Two Pairs of Footprints
A Lit Hum Glossary
Dallas Scott
Motif:     Parental/child relationships and how these contribute to or hinder the personal growth of the characters.
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Entry #2
Entry #3
Reflections
Song of Solomon     Toni Morrison

Milkman from an early age has a great deal of respect for his father, though he recognizes he is very much unlike him, and his respect is mixed with fear. Macon Jr. is not a friendly man to those outside of the family, and for his family he reserves a good deal of criticism. He is a domineering man, filled with strength and vigor but also a great deal of anger and disappointment. Milkman finds himself weak by comparison. He has a leg-length discrepancy and cannot hope to ever emulate his father. Though he works in his father's business, there is no sense of shared identity or path forward for him.

Milkman sees himself in figures who are in some way compromimsed or disadvantaged. From an early age, he tries to differentiate himself from his father both in apperance and attitude. This is his first attempt at separating himself from his father and trying to craft an identity that better suits his physicality and temperament. The company he chooses, Guitar and his aunt Pilate whom Macon Jr. has forbidden him to see, is a sort of thumbing the nose at the father, an incipient form of rebellion.

When Milkman enters young adulthood, this self-identification with weakness is replaced with a new confidence in his abilities. The striking of the father is an important turning point for Milkman, as the roles of domineering father and obedient son are reversed. It is now Milkman who has triumphed over the father. This reversal is not without consequences. When he sees his father bested by him, it is a painful realization that the man he once reverenced for his strength, that idealized form of the masculine and invulernable father, is no longer something to be taken for granted.

The sordid story told to Milkman by his father regarding his mother's past shatters Milkman's sense of belonging or having his own people. His identity in the making is compromised, and the need to leave his family and build a life of his own for himself becomes more urgent. The visit to his father's hometown in Pennsylvania is something of a reversal of these sentiments. He sees his father for the first time through the eyes of people who knew him as a child and the love he had for his own murdered father. The way Macon Jr. is described by these older men instills a new sense of pride in Milkman for his father, who he was, and gives him some glimpse into Macon's past. There is no longer a clear split between son and father, and the sense for Macon that he is a completely separate entity from his father is done away with.

On Macon's part, the son is an escape from disappointment. His affection for Milkman appears to be conditioned upon the sorry state of his conjugal life - a sort of using the son as a means of ownership to spite the wife and her history as the daughter of a wealthy man. The whole basis for the paternal/filial relationship then has its origins not in an unconditional love but one based upon pre-exsting circumstances.

The great strength of Milkman in the end is the realization that such relationships can never be perfect, indeed should not be expected to be perfect, because they are relations between people and people are inevitably flawed. Milkman offers the reader the idea that one's relations with one's parents are inevitably of little consequence in who one becomes. There is no dichotomy between the terrible and the good, separation vs reconcilation. One can be both separate and connected simultaneously if one is willing to accept situations for what they are but not attribute too much importance to them.

