Song of Solomon: Chapters 5–9

Miscegenation.

That had been accomplished by the sight of Milkman’s arms around the shoulders of a girl whose silky copper-colored hair cascaded over the sleeve of his coat.

... her lethargy dissipated of its own accord and in its place was wilderness, the focused meanness of a flood or an avalanche of snow which only observers, flying in a rescue helicopter, believed to be an indifferent natural phenomenon, but which the victims, in their last gulp of breath, knew was both directed and personal.

So Hagar’s forays were part and parcel of the mystery of having been “lifed” by love, and while the manifestation it took was a source of great interest to them, the consequences were not.

When the baby was born the day after she stood in the snow, with cloth roses at her feet and a man with blue wings above her head, she regarded him as a beautiful toy, a respite, a distraction, a physical pleasure as she nursed him—until Freddie (again Freddie) caught her at it; then he was no longer her velveteened toy.

It was an ordinary gesture of frustration, but its awkwardness made Ruth know that there was something truly askew in this girl.

After the tension, the anger, the bravado of her earlier state of mind, followed by the violence of Pilate’s words to her granddaughter, this quiet social-tea tone disarmed her, threw her too soon and too suddenly back into the mannered dignity that was habitual for her.

She arrived with suitcases, a green sack, a full-grown daughter, and a granddaughter, and found her brother truculent, inhospitable, embarrassed, and unforgiving.

Working out some scheme of their own on him, making him the subject of their dreams of wealth, or love, or martyrdom.

So when Milkman came to him with a proposal to steal and share a cache of gold, Guitar smiled.

Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way.

They sauntered on down route 6, stopping frequently to examine the cars, gesticulating, bantering each other about the best way to burglarize a shack that, as Guitar said, “didn’t have a door or window with a lock.”

Guitar, eschewing his recent asceticism, allowed himself the pleasure of waking up old dreams:

Guitar, eschewing his recent asceticism, allowed himself the pleasure of waking up old dreams: what he would buy for his grandmother and her brother, Uncle Billy, the one who had come up from Florida to help raise them all after his father died; the marker he would buy for his father’s grave, “pink with lilies carved on it”; then stuff for his brother and sisters, and his sisters’ children.

He’d always believed his childhood was sterile, but the knowledge Macon and Ruth had given him wrapped his memory of it in septic sheets, heavy with the odor of illness, misery, and unforgiving hearts.

He tried hard not to swallow, but the clarion call in Guitar’s voice filled his mouth with salt.

“She’s Michael-Mary Graham’s amanuensis.”

...and being the granddaughter of the eminent Dr. Foster should have culminated in something more elegant than the two uniforms that hung on Miss Graham’s basement door.

In the world Michael-Mary Graham inhabited, her mild liberalism, a residue of her Bohemian youth, and her posture of sensitive lady poet passed for anarchy.

None of that, however, had mitigated the reluctance of her publishers to bring out her complete collected works (tentatively called The Farthest Shore).

At some point Corinthians began to suspect that Porter’s discretion was not only in deference to who she was (her position and all), but also because he too didn’t want to be discovered.

His denials, accompanied by a wistful smile which she interpreted as a sly one, only aggravated her suspicions.

The voice was incredulous.

He stayed that way, swaying from light buzz to stoned, for two days and a night, and would have extended it to at least another day but for a sobering conversation with Magdalene called Lena, to whom he had not said more than four consecutive sentences since he was in the ninth grade.