The Ability of Naming - ENG 3U7



The Ability of Naming

“Names to Bear Witness” by Lucinda H. MacKethan is an article that looks into the theme and tradition of Naming in “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison. As stated in the article, “there are many complex searches for the meanings of names”. The article looks at several examples of the use of naming, such as “Not Doctor Street”, and then analyzes their purpose within the novel. The article also looks into the naming of characters such as Macons I, II, III (III is also known as Milkman), and Pilate. The article investigates the significance of names associated with those characters. The article references an essay by Ralph Ellison which helps to reinforce the ideas presented about the names. Additionally, there are references to an interview with Morrison, in which it is confirmed that the theme of naming was one of the dominant themes.

Key Concepts

“The name is a very, very strong theme in the book...” (186) - This should be taken note of, as a person who is reading the book should pay special attention to the use of name within the book.

The searches for the meanings of names- This article looks at the origins of names and the searches to find these meanings

The choice of names - Names are reflective of the person or thing which they are given to. Such as “Not Doctor Street”; the residents do not care about the name of the street, rather what the name reflects.

Malcolm X- Malcolm X was an African American and human rights advocate, who was assassinated while giving a speech.

Evolution of names - As identified in the article names grow and change to represent what they reflect. An example of this is Macon Dead III being renamed Milkman through the town gossip.

“We ourselves are our own names” - Our name, or what we are known as, is reflective of the person that we are. Such as Macon Dead I, who was admired and known for his various achievements as a farmer.

Significant Passages, Sections and Quotations from the Book

• "The fathers may soar, and the children may know their names." (Epigraph)

• “Only the unemployed, self-employed and the very young were available...had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.” (4)

• Explains the history of how Mains Avenue became to be known as Not Doctor Street to the Southside residents.

• “It gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital.” (4)

• “In late afternoon, before her husband closed his office…that did nothing to improve either one’s relationship with his father.” (13-15)

• The history of how Freddie rechristened Macon Dead III with the nickname of Milkman when he caught Ruth breast feeding him at an inappropriate age

• “Macon Dead never knew how it came about -- how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness.” (15)

• He guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, he guessed that this name was not clean. Milkman. It certainly didn’t sound like the honest job of a dairy man... It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust.” (15-16)

• “Had even painted the word office on the door. … 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.” (17)

• "[Macon Dead] walked there now -- 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. (17-18)

• 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. … maybe fold it too in a brass box and hang it from her other ear" (18)

• Explains the history of how Macon Dead I got their family name when signing his freedom papers.

• “He had cooperated as a young father with the blind selection of names from the Bible… the naming of the third Macon Dead with the same respect and awe she [Pilate] had treated the boy’s birth.” (18-19)

• Explains the history of how Macon Dead I named his daughter Pilate because he could not read

• “Chose a group of letters that seemed strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging on some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees.” (18)

• "Even while [Milkman] was screaming he wondered why he was suddenly so defensive -- so possessive about his name. He had always hated that name, all of it, and until he and Guitar became friends, he had hated his nickname too. But in Guitar's mouth it sounded clever, grown up. Now he was behaving with this strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal pride, as though she tried to expel him from a very special group." (38)

• "'I asked you did you play any. That why they call you Guitar?' 'Not cause I do play. Because I wanted to. When I was real little. So they tell me . . . It was a contest, in a store down home in Florida. I saw it when my mother took me downtown with her. I was just a baby . . . I cried for it, they said. And always asked about it.'" (45)

• “Mama liked it. Liked the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past. Wipe it al out.” (54)

• “How come they call me Milkman? …. My name is Macon Dead.” (84)

• “Niggers get their names the way they get everything else - the best way they can. The best way they can. … The best way is the right way.” (88)

• “X, Bains -- what difference does it make? … Besides, I do accept it. It’s part of who I am. Guitar is my name. Bains is the slave master’s name. And I’m all of that. Slave names don’t bother me; but salve status does.” (160)

• “Jake the only son of Solomon. … He must have been her lover. (303-304)

• Milkman learns the song about his history and finally learns where his name comes from.

• “Sing’s name was Singing Bird. And my father’s name was Crow at first. Later he changed it to Crowell Byrd.” (322)

• "[Milkman] read the road signs with interest now, wondering what lay beneath the names . . . How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as "Macon Dead," recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do." (329)

• “He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness.” (330)

Significant Sections and Quotations from Article

• “The first discussion of names concerns the name of a street on which much of the action of the story will take place. … The Southside residents are determined that the name their street is given reflect themselves and their memories of one of their own who became ‘the first colored man of consequence in the city.”

• “Our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own,” said by Ralph Ellison in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.”

• “The residents of Southside make the name of their street an announcement of their concern for their own identities as they rebel covertly against a system that would take title to their names and lives as well.”

• “We must learn to wear our names within all the noise and confusion of the environment in which we find ourselves… We must charge them with all our emotions, our hopes hate loves, aspirations. They must become our masks and our shields and the containers of all those values and traditions which we learn and/or imagine as being the meaning of our familial past.” - Ralph Ellison

• “Names define values in the novel because of the crucial ways that they both reveal and conceal true knowledge and true identity. … They find that their names, being “gifts” or questionable value from others out of love or hate, ignorance or accident, must be made their own.”

• “Milkman Dead, Macon the first and Macon the second, Pilate Dead, Sing, Guitar, First Corinthians Dead - all these and others are linked in a quest that is an archetype in the main body of black literature beginning with the slave narratives.”

• Song of Solomon emphasizes names and naming in ways that place the novel squarely within black American literature’s dominant tradition. Works in this tradition enact quests for identity within a culture which systematically denies the black person’s right to both name and identity as a means of denying his or her humanity. … To know one’s name, to tell it, accept it, insist on it are measures of one’s freedom and selfhood and fate.”