The notions of the strong father and the weak son are spelled out fairly clearly in the text early on. The differences between the two are enumerated in a single paragraph as a collection of alternating descriptors. We learn that Milkman feels more of an attachment to historical figures like FDR, presumably from his suffering from polio, than he does to his father, even though it was his father who instilled this imagingation of the past into Milkman when he was very young.
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Milkman secretly preferred FDR and felt very very close to him. Closer, in fact, to him than to his own father, for Macon had no imperfection and age seemed to strengthen him. Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties; Milkman wore four- in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair; Milkman had a part shaved into his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon his love of good shoes and fine thin socks. And he did try, as his father’s employee, to do the work the way Macon wanted it done.
Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified, and he had time to think, to plan, to visit the bank men, to read the public notices, auctions, to find out what plots were going for taxes, unclaimed heirs’ property, where roads were being built, what supermarkets, schools; and who was trying to sell what to the government for the housing projects that were going to be built. The quickie townlets that were springing up around war plants. He knew as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie. But there were properties nobody wanted yet, or little edges of property somebody didn’t want Jews to have, or Catholics to have, or properties nobody knew were of any value yet. There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the war was over and that pie filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging paunch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921. She hadn’t stopped spending occasional nights out of the house, but she was fifty years old now and what lover could she have kept so long? What lover
To get a good sense of Macon Jr.'s domineering personality, it is probably best to look at the way he thinks of himself in his own words, at least as it relates to his role within the family unit and as head of the household. In the scene where Milkman strikes his father, we get both a revealing look into Macon Jr.'s thoughts as well as his son's about what has just taken place and what it means for them. Macon Jr. is shocked at the challenge of his son and his inability to respond in kind. Milkman is likewise shocked at his power but also greatly saddened by what he has done, what he has thrown away about his previous understanding of his father.
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“Macon, please don’t use that language in front of the children.”
“What goddam children? Everybody in here is old enough to vote.”
“There is no call for an argument.”
“You make a fool of yourself in a Catholic church, embarrass everybody at the reception, and come to the table to gloat about how wonderful you were?”
“Macon…”
“And sit there lying, saying you didn’t know any better?”
“Anna Djvorak wasn’t the least bit—”
“Anna Djvorak don’t even know your name! She called you Dr. Foster’s daughter! I bet you one hundred dollars she still don’t know your name! You by yourself ain’t nobody. You your daddy’s daughter!”
“That’s so,” said Ruth in a thin but steady voice. “I certainly am my daddy’s daughter.” She smiled.
Macon didn’t wait to put his fork down. He dropped it on the table while his hand was on its way across the bread plate becoming the fist he smashed into her jaw.
Milkman hadn’t planned any of it, but he had to know that one day, after Macon hit her, he’d see his mother’s hand cover her lips as she searched with her tongue for any broken teeth, and discovering none, tried to adjust the partial plate in her mouth without anyone noticing—and that on that day he would not be able to stand it. Before his father could draw his hand back, Milkman had yanked him by the back of his coat collar, up out of his chair, and knocked him into the radiator. The window shade flapped and rolled itself up.
“You touch her again, one more time, and I’ll kill you.”
Macon was so shocked at being assaulted he could not speak. He had come to believe, after years of creating respect and fear wherever he put his foot down, after years of being the tallest man in every gathering, that he was impregnable. Now he crept along the wall looking at a man who was as tall as he was—and forty years younger.
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Just as the father brimmed with contradictory feelings as he crept along the wall—humiliation, anger, and a grudging feeling of pride in his son—so the son felt his own contradictions. There was the pain and shame of seeing his father crumple before any man—even himself. Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand- year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.
