Active Blog For Chapters 7-10

Plot Summary:
Chapter seven opens up with an introduction to Milkman's urge to leave his landlocked city and be free to roam the country and the world. He is tired of working for his father and he wants to go out into the world and live life. Whilst inquiring his father if he could quit his job and leave for one year to "find himself", he lets it slip that he wouldn't use the money he'd borrow from his father like Pilate does, just sticks it into a bag and hangs it from her ceiling--her inheritance, she calls it. This sparks something in Macon's eyes and he tells Milkman the story of what happened after white men came and shot his father and they had to live life without a patriarch to guide them. He told how his father had a large piece of land and was illiterate, and how he accidentally signed a paper that gave the white men their property. He refused to move and was shot right in front of his own children. Evicted from the property, the homeless orphaned children went to Circe, the midwife who was working as a maid in the Butler house. This rich white family were the ones who killed their father, a fact Circe didn't tell them. She housed them there until they got too restless and then the children decided to go to Virginia to see if they still had family there. They left without notice into the wilderness where they saw constant reappearances of their father's ghost. He led them into a cave at night to keep them safe, and then left them. Macon Jr. woke up in the morning and saw an old white man sitting on the ground: Macon Jr. killed him with rocks and a knife. His father's ghost reappears again whispering, "Sing, sing," and then "melts away." There was a hole in the back of the cave filled with bags of gold which Pilate said they needed to leave alone and she fought him with the knife of make him leave the cave. Coming out of his reverie of telling his son the story, Macon Jr. tells Milkman to get the gold he believes Pilate is keeping in the green bag.
The beginning of chapter eight highlights Guitar's guilt and reluctance to participate in being the Sunday Man, being apart of the Seven Days. When four black girls were killed in a church bombing, Guitar had to retaliate and kill four white with the same type of murder techniques, and that was expensive. When Milkman comes and tries to get Guitar in on the plan to steal Pilate's gold, he was in from the get-go. While the two make plans to commit the felony, they spot a white peacock that distracts them from planning the crime, and instead they talk about what they'll do with the money. Guitar talks about spending it on nice clothes, but really with use it to purchase weapons for the Seven Days. Milkman decides he just wants the money so he can move away from his parents, sisters, Hagar, and the whole town. Milkman realizes that until Guitar really inspired an anger in him about how his life was just so easy compared to everyone else, he never thought the gold was really real. Once he got a taste of the possibly of not having to mooch off of his father for the rest of his life, he wanted to do the burglary immediately. He and Guitar waited until one in the morning and then they crept into Pilate's house and took down the bag that was much lighter than they expected a bag of gold to weigh. As the boys go off down the street, Pilate appears in the window and wonders what they wanted the bag for, foreshadowing that the bag may not be as precious to the two men as initially though.
In chapter nine, the character focus changes surprisingly from Milkman to his second oldest sister First Corinthians. She grew up as a very pretty, well mannered lady whose main job experience was making fake roses. She had gone to college and was very well educated for a woman in that time period. She was flirted with but no one whom her parents approved of really looked to marry her because she was smarter than them and she was weak willed. She decides to get out of the house and get a job since she is forty-two and her prospects have taken a very subtle halt. She doesn't want to go back to school to get a teaching degree, and she believes her last option is to become a maid to a Miss Michael-Mary Graham, who is an elderly poet. She teaches Corinthians how to type and how to speak a little French and to make her a more affluent citizen. One day on the bus, a man sits next to her and drops off a note written with poetry about being friends on her seat. They strike up conversations sometimes on the bus, and eventually he starts courting her. His name is Porter and he is apparently bad news: he was the man Macon was collecting rent from whilst he was threatening to kill himself if someone didn't send someone up to have sex with him (and it isn't found out until later that he is also part of the Seven Days). He invites her up into his room one day and she worries about her propriety and about her parents and subsequently is called a "doll baby", a child. She resents it and walks away from him in a rage, but comes to the realization that she'll never leave her parent's house if she doesn't go back to him. She does go back to Porter and he takes her to his room and has sex with her. He takes Corinthians home right before dawn, and as she enters the house the character focus changes back to Milkman who was arrested by the police for carrying bones around in a bag. Macon has to go bail them out (Milkman and Guitar) with bribes, but eventually the men tell the police they stole from Pilate and they bring her to the station for questioning. She tells them a story of how the bones are her husband's, whose name is Solomon (Title Reference!). When Macon gave her a ride back to her house, she told him how she left the bags in the cave when she left. She said her father's ghost stayed with her, telling her to "Sing, sing, sing." Then after Reba was born he told her to go get the bones because it was her responsibility. The next day Milkman went to talk to Guitar but he saw that he was meeting with the other Six of the Seven Days, one of whom was Porter, Corinthians' lover. He left without saying hi to his best friend to get drunk and to go home where Magdalene called Lena was there to confront her brother. She told him how she, Corinthians, and Ruth had slaved over his each and every whim since he was born and how he was ungrateful and hurtful and abusive and selfish: an exact replica of his father. She told him that she no longer going to be passive; she was going to be strong now and there he was going to respect her.
Chapter ten is about Milkman's journey back to the cave his father and aunt hid in after their father's death, where Macon killed a man, and where the gold was supposedly still sitting in a hole. Milkman is determined to find the gold to get away from the life he hates. He flies to Pittsburgh and rides the bus to the town of Danville to seek out Circe, the woman who cared for the children over fifty years ago. A reverend tells him she had died of old age and has his nephew drive him out to the country to search for the cave. At the Butler's house where Circe worked as a maid he found that Circe was still alive and living alone in the house with thirty dogs. She tells Milkman that his grandmother, the wife of the first Macon, whose real name was Jake, was called Sing, which causes one to rethink that when the ghost of Jake kept saying "Sing, Sing," he might have been calling his wife, not instructing a verb to take place. Milkman goes trekking through the forest in a hurry with the taste of having the gold within his reach and he has to wade through a deep creek and also climb a steep rock face before getting into the cave. There is nothing in the cave at all: just a pile of rocks and an empty hole. He gives up: he's hungry, exhausted, wet, sweaty, and he goes back to the road, but not before discovering an easy path that goes from the cave to the ground, a bridge to cross a shallow bit of the creek, and a walking path through the thick forest. He decides to go to Virginia, thinking that he'd follow Pilate's tracks to where he thinks she left the gold.


