Song of Solomon
...rried the wrong man for a woman so in need of physical touch, a man whose coldness and emotional neglect she had to swallow for years. Macon Jr. was such a cold-hearted man that he went to collect rent from a man who was threatening to commit suicide named Henry Porter. Macon Jr.’s, “hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her.”(p.10) Ruth’s first act out side of what were considered social norms that showed she was too starved of affection from her husband too live appropriately was when Macon Jr. saw her embracing her recently deceased father in an inappropriate way. After that incident, Ruth and Macon Jr. no longer had sex. “Your father and I hadn’t had physical relations since my father died,” she told her son on page 125. Perhaps it was not the way she embraced her father that Macon Jr. initially felt was inappropriate, but the fact that she was showing such affection towards another patriarch, and that made Macon Jr. jealous. He made up the details of what he saw to justify his emotional neglect. “Little by little he remembered fewer and fewer of the details, until he finally had to imagine them,” it says on page 16. His jealousy eventually led to physical abuse, when on page 67 his fist, “smashed into her jaw.” This act of what Macon Jr. considered to be socially inappropriateness, eventually led to not only emotional neglect, but physical abuse as well, so her venture outside of the social norm of showing the most affection to your husband led Ruth’s marriage to be worse than before. Ruth stepped beyond the boundaries of social acceptance within her family other times as well. After her sexual relationship stopped with Macon Jr., she secretly gave him aphrodisiacs so that she could have some form of sexual affection. However, when she became pregnant, it further soured her marriage, because Macon Jr. told Ruth, “to get rid of the baby.” (p.125) and she was forced to have Pilate, Macron Jr.’s sister, protect her from her own husband. Her deviance in trying to conceive with Macon Jr. led, to the decline of her relationship with her husband just as before. Ruth’s strive for the affection of a male not only affected her relationship with her husband, but with her son as well. Ruth, not having the physical affection she needed from her husband, began to breastfeed her son to the point of inappropriateness when he was a child. On page 14, when Freddie the janitor saw how old her son was while she was still breastfeeding him, Freddie exclaimed, “Have mercy. I be damn.” Freddie told Macon Jr. about what he had seen and he dubbed Macon III with the nickname Milkman which stuck with him his whole life. This act outside of the social norms of society caused her husband to hate his son. “This disgust and the uneasiness with which he regarded his son affected everything he did in that city.” (p.16) It was clear this inappropriateness affected her relationship with Milkman as well when he says to her, “You nursed me. Until I was…old. Too old.” (p.126) Again, Ruth’s venture beyond social norms to find affection eventually negatively affected the relationships in her family. Ruth was not the only woman in the Dead family that was starved of affection by Macon Jr. “Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices.”(p.10) One of his daughters, First Corinthians, ventured out of the Dead house in order to escape her father’s unloving wrath and find the love of a father figure somewhere else. Corinthians began to be courted by Henry Porter. This would have been a relationship in which she ventured beyond social norms, because he was at least twenty years her senior, suicidal, and was a Southside tenant under her father. Corinthians was too highly thought of to court someone as poor as a tenant under Macon Jr. She even admitted that she “knew she was ashamed of him, that he could never set foot inside her house.” This did not stop her from seeing him and in fact she fell in love with him as their relationship became sexual. When they almost broke up, she became so insane with the thought of being starved for patriarchal love even more that she jumped on the hood of Porter’s car in order to keep him from driving away. “Even if he drove of at one hundred miles and hour, she would hang on.”(p.199) Eventually, after Macon Jr. finds out about the relationship between First Corinthians and Henry Porter, Porter is evicted from his housing and Corinthians is forbidden to leave her house, most likely driving her even more insane than when she and Porter almost broke up the first time. She, like her mother, ventured beyond...