Soaring is the Opposite of Haunting: The Ghosts of Community in Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Employing the distinction between “ghosts” and “ancestors” as developed by Hans Loewald, my essay applies this transformation of destructive to constructive internal objects to Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon (1977). The essay traces the movement from the spectral to the ancestral in Morrison’s protagonist, Milkman Dead. Its main concern is to show that soaring through ancestry is just as germane to the experience of uncanny inner objects as is the more familiar haunting through spectrality. The Morrison-narrator shows this process through Milkman and Pilate Dead, a startling original woman without a navel who emerges as protagonist, counselor, and cultural symbol all at once. Morrison reworks African legend into a mid-twentieth-century American fable. Milkman, almost a black Hamlet, looks for a lost heritage in the woods of Pennsylvania and over a canyon in Virginia. As Milkman moves through the American continent, he experiences a geographical version of Winnicott’s liberating “Potential Space.” He finds the deeper meanings of both love and being through his counselor-as-good-object, Pilate. The forest community he meets near Shalimar, VA, provides a communal passage from ghosts to ancestors in his understanding of his own heritage. Community and counselor lead him to a mythical-but-true ancestor: legendary Solomon, the slave who really knew how to fly.