s power lies not only in its recovery and representation of African American experience in the mid-twentieth century but also in Morrison’s insistence on the necessity of healing her broken, alienated protagonist, Milkman Dead. Central to both his maturation and his healing is Milkman’s recognition that the cultural past of the African-American South continues to create his twentieth-century present in ways that are not con straining but liberating. Critics have typically understood Milk man’s growth and his healing in the context of the mythic quest or the classic initiation story.1 To be sure, Morrison’s novel reflects archetypal initiation patterns found throughout Western literature, as Milkman follows a quest, first for gold, then for knowledge about his ancestors.