Song of Solomon Read Online Free Page B

plate-glass window contradicted him. In peeling gold letters arranged in a semicircle, his business establishment was declared to be Sonny’s Shop. Scraping the previous owner’s name off was hardly worth the trouble since he couldn’t scrape it from anybody’s mind. His storefront office was never called anything but Sonny’s Shop, although nobody now could remember thirty years back, when, presumably, Sonny did something or other there.
    He walked there now—strutted is the better word, for he had a high behind and an athlete’s stride—thinking of names. Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name. His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide by a naming done to them by somebody who couldn’t have cared less. Agreed to take and pass on to all their issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army. A literal slip of the pen handed to his father on a piece of paper and which he handed on to his only son, and his son likewise handed on to his; Macon Dead who begat a second Macon Dead who married Ruth Foster (Dead) and begat Magdalene called Lena Dead and First Corinthians Dead and (when he least expected it) another Macon Dead, now known to the part of the world that mattered as Milkman Dead. And as if that were not enough, a sister named Pilate Dead, who would never mention to her brother the circumstances or the details of this foolish misnaming of his son because the whole thing would have delighted her. She would savor it, maybe fold it too in a brass box and hang it from her other ear.
    He had cooperated as a young father with the blind selection of names from the Bible for every child other than the first male. And abided by whatever the finger pointed to, for he knew every configuration of the naming of his sister. How his father, confused and melancholy over his wife’s death in childbirth, had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees. How he had copied the group of letters out on a piece of brown paper; copied, as illiterate people do, every curlicue, arch, and bend in the letters, and presented it to the midwife.
    “That’s the baby’s name.”
    “You want this for the baby’s name?”
    “I want that for the baby’s name. Say it.”
    “You can’t name the baby this.”
    “Say it.”
    “It’s a man’s name.”
    “Say it.”
    “Pilate.”
    “What?”
    “Pilate. You wrote down Pilate.”
    “Like a riverboat pilot?”
    “No. Not like no riverboat pilot. Like a Christ-killing Pilate. You can’t get much worse than that for a name. And a baby girl at that.”
    “That’s where my finger went down at.”
    “Well, your brain ain’t got to follow it. You don’t want to give this motherless child the name of the man that killed Jesus, do you?”
    “I asked Jesus to save me my wife.”
    “Careful, Macon.”
    “I asked him all night long.”
    “He give you your baby.”
    “Yes. He did. Baby name Pilate.”
    “Jesus, have mercy.”
    “Where you going with that piece of paper?”
    “It’s going back where it came from. Right in the Devil’s flames.”
    “Give it here. It come from the Bible. It stays in the Bible.”
    And it did stay there, until the baby girl turned twelve and took it out, folded it up into a tiny knot and put it in a little brass box, and strung the entire contraption through her left earlobe. Fluky about her own name at