Every Black History Month, I try to make sure my reading agenda includes Black voices – whether contemporary Black voices writing about contemporary themes; historical fiction; art writing; or a classic work. This year, I chose to focus on Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison.

Song of Solomon focuses on the lives, and obsessive loves, of an affluent Black family in Michigan in the middle of the twentieth century, and the people that come into their orbit. The main character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born into a family that presents a gilded image to the community but is at war with itself. Macon’s father is cold, disgusted by his wife, and largely oblivious to his children until the day that Milkman grows up enough to help out in the family business. Milkman’s mother, the elegant daughter of the town’s only Black doctor, is a needy, clinging woman, desperate for love and still mourning her father. And away at the edge of town live Milkman’s aunt Pilate, his father’s sister, with her daughter Reba and her granddaughter Hagar.

Into this world steps Milkman – favored son, spoiled and selfish. The book follows his journey – both growing up in the strange, not-quite-right world of his family’s elegant house on Not Doctor Street – and then traveling to first Pennsylvania and then the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to seek answers about his family. Who was Milkman’s grandfather, the first Macon Dead, and his enigmatic wife? A “hero takes a journey” narrative with a healthy splash of magical realism, Song of Solomon is epic and gorgeous and weird.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can’t help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don’t even know why. But look here, don’t carry it inside and don’t give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can’t, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.

The focus of the story is certainly on the men – Milkman, mainly, but also on his father Macon Dead II and his friend Guitar. But a Goodreads review that I read midway through oriented me to the stories of the women – Milkman’s mother Ruth; his sisters Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians; Pilate, Reba and Hagar; and even the more “minor” – but still fully realized – characters like Circe, an old woman who shelters Macon II and Pilate after their father is murdered.

Of course, not all is as it seems – which is lucky, because it all seems super messed up. Milkman’s education in the extreme weirdness of the Dead family begins when his father hits his mother. Milkman, by then a strong man of 22 years old, punches his father in retaliation. Macon II regales his son with a long and extremely creepy story about just why it is that he is so revolted by his wife. The story does its job. Milkman, feeling the need to pick a side, pretty much chooses his father. But his mother won’t be silenced so easily; she shares her own side of the story – unsurprisingly, a little different from Macon II’s – on a late-night train ride. Milkman longs to escape the pressure of two warring factions in his family, his childhood friend Guitar’s tumble into a brigade of assassins, and his obsessive ex-girlfriend (and first cousin) Hagar. His opportunity comes when Macon II tasks him with tracking down a bag of gold that he believes Pilate stole. Milkman sets off on his journey in Part II of the novel, seeking gold, but also seeking even more valuable answers. And he finds answers.

It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn’t deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He’d told Guitar that he didn’t “deserve” his family’s dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn’t even “deserve” to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he “deserve” Hagar’s vengeance. But why shouldn’t his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely Hagar, who knew him and whom he’d thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone–surely she had a right to try to kill him too.

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved–from a distance though–and given what he wanted. And in return, he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

It is not outlandish to say that the vast majority of the characters in Song of Solomon are struggling with private, obsessive love. There are a few who are not. Milkman is the prime example; with so much love pressing in on all sides, he mainly rejects anything that carries too much emotional weight. He’s as dismissive of Hagar as he is of his sisters and of his friend Guitar’s new consciousness. Indeed, I think the only other character in the book that is as emotionally removed as Milkman is Reba, who is repeatedly described as “simple.” Macon II; Ruth; Corinthians; Pilate; Hagar; Guitar; even Circe — all are driven by obsessive love of someone else, or of a concept. (I won’t say who or what these people and concepts are, because that would spoil the book. Suffice it to say: while the magical realism continues to the very last page, the threads that seemed so tangled at the beginning of the journey are neatly tied up by the end.)

Song of Solomon was an intense read, certainly, and I’m always a little skeptical of magical realism. But I did find it incredibly engaging, and a breathtaking panorama. This was the third Toni Morrison I have read — a collection of essays, and Sula, being the other two — and I think it’s my favorite so far. I suspect it would reward a close re-reading, and I do plan to revisit it.

Have you read any Toni Morrison? Which is your favorite?