Morrison's Religion
...falling, falling into my arms, into my life. After all these years of waiting, my father and I have finally met. I bend down, pick up some dirt from his grave and rub it on my head. All the sorrow wells up inside me and merges with the joy of meeting him, finally for the first time…It is fire in the bones” (Albert Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones 196). Albert Raboteau’s search for the truth about his father closely parallels Milkman’s struggle to find the truth of his own ancestral legacy. Both searches result from secrets that have suppressed the history of a marginalized people: Raboteau’s father shot from racial disturbances and Milkman’s great-grandfather soaring on wings of African tradition. Raboteau’s story comes at the end of his book-length explanation of “fire in the bones” as the “metaphor of the distinctive character of African-American Christianity, a mood of joyful sorrow, sorrowful joy, or more accurately, sorrow merging into joy” (Raboteau, Fire 184). Of course, Solomon’s flight back to Africa bears the ultimate question asked in no uncertain terms by Gay Wilentz in Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora, “not whether Milkman lives or dies; rather, the question is whether Milkman dies or flies!” (98). The acceptance of Christian ideology would clearly dismiss the supernatural flight back to Africa; yet, this celebration of flight could direct the reader to a revelation of African traditions within African American religion. Morrison, in giving newfound voice to the marginalized of the marginalized, African American women, additionally offers a greater vision of Christian theology through her appropriation of Pilate’s character and her novel’s title, Song of Solomon. This appropriation inevitably celebrates the African American connection to the origin of African experience in Christianity. Morrison’s distortion of biblical references serve to free African American culture from dominant, patriarchal customs of Westernized religion to exalt black women, even if through the lives of men, who exhaust the will to discover paths to survival and beyond; in turn, under Morrison’s direction, biblical “others” are given redemption through their newfound freedom and identity and Song of S...