Song of Solomon Memory and the Past Quotes

Pilate is uninterested with knowing the who and the why of her father’s death. In fact, the who and the why are never explored in great detail. The who and the why lead to the Butlers, the greedy, racist, white land owners, the likes of whom we never meet in present or in flashback form. Pilate remembers details as specific as the color of her mother’s ribbon, but there are other details she cannot recall (because she has no interest in them).

Specificity of time as we know is not of interest to Pilate. She tells time, records time by the great events that take place along the way. Though she does not adhere to conventional methods of measuring time when telling this story, she remembers the exact position of the sun and the color of the sky. Guitar’s frustration serves to highlight his northern, citified ways of relying on watches, calendars, and the news, in contrast to Pilate’s southern roots whereby a person understands a situation by perceiving the natural world around her.

We really don’t know who the hey Macon is. There are huge chunks of time in his life that are unaccounted for. It is only when he remembers Lincoln’s Heaven and his childhood that we see a happier, peaceful Macon. We wonder why he doesn’t talk about Lincoln’s Heaven more these days. Macon seems to have been hardened by city life. The city is teaching him things that make him forget where he comes from.

In recalling the memories of his childhood, Macon melts a little and assumes the dialect of his hometown. Memory is capable of softening Macon. Money has made him hard.

Macon’s father Jake never learned to read. Here we see how even reading (along with time) is unimportant when one works with nature, when one has developed a language like the language in which the Shalimar hunting party is fluent. It seems as though it isn’t that Jake couldn’t remember the alphabet; it’s that he didn’t find it necessary to remember the alphabet. This brings to light the idea that people remember what is useful, what is important, and what is essential.

Smell instantly triggers Ruth’s memory. Memory lives in the olfactory, reminding us of how important taste buds are when burning a moment on the brain. Memory is not only visually or emotionally triggered. In this way, the senses again become extremely important agents in the telling of Song.

Usually, it’s you or your family that remember something important or significant to you. Imagine Milkman’s glee to find that children, strangers, remember his great grandfather. In this way we also see another vehicle through which memory travels (besides image, smell, taste, and emotion): song.

A memory doesn’t all come together at once like a nicely wrapped birthday present. It comes in pieces. Song of Solomon in and of itself is the perfect example of the fragmented quality of memory. How many times do we hear the story about Macon and Pilate in the cave? A million. Each time we hear this story, a new morsel of sub-memory is thrown to us like a bone. This novel does not move linearly, but dips and dives and moves back and forth across time. We understand it by considering all of the narratives and fragments of narratives together, but we are not forced necessarily to connect these mini stories.

Milkman perpetuates the memory of his great grandfather, even though he never witnessed the moment of his flying. He tells this story to Sweet and Guitar, and so we suppose that the story will continue, even when the Dead lineage is ended when Milkman surrenders to the air. Here, Milkman contributes toward the memory of his great-grandfather.

A memory is only a memory when it is remembered. This may seem obvious, but there is no such thing as a dead memory. A memory is inherently alive. If it dies, because no one is around to invoke it, a memory just ceases to exist. In a book that doesn’t present possibilities of heaven or of an afterlife, memory is where permanence and perpetuation dwells.