He also felt glee. A snorting, horse-galloping glee as old as desire. He had won something and lost something in the same instant. Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the latter. So he cock-walked around the table and asked his mother, “Are you all right?”
She was looking at her fingernails. “Yes, I’m fine.”
Milkman looked at his sisters. He had never been able to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother. They were in their early teens when he was born; they were thirty- five and thirty-six now. But since Ruth was only sixteen years older than Lena, all three had always looked the same age to him. Now when he met his sisters’ eyes over the table, they returned him a look of hatred so fresh, so new, it startled him. Their pale eyes no longer appeared to blur into their even paler skin. It seemed to him as though charcoal lines had been drawn around their eyes; that two drag lines had been smudged down their cheeks, and their rosy lips were swollen in hatred so full it was about to burst through. Milkman had to blink twice before their faces returned to the vaguely alarmed blandness he was accustomed to. Quickly he left the room, realizing there was no one to thank him—or abuse him. His action was his alone. It would change nothing between his parents. It would change nothing inside them. He had knocked his father down and perhaps there were some new positions on the chessboard, but the game would go on.
When Milkman visits the old men in the town in Pennsylvania, their memories of Macon Jr. contradict his own notions of his father. Gone is the domineering, repressed man fixated on business building, replaced with a cheerful young Macon Jr., strong, active, an inspiring figure that Milkman cannot recognize. This fresh look at his father through the eyes of these older men reinstill Milkman's sense of belonging, not to a sorrowful, angry, sordid “people" but the son of a great man, whose life experiences may have changed him for the worse. This new narrative in some sense supplants the old, or at least nudges it aside enough for Milkman to reconsider his relationship with his father.
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Milkman waited four days for the car to be ready. Four days at Reverend Cooper’s house as his guest, and the purpose of long visits from every old man in the town who remembered his father or his grandfather, and some who’d only heard. They all repeated various aspects of the story, all talked about how beautiful Lincoln’s Heaven was. Sitting in the kitchen, they looked at Milkman with such rheumy eyes, and spoke about his grandfather with such awe and affection, Milkman began to miss him too. His own father’s words came back to him: “I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him.” Milkman thought then that his father was boasting of his manliness as a child. Now he knew he had been saying something else. That he loved his father; had an intimate relationship with him; that his father loved him, trusted him, and found him worthy of working “right alongside” him. “Something went wild in me,” he’d said, “when I saw him on the ground.”
His was the genuine feeling that Milkman had faked when Reverend Cooper described the hopelessness of “doing anything.” These men remembered both Macon Deads as extraordinary men. Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl “that couldn’t nobody put shoes on.” Only one of them remembered his grandmother. “Good- lookin, but looked like a white woman. Indian, maybe. Black hair and slanted-up eyes. Died in childbirth, you know.” The more the old men talked—the more he heard about the only farm in the county that grew peaches, real peaches like they had in Georgia, the feasts they had when hunting was over, the pork kills in the winter and the work, the backbreaking work of a going farm—the more he missed something in his life. They talked about digging a well, fashioning traps, felling trees, warming orchards with fire when spring weather was bad, breaking young horses, training dogs. And in it all was his own father, the second Macon Dead, their contemporary, who was strong as an ox, could ride bareback and barefoot, who, they agreed, outran, outplowed, outshot, outpicked, outrode them all. He could not recognize that stern, greedy, unloving man in the boy they talked about, but he loved the boy they described
There is an overall sense that what one makes of oneself should not be an account of one's relationship to one's parents. There is a parallel relationship at play in the novel not just between Macon Jr. and Milkman, but Macon Jr. and his own father Macon Dead Sr. In both respects, perhaps more so in Macon Sr. than Macon Jr., there was a notion that to survive in the world, one had to get one's hands dirty and put forth the effort, not dwell on the minituae of one's relationship to one's father. Macon Dead Sr.'s acquisition and development of his farm was this achievement. For Macon Jr., it was his real estate business.