Magical Realism: When Milkman and Guitar go to steal the "gold" from Pilate's house, there is a scent that fills the air that physically shouldn't have been there. With a plastic factory's pollution running into the lake and with fish floating belly up, there was a smell like crystallized ginger and sweet tea that is described as a motivator to get the two men to burgle, keep them focused. There are three mentions of Macon and Pilate's father's ghost showing up to give them directions and advise. Another magical element was shown with Circe: she seems to have longevity, which is not normal for humans.

Themes:
A theme that sticks out to me is about flying: you have to get rid of all of the stuff that's holding you down before you can fly. A moral lesson that Milkman demonstrated was when he is so stubbornly focused on reaching the cave that while he hurries, he takes the most difficult path to the cave when there was a simple, easy path to the cave that was accessible to a more observant person. Basically, being driving by selfishness is very stupid. The other recurring underlying theme is Milkman's quest for identity.

Quote from Ch 7, page 167: "Macon and Pilate stayed there two weeks, not a day longer. He had been working hard on a farm since he was five or six years old and she was born wild." This quote describes the lives of the siblings in present day. Macon works and works and works, and Pilate is completely unpredictable.

Quote from Ch 7, page 171: "Life, safety, and luxury fanned out before him like the tail-spread of a peacock..." This is the beginning of Macon's constant hunger for money. This is the root: he thinks he can only find safety and contentment through money, and that's very unfortunate.

Quote from Ch 8, page 180: "Wanna fly, you got to give up that @#$% that weighs you down." For some reason, I think that this must be the theme of the whole story. Milkman has had the desire to fly since he was born and he's always concerned with materialistic and petty things. It's going to be interesting to see if he ever does get the chance to fly away.

Quote from Ch 8, page 184: "Well, if a man don't have a chance, then he has to take a chance." I think that this is a very good quote to live by when there seems to be no other options left. I'm not saying one has to be irrational every time a roadblock appears on the horizon, but it still holds ground with me personally.

Quote from Ch 9, page 208: "(She always called him Mr. Solomon cause he was such a dignified colored man)." This is the only title reference that has shown up in the book so far. Pilate calls him a dignified colored man, and Solomon from the Bible was the wisest man who ever lived, and he had dark skin.

Quote from Ch 9, page 215: "I forgot there were all kinds of ways to pee on people." Magdalene called Lena was bitter from when Milkman peed on her. She tolerated his petty whims but no longer: she is going to brush him off as important, just like he did to her (her version of peeing on him).

Quote from Ch 10, page 234: "The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always work out." This particular quote stood out to me because it's one that I personally live by and I love that Toni Morrison wrote this in her novel. I have to wonder, however, if things will really work out for Milkman. You never know when it comes to fiction.

Quote from Ch 10, page 237: "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 country right here. Nowhere else!" This quote is what the farm and the land and the earth would supposedly being saying and I think it holds mounds of truth. We only have this one life to live, to be spontaneous and successful, and to take care of the earth. It's the motto of this generation.

Characters:
Milkman Dead: This man is insufferable. He is unintelligent, selfish and greedy, ungrateful, stubborn, deceitful and abusive. There are a couple good characteristics about him but I believe the whole point is to not like him...not yet, anyways. He seems to be getting worse and worse (in my opinion).
Macon Dead: Macon has basically stayed the same. He still exploits people (Milkman, Pilate, his renters, etc). He is greedy and is selfish enough to steal from his own sister and make his son do it for him.
Pilate Dead: She too has stayed the same. She is wild and unpredictable. Even when Milkman stole her only inheritance, she bailed him out of jail because she cares for him like he was her own child.
Guitar: Guitar is changing for the worse. He is becoming more and more irritable; he's blaming people for things he doesn't have the right to blame people for (ie. being mad at Pilate for not having the gold he wanted tried to steal). He's also drifting even more away from Milkman because his "hobby" of killing innocent people is making him feel guilty.
First Corinthians: Finally, after forty-two years of living on this planet, she decides to become an independent woman who can make her own money and decisions.
Magdalene called Lena: Lena steps out of her box as well. She won't take the men's crap anymore. She is thinking for herself and yet she'll never leave because she wants to protect her mother from her dad. She is a good person.
Hagar: She is mentioned in Chapter Eight to have become even more unstable over the months since Milkman dumped her.