• “The rite of naming came to symbolize the act of liberation” - Sidonie Smith

• “William Wells Brown, reacting to the human right to show oneself through one’s name, took back the name “William”. … All the events involved with his struggle for freedom could be identified as part of what was symbolized through his taking back of his name.”

• “I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for a name.” - William Wells Brown

• “For we ourselves are our true names, not their epithets.” - preacher

• Malcolm’s Little’s transformation...was keyed around his taking of the Muslim symbol “X” to signify his mastery of the problem of identity facing all blacks in America.

• “The Black Muslims, discarding their original names in rejection of the bloodstained, the brutal, the sinful images of the past. Thus they would declare new identities, would clarify a new program of intention and destroy the verbal evidence of a willed and ritualized discontinuity of blood and human intercourse.” - Ellison

• “She [Morrison] explores the many options available with the power to name that belong rather uniquely to the black man and woman within American culture and emerges with a novel that affirms both the heritage of the name as a “gift of others” and the function of the name as “witness bearer” to an individual’s treasure of selfhood.”

• “His [Milkman Dead] name makes him the white man’s chattel and so lives by white definitions of success and failure; his father, the second Macon Dead, provides a model for this option. Milkman can reject his name as a burden of shame, as his grandmother had influenced the first Macon Dead to do. He can try to be totally unconcerned with individual names and to lose himself within a group consciousness of protest, as his friend Guitar does. … Aunt Pilate Dead, who accepted a name that carried awful connotation of Christ killer.”

• “The name Pilate was just as often mistaken for the name Pilot, the spelling and meaning of which are not insignificant for the role that Pilate plays in teaching Milkman how to regard himself within his own name. … He sees Pilate, who has treasured every aspect of her own identity from her tragic past to her family to all of her human relationships, as the one who has the best grasp of the power of naming. She is a dramatization of Ellison’s point that “we take what we have and make of our names what we can,” not in “mere forgiveness” or “obsequious insensitivity” but in “conscious acceptance of the harsh realities of the human condition, of the ambiguities and hypocrisies of human history as they have played themselves out in the United States.”

• “Many of the names in the novel grow into meaning, “begat” by accident or misunderstanding yet accruing associations which articulate some truth about the name bearer.”

• “The name [Milkman], which came into being as a joke, evolved into a truth, not about Milkman himself but about his parents, their diseased relationship, and their ambiguous feelings about him.

• “To Macon Dead II, the name means only a heritage of oppression that his father was unable to master or even survive. … Macon Dead II, who hates his name yet abides by it, will never be able to acknowledge this ancestor, for in accepting his name he is actually accepting the idea that the white man can determine his values and control his life.”

• “He [Milkman] learns eventually that the name bore witness to his grandparents’ determination to shape a new identity out of a past.”

• “From his father, Milkman learns that a name can be a title of ownership given gratuitously by those who would rule by force what they cannot know in love. From his grandfather, he learns that a name, though created as accidentally as life itself, can, again like life itself, be shaped to mean anything that a man decides he wants it to show. Yet Milkman’s grandparents hoped to wipe out the past by denying their original name and accepting an arbitrary new one, and the murder of the grandfather showed the futility of that attempt. They could not shape who they wanted to be exclusively on the basis of courage for the present moment and dreams for the future, because their identities were rooted in a past steeped in oppression as well as love and accident.”

• “Love is still the key to naming, and Milkman has two teachers to show him this truth, one whose message is love in death, the other whose lesson is that love keeps identity alive through roots in memory and responsibility. … He [Guitar] received his name out of his desire to have, not his ability to play, the guitar. Guitar’s knowledge of the world grows from the desire and deprivation that were the twin sources of his name.”

• “Guitar can accept his name as the expression of how his heritage has shaped him; in addition he is committed to action to express who he is and what his status should be.”

• “Milkman cannot use Guitar as a model for learning the value of his name to his life because Milkman is, in spite of his detachment from others, committed to living, and to living for himself. “

• “Pilate’s lessons and her wisdom are intimately connected to what her name signifies and to her attitude toward it. … Pilate’s father attempted to give his daughter a name that would be a blessing and a prophecy, so that the motherless child could protect herself and others. … Her name is her charm, symbolizing her love and acceptance of who she is and her resolution to live according to her own lights. The name must bear witness to her life, not her life to the name.”

• “Milkman journeys south until he arrives at his grandfather’s birthplace and also comes home to himself. … Milkman experiences one revelation after another concerning his own actions, his parents, and their shared inheritance. When he returns from the South to Michigan, he has none of the things he started with -- no watch, clothes, money or suitcase -- but he knows his name.”

• “Milkman’s true family name is Solomon; his great-grandfather had escaped slavery in a magical flight that was recorded among his descendant in fable and song. Yet knowledge of name and past endows Milkman with no more than a beginning, a zero point from which to start; they bear witness to but do not fix or limit his life and way of living. What Milkman can learn from his relationships is that the power to give a name is a trifle; the power to give a name its meaning is the power over life itself. ….Milkman’s great-grandfather Solomon’s song of flight to freedom was his and became his people’s for all time because it noted down and remembered, bearing witness to a dream that would not die.”

5 Questions in Relation to the Theme of Naming

1. Discuss the significance of nicknames and the significance of their importance over real names.

2. Morrison begins the novel with the epigraph “The fathers may soar and the children may know their names.” Explain how this relates to the story.

3. How does Morrison present the idea of naming through the use of the setting?

4. "Under the recorded names were other names, just as "Macon Dead," recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning.” What does Morrison mean by this? Explain by using relevant examples from the text.

5. Milkman notices that Pilate can fly “without ever leaving the ground.” Explain the irony of Pilate's name in correlation with the quote.

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