Realizations

Chapter eleven of Song of Solomon marks a very important change in Milkman. In a tiny southern town, he hunts with a group of men who seem to have everything figured out. In the dark, which literally opens him up to his inner blindness, and with nothing left to distract him, he slowly begins to understand the people who make up his life. He finally opens up to the possibility that he is at fault for most of his own blunders: "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," (Morrison 276). As his realizations continue, he ceases to describe others as "devious, jealous, traitorous, and evil," and instead recalls "intimate" gestures and replaces hatred with "affection" (278).

When Milkman realizes that his hunting companions and their dogs are speaking to each other, he uses instruments to describe their communications; music does not present a concrete picture, but anybody who listens carefully enough can draw abstract meaning from its nuances. In this way, where words are different in every part of the world, music is universally understood; as Milkman reasons, "It was what there was before language," (278). As its primitivity suggests, music is a simpler form of communication: the speaker is unhampered by words with nuanced meanings, and instead speaks only to the emotions.

Later, Milkman also realizes that meaning can be gleaned from the land and the animals that inhabit it: in the wild, none of the qualities that society worships matter, and a person is only defined by his ability to survive and understand other living things. Nature gives Pilate her mystery and her awareness, and it helps Milkman to see, "As a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers," (278). Though Milkman starts out on a chase for money, the meaning he reaches for is discovered in both familial and natural roots.