Yvette 是 Toni Morrison 的忠實讀者，擁有她所有的書，只有一本書《黑寶寶》沒看完。

上星期教到她的《所羅門之歌》，這本小說巧妙的用一首流傳久遠而且歌詞因為傳唱出錯的兒歌和聖經交織，讓男主角憑著兒歌中的故事找到他的本家根源。《聖經‧所羅門之歌》本來就是傳抄錯誤的美麗詩篇，Morrison 藉此發揮想像：男主角一家本姓所羅門，可是解放黑奴時期戶政人員出錯讓這家三代人都姓 Dead。

真恨不得 PChome 有錄音程式，咱家就可以在這裡唸給大家聽。(我發覺我上課的時候只要稍微唸一小段，全班就醒過來了，比卜學亮 rap 〈孔子的中心思想是個仁〉有用。)

Morrison 雖然寫的是小說，可是句句都像詩。相信周小生看這種小說也會驚跳，然後收成床頭書。

Song of Solomon
By Toni Morrison

Chapter 1

The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from
Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days
before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:

At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take
off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I
loved you all.

(signed) Robert Smith,
Ins. agent


Mr. Smith didn’t draw as big a crowd as Lindbergh had four years
earlier--not more than forty or fifty people showed up--because it
was already eleven o’clock in the morning, on the very Wednesday he
had chosen for his flight, before anybody read the note. At that
time of day, during the middle of the week, word-of-mouth news just lumbered along. Children were in school; men were at work; and most
of the women were fastening their corsets and getting ready to go
see what tails or entrails the butcher might be giving away. Only
the unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young were available-
-deliberately available because they’d heard about it, or accidentally available because they happened to be walking at that
exact moment in the shore end of Not Doctor Street, a name the post
office did not recognize. Town maps registered the street as Mains
Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died
on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to
calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor
Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal
service became a popular means of transferring messages among them,
envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama,and Georgia began to
arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The
post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to
the Dead Letter Office. Then in 1918, when colored men were being
drafted, a few gave their address at the recruitment office as
Doctor Street. In that way, the name acquired a quasi-official
status. But not for long. Some of the city legislators, whose
concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city’s
landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it
that ”Doctor Street” was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had
notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that
part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and
southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of
routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to
and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and
would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.

It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave
Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please
the 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 since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith’s
leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was
allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps. The
reason for the hospital’s generosity to that particular woman was
not the fact that she was the only child of this Negro doctor, for
during his entire professional life he had never been granted
hospital privileges and only two of his patients were ever admitted
to Mercy, both white. Besides, the doctor had been dead a long time
by 1931. It must have been Mr. Smith’s leap from the roof over
their heads that made them admit her. In any case, whether or not
the little insurance agent’s conviction that he could fly
contributed to the place of her delivery, it certainly contributed
to its time.

When the dead doctor’s daughter saw Mr. Smith emerge as promptly as
he had promised from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings
curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck
basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them about,
up, down, and into small mounds of snow. Her half-grown daughters
scrambled about trying to catch them, while their mother moaned and
held the underside of her stomach. The rose-petal scramble got a lot
of attention, but the pregnant lady’s moans did not. Everyone knew
the girls had spent hour after hour tracing, cutting, and stitching
the costly velvet, and that Gerhardt’s Department Store would be
quick to reject any that were soiled.

It was nice and gay there for a while. The men joined in trying to
collect the scraps before the snow soaked through them--snatching
them from a gust of wind or plucking them delicately from the snow.
And the very young children couldn’t make up their minds whether to
watch the man circled in blue on the roof or the bits of red
flashing around on the ground. Their dilemma was solved when a woman
suddenly burst into song. The singer, standing at the back of the
crowd, was as poorly dressed as the doctor’s daughter was well
dressed. The latter had on a neat gray coat with the traditional
pregnant-woman bow at her navel, a black cloche, and a pair of four-
button ladies’ galoshes. The singing woman wore a knitted navy cap
pulled far down over her forehead. She had wrapped herself up in an
old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her
eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto:

O Sugarman done fly away
Sugarman done gone
Sugarman cut across the sky
Sugarman gone home....

