Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second one, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt and because what difference does it make?¹

I enjoyed Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. It dealt primarily with misunderstandings and how they can tear a family (and friends) apart and lay waste to years that could have been spent happily together; how rejection can change the lives of both the person doing the rejecting as well as the person being rejected; and how money can be the divide between a life lived with shame and and a life of true happiness. 

"All our lives were like that: first he would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.²

As with all of Toni Morrison’s books, the reader learns a flip side to people and situations they wouldn’t normally understand (or want to understand). Racial issues are a secondary character in this book, both between black and white people, but more so between an African American family with money and their less fortunate contemporaries of 1960's America.

Money is freedom, Macon. The only real freedom there is.³

The second part of the book, in my opinion, was better than the first - sort of the "meat and potatoes" of the story after an exhaustive background setting of the first half. The ending was sad and surprising, and brought a generational issue full circle to a final end. Flight is a symbolic thread running through this story and is marked by the appearance of a bird at important parts of the story.

A powerful speech given by a secondary character to another towards the end of the book really rang true to me and is something I think everyone, but most especially females, would benefit from reading:

Guitar spoke softly to her. "You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right - that his judgment and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Hagar, don't. It's a bad word, "belong". Especially when you put it with somebody you love. [....] You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean anymore to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.⁴"

 All in all, I liked this book and would read it again.

¹. Excerpt from Chapter 4 (91).

². Excerpt from Chapter 9 (216).

³. Excerpt from Chapter 7 (163).

⁴. Excerpt from Chapter 13 (305 and 306)