Tainted by Education: Characters in Song of Solomon
Summary:
Through the characters in her work Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison shows how education plays a profound role in an individual's perspective on life. She is saying in effect that one must have an education based on experience in order to be able to achieve a healthy sense of self-awareness. The characters in Song of Solomon display the degree to which they are tainted by their education, their sense of perspective having been forever altered by their environment and by events that they endured as children.
There is an old Confucian adage that says: "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime." The two sentences have more than a grain of truth to them, for they emphasize the essential truth of education: that the purpose of education is not to teach us about the world, but rather to give us the tools and skills necessary to percieve in our own light, and deal with it as we see fit. Characters such as the two Deads are clear examples of how education leaves a profound impact on point of view at life, and how the shortcommings of can lead to an incomplete development of a personality. It is clear that emphasis is placed on the enviroment in which the education takes place as well as the various events that they had to endure as children. Throughout Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the author uses examples of characters in the novel in order to show that in order to attain self-awareness, one must first have completed a experiental education to aquire the skills and insight necessary to have a healthy perspective on life.
The most emphasis during a character's developmental education is placed on the childhood. This is where most of the characters have their perspectives on life altered by personal events. Guitar Bains is such a character; his hate of white men started ever since his "father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us kids some candy" (Morrison 61). From that moment on, Guitar was infused with a hatred for white people. Negative experiences of the smiliar sort occur repeatedly, such as the dim-witted nurse's bossing around of Guitar: "Listen. Go around to the back of the hospital... It will say 'Emergency Admissions' on the door. A-D-M-I-S-I-O-N-S" (Morrison 7). These incidences only bred hate within Guitar, teaching him only how to look down upon his fellow man. Hate which was directed only at white people at the beginning would only serve to consume him and sooner or later, cause him to lash out and even kill his fellow African Americans. Morrison, however, also makes a point to show that an incorrect or incomplete experiential education can be harmful. Having been given the tools only to see the world in a black-and-white perspective of the world, Guitar comes to possess a skewed view of the world which condemns him to be a flawed character. Morrison, however, makes Guitar out to be an intelligent individual, after the bossy nurse had misspelled the word "Admissions", Guitar had the courage to say to her, "You left out a s, ma'am" (Morrison 7).
Macon Dead Jr. is the next prime example of an education gone wrong. Macon's fault was loving his father too much. His father had been the one giving him his experiential education but due to his tragic end, Macon was left with a skewed perception of the world as well. His final memories of his father were not peaceful ones:
"The numbness that had settled on him when he saw the man he loved and admired fall off the fence; something wild ran thought him when he watched the body twitch in the dirt. His father had sat for five nights on a split-rail fence cradling a shotgun and in the end died protecting his property" (Morrison 51).
From the moment his father had made contact with the dirt, Macon's education became scrambled. He had loved his father so much that he associated his final images with that of defending property. Macon Dead's fanatical attachment to material possessions is a direct result of associating love for his father with the ownership of property. From that point on, Macon Dead was equipped only a viewpoint on life that only registered property and monetary values as a means of understanding life. The end result was a pragmatic and greedy man. After Milkman visits Pilate, Macon declares:
"Pilate can't teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too" (Morrison 55).
To Macon, the ownership of things is what gives him personal identity and a false feeling of self-awareness though "owning oneself." Anything that cannot create money is considered not worth the time and is immediately dismissed. Since these was the perspective on life that he was set with since birth, Macon Dead has no other way he can perceive the world. Because of his incomplete and misplaced results of his education, Macon Dead can never truly transcend being tied to the Earth and fly.
Perhaps as the supreme example of experiential education, Milkman was one of the few characters in the book to have a complete and untainted education, and thus, could view the world with a healthy perspective. No profound incident in his life had skewed his vision of the world, although Macon Dead came close when he tried to mold and fashion his own son to be a carbon copy of his personality. Milkman's journey comprises of many small steps and even in between, there are moments in which, as James Baldwin describes, Milkman "look[s] at the world for himself to make his own decisions."
"The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from... After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street... He turned around to see where everybody was going, but there was nothing to see except their backs and hats pressing forward into the night" (Morrison 78).
Small epiphanies such as these encourage Milkman's discovery of his self. Gradually, his perception of the world grows proportionally to how much education he has received, reflecting his most influential experiences. Milkman may have been spurred for the selfish reasons, but the very same reasons set him on the path to a correct and healthy education, and like Pilate, after his education is complete, he is able to attain a true sense of self and shed the material connection to the Earth.
Each one of the characters had different examples of education--Macon and his father, Guitar and the way white people treated him, and Milkman and his small realizations in society. Toni Morrison creates characters that were directly results of their conditioning at childhood, having their perspective of their world being altered by events that occur during moments of great emotion. Many of these are failures, as they are all tainted by their education, and as a result, they are forced to look at the world through the only pair of glasses they knew.
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