Tuesday
The other day Joyce Carol Oates, observing the insurrection at the Capitol, commented on how the violent craziness of Trumpists feeds on itself. Oates is an author who knows crazy, having explored the darkest recesses of the human soul in such novels as The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Daddy Love. (To this day I wish I could get Daddy Love’s serial killer out of my head.) To illustrate her point, however, I turn a different novel, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
In two tweets, Joyce observed the following about the Capitol Hill marauders:
Initially they were (just) racists with a (latent) wish to kill Blacks. then, they began to wish to kill whites whose political convictions differed from their own. then, their wish to kill began to include other right-wingers like themselves who were not–quite–as crazy…
The rioting criminal mob came within 60~ seconds of seeing Mike Pence on Jan. 6. And they were just 90 feet away from a small office where Pence was hiding, before a cop steered them away.
The mob began chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” after Donald Trump tweeted that the vice president wasn’t doing enough to stop Congress from certifying the election results. Given that they didn’t hold back from beating Capitol police, it’s not hard to imagine them injuring or even killing Pence and Nancy Pelosi had they caught them.
In Song of Solomon Guitar, the protagonist Milkman’s best friend, becomes unhinged by white-on-black violence and joins a secret organization called “the Seven Days.” The organization has seven members, each of whom pledges to kill an innocent White each time Whites kill an innocent Black. Many Americans have seen friends and family descend into similar cult madness over the past four years.
As Oates predicts, the violence doesn’t stop with Whites. A coolness springs up between Milkman and Guitar once Milkman learns about the group, and it doesn’t take long before Guitar thinks Milkman has betrayed them in a search they are conducting for Confederate gold. It doesn’t matter that Guitar’s evidence is as thin as massive voter fraud in the 2020 election, consisting only of an unexplained crate. Logic won’t convince someone in the grip of a conspiracy theory, however:
“Guitar, I didn’t ship no gold. There wasn’t any gold to ship. You couldn’t have seen me.”
“I saw you, baby. I was in the station.
“What fuckin station?”
“The freight station in Danville.”
Milkman remembered then, going to look for Reverend Cooper, looking all over for him. Then going into the station house to see if he’d gone, and there helping a man lift a huge crate onto the weighing platform. He started to laugh. “Oh, shit. Guitar, that wasn’t no gold. I was just helping that man lift a crate. He asked me to help him. Help him lift a big old crate. I did and then I split.”
Facts have become irrelevant to Guitar, however, and he goes over Milkman twice, first with piano wire and then with a gun.
Milkman, meanwhile, has been undergoing his own narrative arc, one that is far more hopeful. Just as many are harkening back to America’s roots in the Declaration of Independence, so Milkman connects with his roots in slaves who resisted white oppression. At the novel’s end, we don’t know whether conspiracy violence or newfound hope will prevail, just as we don’t know whether Trumpist hate or Biden healing with our own future.
Despite the open ending, however, Morrison’s closing paragraph–one of the greatest in American literature–leaves us hopeful. Although Guitar, standing on one mountain ledge, is prepared to pick off Milkman, standing on another, Morrison assures us that if we give ourselves up to the heroic vision of our ancestors, we will be buoyed up:
“You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Believe.
