family histories

With all the different elements running through the narrative in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, it is difficult to find a place to start.  This text, which is so imbued with history, language, place and folklore, is almost too overwhelming to dissect, and yet, I found it to be the most approachable story that we have read/watched thus far.  Perhaps this is due to the numerous and evocative descriptions of place.  I am looking back at the recently posted blog by “zpeterse.”  Here, one reader of the text identifies with the sights and smells of a certain place, the south side of Chicago.  I grew up in neighborhood called Marquette Park in Southside Chicago, and am familiar with the amalgamation of smells that waft through the air (our house was blocks away from a Nabisco factory, and no they didn’t give free cookie samples, believe me, I tried). My ties to this place help to define who I am.  What is also interesting about this text is what a full spectrum of experience helps to define place and time.  Milkman, when he is in Shalimar, becomes homesick, not just for the familiarity of place, but also misses his family and friends.  The elements of folklore also present in this story – the myth of flying, the story of Icarus – also work to create the story of a family that is now named Dead.  Though at first Milkman is driven by the greed for gold to travel the country and find his roots, on his journey his sentiments change, and he is more interested and driven by the want to know about his family, his “people.”  The struggle of this journey is echoed in the complexity of finding African American family histories, which are not always readily available.  As an aside-I work in the Alexandria Library at the Local History/Special Collections Division.  We are working now to compile a database of Slave Births, for the years 1850-1864.  This index asked slave owners to register all slave births, with names, dates, and counties in Virginia.  As I am going through and entering the information, the lists are full of mistakes, misspellings, blank spaces.  This is but a small part of the issue, but it does show the precarious nature of tracing African American family histories through slavery and beyond.  Morrison, in Song of Solomon, creates a family epic, spanning generations, which seeks to explore both the history of the family and the future of their histories