Song of Solomon: The Symbolism Behind the Blue Silk Wings and the Revising of Till

Toni Morrison’s eighth novel Love is presented in a series of flashbacks that enhance how the past reflect the present. The mysterious narration of character L is veiled, but according to Wen-ching Ho’s article, “I’ll Tell” __ The Function and Meaning of L in Toni Morrison’s Love  is revealed as a surrogate mother, peace maker, historian, and the spokeswoman for the Cosey family. Morrison tends to tell her stories in segments relating back and forth in time, but in a concealed attempt Morrison opens up her third novel Song of Solomon with corresponding characteristics that protest the lynching of Emmett Till’s, however hiding Milkman’s ancestral past. This paper will identity who character Robert Smith is, and why he wishes to fly from Mercy Hospital on such a cold morning. It will also identity the insurance agent as an additional person associated with the Till case. Morrison ridicules certain people associated with Emmett Till’s poor legal defense.

Prologue: Revising Till while Unmasking Robert Smith

Morrison forms identity of characters by carefully considering their names, but in some cases character names have no meaning. According to the article Names and Storytelling in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, “Mr. [Robert] Smith is considered a common character name and is seen as having little creditablity and his life is so mundane even on the verge of suicide.The tragic scene is cut short to avert to the historical renaming of Not Doctor Street to further prove how unimportant Smith’s charater is.” For example, Pilate is named after the man that murdered Jesus, but in return it foreshadows her murder. Guitar is named after an instrument that he cried for as a child. Morrison continues to make reference to a character named Till in several of her works. For example, Morrison recreates Till’s slaying by describing the event in her novel Song of Solomon by saying:

A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him-his murderers had boasted freely-and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till. (Morrison 80)

Notice the quote above Morrison has intentionally created a fictitious place Sunflower County, Mississippi. The real murders of Emmett Till did actually boast freely to a reporter for monetary value. Intent could be to inform or remind white America of certain injustices suffered in the rule South. According to Professor David Crowe,

[M]ost white Americans have never heard of [Till] and a review of history textbooks suggest why. Sadly, only two books mentioned Emmett Till, and those books used a combined total of less than fifty words to describe his place in American history” and perhaps Morrison realizes that Till’s horrible death is being erased from American history (Crowe 12).

Morrison is a writer that defines; yet reminds readers of racial tensions in the rural South; but why is Till so important that Morrison continues to recycle him within her works? “The outrage after his death and acquittal of his murders finally launched the movement to combat racism in the United States” (Crowe 13). There were several positive changes following Till’s death. “Reactions to the famous murder case played an important role as catalyst for the civil rights movement” (Crowe 15).  The impact of Till’s case created a new atmosphere around the world, white men had been murdering blacks since the beginning of time, but Till’s death set the stage for justice in America (Crowe 21). “. . . A state where more than 500 lynching’s had occurred since 1880 . . . it was the first time white men had been indicted for killing a Black person” (Crowe 22). This case provided hope and equal rights for all citizens in America, although it “put white dominated southern way of life in jeopardy.” This case marks the “first time an African American [Emmett’s great Uncle] accused a white man of a crime in Mississippi court of law” (Crowe 22, 23). The media forced eyes to take witness to this brutal killing (Crowe 21). The first time I had ever seen Till’s picture was in an Ebony magazine in the early 80s. Reading about the case was very interesting, but seeing his disfigured corpse in the casket was very alarming. I had read that Till’s mother wanted the world to take witness. “The most sensational coverage of the murder, which included the photo of Emmett’s battered body resting in his casket, [first] appeared in Jet magazine” . . . (Crowe 12). Crowe describes Till’s tattered corpse several times in his novel, “Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of Emmett Till Case. In one context he stated the following:

One side of the victim’s forehead was crushed, an eye had been gouged out, and the skull had a bullet hole just above the right ear. The neck had been ripped raw by the barbed wire wrapped around it. The beating and three days in the river had turned the face and head into a monstrous mess of stinking flesh. (Crowe 64)

