TONI MORRISON 27
Shadrack's organized, public madness-his disruptive remembering
presence which helps (for a while) to cement the community, until
Sula challenges them.
"The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly
from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at 3:00."
This declarative sentence is designed to mock a journalistic style;
with a minor alteration it could be the opening of an item in a smalltown newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event of minimal
local interest. Yet I wanted it to contain (as does the scene that takes
place when the agent fulfills his promise) the information that Song
of Solomon both centers on and radiates from.
The name of the insurance company is real, a well known blackowned company dependent on black clients, and in its corporate
name are "life" and "mutual;" agent being the necessary ingredient
of what enables the relationship between them. The sentence also
moves from North Carolina to Lake Superior- geographical locations, but with a sly implication that the move from North Carolina (the south) to Lake Superior (the north) might not actually
involve progress to some "superior state"- which, of course it does
not. The two other significant words are "fly," upon which the
novel centers and "Mercy," the name of the place from which he is
to fly. Both constitute the heartbeat of the narrative. Where is the
insurance man flying to? The other side of Lake Superior is Canada, of course, the historic terminus of the escape route for black
people looking for asylum. "Mercy," the other significant term, is
the grace note; the earnest though, with one exception, unspoken
wish of the narrative's population. Some grant it; some never find
it; one, at least, makes it the text and cry of her extemporaneous
sermon upon the death of her granddaughter. It touches, turns and
returns to Guitar at the end of the-book - he who is least deserving
of it- and moves him to make it his own final gift. It is what one
wishes for Hagar; what is unavailable to and unsought by Macon
Dead, senior; what his wife learns to demand from him, and what
can never come from the white world as is signified by the inversion of the name of the hospital from Mercy to "no-Mercy." It is
only available from within. The center of the narrative is flight;
the springboard is mercy.
But the sentence turns, as all sentences do, on the verb: promised.