In one of the more exciting passages in the book, the old men in the town in Pennsylvania give a barrage of memory mixed with future, spurred on by Milkman's presence and encouragement. Milkman begins a series of boasts about the man he not long ago had struck in anger, rekindling his respect for his father that seemed to be lost for good.
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and loved that boy’s father, with his hip-roofed barn, his peach trees, and Sunday break-of-dawn fishing parties in a fish pond that was two acres wide.
They talked on and on, using Milkman as the ignition that gunned their memories. The good times, the hard times, things that changed, things that stayed the same—and head and shoulders above all of it was the tall, magnificent Macon Dead, whose death, it seemed to him, was the beginning of their own dying even though they were young boys at the time. Macon Dead was the farmer they wanted to be, the clever irrigator, the peachtree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time flat and sang like an angel while he did it. He had come out of nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing but free papers, a Bible, and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year he’d leased ten acres, the next ten more. Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon. “You see?” the farm said to them. “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,” it said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—can you hear me? Pass it on!”
But they shot the top of his head off and ate his fine Georgia peaches. And even as boys these men began to die and were dying still. Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they
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yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying. That’s why Milkman began to talk about his father, the boy they knew, the son of the fabulous Macon Dead. He bragged a little and they came alive. How many houses his father owned (they grinned); the new car every two years (they laughed); and when he told them how his father tried to buy the Erie Lackawanna (it sounded better that way), they hooted with joy. That’s him! That’s Old Macon Dead’s boy, all right! They wanted to know everything and Milkman found himself rattling off assets like an accountant, describing deals, total rents income, bank loans, and this new thing his father was looking into—the stock market.
Suddenly, in the midst of his telling, Milkman wanted the gold. He wanted to get up right then and there and go get it. Run to where it was and snatch every grain of it from under the noses of the Butlers, who were dumb enough to believe that if they killed one man his whole line died. He glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride. “Who’d your daddy marry?”
“The daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town.”
“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead!”
“Send you all to college?”
“Sent my sisters. I work right alongside him in our office.”
“Hah! Keep you home to get that money! Macon Dead gonna always make him some money!”
“What kinda car he drive?”
“Buick. Two-twenty-five.”
“Great God, a deuce and a quarter! What year?”
“This year!”
“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead! He gonna buy the Erie Lackawanna’ If he want it, he’ll get it! Bless my soul. Bet he worry them white folks to death. Can’t nobody keep him down! Not no Macon Dead! Not in this world! And not in the next! Haw! Goddam! The Erie Lackawanna!”
Near the end of the book, Milkman is watching a group of children play. It not only elicits memories of his own childhood but puts him into something of a trance, giving him clarity of thought. He recognizes his love for his family. He sees the flaws in his father and now understands why he became the man he is. He acknowledges the futility in wasting his time hating them. It's a moment of growth for Milkman, a moment of clarity and maturity.
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this point, one he had heard off and on all his life. That old blues song Pilate sang all the time: “O Sugarman don’t leave me here,” except the children sang, “Solomon don’t leave me here.”
Milkman smiled, remembering Pilate. Hundreds of miles away, he was homesick for her, for her house, for the very people he had been hell-bent to leave. His mother’s quiet, crooked, apologetic smile. Her hopeless helplessness in the kitchen. The best years of her life, from age twenty to forty, had been celibate, and aside from the consummation that began his own life, the rest of her life had been the same. He hadn’t thought much of it when she’d told him, but now it seemed to him that such sexual deprivation would affect her, hurt her in precisely the way it would affect and hurt him. If it were possible for somebody to force him to live that way, to tell him, “You may walk and live among women, you may even lust after them, but you will not make love for the next twenty years,” how would he feel? What would he do? Would he continue as he was? And suppose he were married and his wife refused him for fifteen years. His mother had been able to live through that by a long nursing of her son, some occasional visits to a graveyard. What might she have been like had her husband loved her?
And his father. An old man now, who acquired things and used people to acquire more things. As the son of Macon Dead the first, he paid homage to his own father’s life and death by loving what that father had loved: property, good solid property, the bountifulness of life. He loved these things to excess because he loved his father to excess. Owning, building, acquiring–that was his life, his future, his present, and all the history he knew. That he distorted life, bent it, for the sake of gain, was a measure of his loss at his father’s death.
As Milkman watched the children, he began to feel uncomfortable. Hating his parents, his sisters, seemed silly now. And the skim of shame that he had rinsed away in the bathwater after having stolen from Pilate returned. But now it was as thick and as tight as a caul. How could he have broken into that house–

The work centers on Milkman and his transformation from a dissatisfied youth with little understanding about the larger world and the past that make people are what they are in the present, into a man who has gone out, experienced things for himself, and comes back completely changed in his mindset. It is the prototypical hero's journey, and Milkman's relationship with his father is in microcosm representative of the eternal recurrence of this journey. It is sometehing Milkman's father had, something his grandfather had before him, and so on down the line.

Entry #1
Entry #2
Entry #3
Reflections