Correspondents were sent from all parts of the Unites States to cover for newspapers and magazines (Crowe 21). The fact that Till was a kid took a hold on society in a different way, and murdering him and getting away with it would not be tolerated. Black History month celebrates black achievers, but we seem to always forget Emmett Till. “The murder of a fourteen-year old boy from Chicago and the trial of his killers would turn out to be the beginning of the decline of segregation and Jim Crow rule in the south” ( Crowe 107). Many people would say that Rosa Parks sparked the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her bus seat, but “the beginning of the civil rights movement began with the senseless murder of Emmett Till [1955] that galvanized Blacks all over the United states and set the stage for the civil rights movement to begin” (Crowe 26). During this time the nation was faced with Brown V. Board of Education the famous case of 1954 ruled that, “racially segregated schools were unconstitutional,” many white Americans snarled at the concept of desegregation (Crowe 19). If you know anything about the historical movement you would know that Rosa did not ignite the flames, but a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago whose “lack of experience with southern customs” or what Stephen J. Whitfield calls “culturally dislocated” did (Crowe, 35, 18). In almost every novel Toni Morrison mentions a character by the name of Till or makes reference to a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago traveling to Mississippi. “Before the Emmett Till case, no single event had ever generated enough support, enough publicity, or enough outrage to unify a large scale effort to oppose segregation” (Crowe 111). My investigation will reveal why Morrison continues to recreate Emmett Till as a fictional character, and the Seven Days, by using theorist Hayden White’s ideas from his text titled Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

A Member of the Seven Days

 The Seven Days is created in Song of Solomon to serve as the African American version of the white supremacy group the Ku Klux Klan.

 They responded to acts of sexual violence against African American men. These acts of violence were white men way of telling black men that white women were off limits. The seven days responded to rapes of black women by white men and lynchings of black men that expressed interest in white women (Duvall87).

 Readers are introduced to Robert Smith a North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent on the first page in the first chapter; however we later learn after Robert’s suicidal death in 1931 that he was a former member of the group called seven days. “Robert Smith [is] driven to madness and to an ‘artificial’ flight, [and] had wished to free himself from the death and distortion of the seven days” (Bjork 107).  The novel opens up informing readers of the suicidal insurance agent who is attempting to jump from Mercy hospital.

The novel’s first sentence creates a problem when Robert Smith announces his intention to fly “to the other side of Lake Superior” (3). This implies that his point of departure is on the opposite side of the lake, yet the only part of Michigan touching Superior is the Upper Peninsula, a place where very few African Americans live. (Duvall, 72)

This geographical mishap could inform readers that Robert Smith is actually a white Klansman rather a black seven days member. Why does Robert Smith reside within white society? Further analyzes reveals that all of the seven days members resided on the Southside of town or in the black neighborhood except Robert Smith : Railroad Tommy, Guitar Baines, Hospital Tommy, Empire State, Robert Smith, and Porter. Geographically speaking this discovery leads me to believe that Robert Smith is actually a white man that belonged to a secret society. Why would Robert Smith be the only member of the Seven Days that would have resided on the Northern side of town or in the white neighborhood? Author John Duvall interprets this geographic issue as Morrison hasn’t left home yet, but it has nothing to do with Morrison’s location. Why is Robert Smith an exception to living on the Southside? All of the other Seven Days member are employed, but are restricted to the Southside.

The naming of character Robert Smith is no coincidence. “Robert [Bruce] Smith made the final argument for the prosecution” in Till’s case (Crowe 100). According to Morrison’s fictional version of Smith he commits suicide first chapter/first page.  According to the article titled Who's Who in the Emmett Till Case Robert Smith can be identified as:

Smith, Robert Bruce, III (1914-1967) served on the prosecution team in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He attended law school at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. He served four years in the FBI before enlisting in the marines in 1944. He practiced law in Ripley, Mississippi with his uncle after his discharge. Unfortunately, he later battled alcoholism and, tragically, on a December afternoon, after attending to his usual court duties, came home and shot himself.

