Justice and Citizenship in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. […] I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. –Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm XDeconstruction keeps open the “beyond” of currently unimaginable transformative possi­bilities precisely in the name of Justice. –Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the LimitPublished in 1977, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon remains haunted by the debates and struggles of the previous two decades. Her characters seem to repre­sent or embody different positions from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conjuring in both oblique and explicit ways the words of its prominent spokesmen: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. While the novel is often read as an account of the trauma wrought by racial injustice, it is, at the same time, an attempt to express an idea of justice loyal to this experience.1 This paper focuses on the figures of Guitar and Pilate, con­tending that each articulates and develops a concept of justice in Song of Solomon, and that each informs – or exerts pressure on – the other’s configuration of justice. Although the text does not ultimately sustain Guitar’s eye-for-an-eye directive, as the scholarship on the novel concurs, neither does it entirely dismiss or discredit it. Guitar has his say in two separate, lengthy dialogues; he also speaks on behalf of consequence in the enaction of justice: “’The earth is soggy with black people’s blood,’” he says about his involvement in the deadly Seven Days. “’And before us Indian blood. [ … ] I had to do something’” (Song 154). Pilate, I will argue, ges­tures toward a promise of justice, an ever-arriving ideal outside or beyond the necessity of force or retribution. In Morrison’s words: “She is something we wish existed on a wider scale” (Conversations 140). If Pilate stands for an ethical ideal, with an attendant ontological reconfiguration, Guitar stands for the real­ity of its absence in African American lives, announcing the force of law that often accompanies an ethical portal in an unjust world.