When it comes to Song of Solomon critics don’t really understand the complete function of character Guitar or the seven days. Guitar serves as a person, who connects Milkman to his Aunt Pilate and family roots. Milkman is forbidden to visit Pilate and Guitar is the person who has enough courage to invite Milkman over. Guitar whom resides over on the South side give Milkman the motive to change his personality from just a spoil brat to a bad boy. For example Milkman follows Guitar in the bar for a drink but is refused a drink on the account that his father is the bartender’s landlord. We never saw him attempt to drink before Guitar entered the picture. Actually we don’t see Guitar do anything wrong or out of the norm for a teenage boy. According to Author Ron David Morrison creates Guitar as a part of the “euro-novel” which contains a character that creates an “obstacle” but this person has to be a “bad ass” to introduce violence” in prior chapters (93).  A central theme in the novel is betrayal and Guitar is used to expose the theme. Pilate is named after the man who murdered/betrayed Jesus (Morrison 19). Milkman is betrayed by Guitar and Till is betrayed by his cousin Maurice Wright (Whitfield 19). It was a black man who told Till’s murders that Till had whistled at the wife of the store owner when they had returned from out of town working when it occurred.

Ku Klux Klan

Racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan is copied or mimicked by an opposing group called the Seven Days in Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The Ku Klux Klan is, “One of the oldest living terrorist societies exist[ing] in the United States today (Chalmers 1). In comparison to the Ku Klux Klan Morrison establishes a somewhat similar group existing on the south side of Chicago, whose objective is to resist oppression/racism and segregation; although the Klan wanted to keep racial segregation. “The historical concept of the seven days originated during the 1920s after some white private from Georgia had his balls cut off and was blinded, but in the case of the Klan a black was castrated in the same manner as a symbol of ignition (Morrison & Chalmers 155, 7). Perhaps the seven represents Till’s friends he went to the store with in Money, Mississippi. “In the evening of August 24, after [Till] had been visiting for a week, he joined seven boys and a girl – all teenagers, three of whom were also visiting the Delta . . . (Whitfield16). I am not sure where the seven comes from, but I’m sure that it somehow connects to the Till murder case of 55.

I.                   A Member of the KKK

What sent Ruth into labor-- Smith’s frightening qualities? The Klan association comes from the fact that Smith is described as having, “wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest causing Ruth to drop her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals . . .” (Morrison 5). Wings are used rather than the hood and robe by Smith, and it scares Ruth so bad that she fell down on the steps of Mercy hospital dropping her petals to the ground, rather letting her complete her task of selling them to the local department store. The townspeople had no remorse for Smith who is about to jump to his death. He is said to be associated with death and illness (Morrison 8). We later learn that he is a part of the group the Seven Days in alternative to the Klan, last but not least, one of Robert Smith’s insurance customers ask him during a visit . . .”Do Hoover knows about you?” (Morrison 8). Making reference to FBI director J. Edward Hoover which is used to further identity this fictional character as the real Robert B. Smith.

II.                An Insurance Agent

I looked at several photos relating to Till’s case during research. When I actually saw the jurors it revealed that one of them was an insurance agent. “In 1955 neither blacks nor women were permitted to serve on Mississippi juries, and the panel in Sumner was no exception. These twelve peers . . .  included nine farmers, two carpenters, and an insurance agent” (Whitfield xiii). Morrison uses certain minor characteristics to point out Emmett’s poor legal defense.

III.             Sentencing for Robert B. Smith

The first Chapter is the execution of Robert Smith by jurors or onlookers of the community but, “As a blackman in America, the life he chose as an assassin for the Seven Days, a group committed to avenging the murders of black people, ultimately gave him only one way to end his life-by his own hands. And it is surely death that a black man faces when he murders a white person in America” (Duvall 87). In this instance Morrison proves rather a black man or a white man that justice is going to be served. The sentence of the court in this case is death. It is celebrated the next day with the birth of a baby. “The next day a colored baby is born inside Mercy for the first time . . .” (Morrison 9). A poor lady (Pilate) sings as Robert Smith exits and Macon Dead Jr. enters the world. The conviction by the court led a few to witness. “A few of the half a hundred or so people gathered there nudged each other and sniggered (Morrison 6). Morrison has placed Robert B. Smith on trial because he is worthy of death.

Work Cited

Crowe, Chris. Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. New York:      Phyllis Fogelman. 2003.

Bjork, Patrick B. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the           Community. New York: Peter Lang. 1992.

David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained: A Reader’s Road Map to the Novels. New York: Random

            House. 2000.

Duvall, John N. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison. New York: Palgrave. 2000.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1977.

Whitfield, Stephen J. “A Death in the Delta.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press 1988.

Who's Who in the Emmett Till Case? March 31, 2010. April 26, 2010