A few of the half a hundred or so people gathered there nudged each
other and sniggered. Others listened as though it were the helpful
and defining piano music in a silent movie. They stood this way for
some time, none of them crying out to Mr. Smith, all of them
preoccupied with one or the other of the minor events about them,
until the hospital people came.

They had been watching from the windows--at first with mild
curiosity, then, as the crowd seemed to swell to the very walls of
the hospital, they watched with apprehension. They wondered if one
of those things that racial-uplift groups were always organizing was
taking place. But when they saw neither placards nor speakers, they
ventured outside into the cold: white-coated surgeons, dark-jacketed
business and personnel clerks, and three nurses in starched jumpers.

The sight of Mr. Smith and his wide blue wings transfixed them for a
few seconds, as did the woman’s singing and the roses strewn about.
Some of them thought briefly that this was probably some form of
worship. Philadelphia, where Father Divine reigned, wasn’t all that
far away. Perhaps the young girls holding baskets of flowers were
two of his virgins. But the laughter of a gold-toothed man brought
them back to their senses. They stopped daydreaming and swiftly got
down to business, giving orders. Their shouts and bustling caused
great confusion where before there had been only a few men and some
girls playing with pieces of velvet and a woman singing.

One of the nurses, hoping to bring some efficiency into the
disorder, searched the faces around her until she saw a stout woman
who looked as though she might move the earth if she wanted to.

”You,” she said, moving toward the stout woman. ”Are these your
children?”

The stout woman turned her head slowly, her eyebrows lifted at the
carelessness of the address. Then, seeing where the voice came from,
she lowered her brows and veiled her eyes.

”Ma’am?”
”Send one around back to the emergency office. Tell him to tell the
guard to get over here quick. That boy there can go. That one.” She
pointed to a cat-eyed boy about five or six years old.

The stout woman slid her eyes down the nurse’s finger and looked at
the child she was pointing to.

”Guitar, ma’am.”
”What?”
”Guitar.”

The nurse gazed at the stout woman as though she had spoken Welsh.
Then she closed her mouth, looked again at the cat-eyed boy, and
lacing her fingers, spoke her next words very slowly to him.

”Listen. Go around to the back of the hospital to the guard’s
office. It will say ’Emergency Admissions’ on the door. A-D-M-I-S-I-
O-N-S. But the guard will be there. Tell him to get over here-- on
the double. Move now. Move!” She unlaced her fingers and made
scooping motions with her hands, the palms pushing against the
wintry air.

A man in a brown suit came toward her, puffing little white clouds
of breath. ”Fire truck’s on its way. Get back inside. You’ll freeze
to death.”

The nurse nodded.

”You left out a s, ma’am,” the boy said. The North was new to him
and he had just begun to learn he could speak up to white people.
But she’d already gone, rubbing her arms against the cold.
”Granny, she left out a s.”
”And a ’please.’ ”
”You reckon he’ll jump?”
”A nutwagon do anything.”
”Who is he?”
”Collects insurance. A nutwagon.”
”Who is that lady singing?”
”That, baby, is the very last thing in pea-time.” But she smiled
when she looked at the singing woman, so the cat-eyed boy listened
to the musical performance with at least as much interest as he
devoted to the man flapping his wings on top of the hospital.

The crowd was beginning to be a little nervous now that the law was
being called in. They each knew Mr. Smith. He came to their houses
twice a month to collect one dollar and sixty-eight cents and write
down on a little yellow card both the date and their eighty-four
cents a week payment. They were always half a month or so behind, and talked endlessly to him about paying ahead--after they had a
preliminary discussion about what he was doing back so soon anyway.

”You back in here already? Look like I just got rid of you.”
”I’m tired of seeing your face. Really tired.”
”I knew it. Soon’s I get two dimes back to back, here you come. More
regular than the reaper. Do Hoover know about you?”

They kidded him, abused him, told their children to tell him they
were out or sick or gone to Pittsburgh. But they held on to those
little yellow cards as though they meant something--laid them gently
in the shoe box along with the rent receipts, marriage licenses, and
expired factory identification badges. Mr. Smith smiled through it
all, managing to keep his eyes focused almost the whole time on his
customers’ feet. He wore a business suit for his work, but his
house was no better than theirs. He never had a woman that any of
them knew about and said nothing in church but an occasional ”
Amen.” He never beat anybody up and he wasn’t seen after dark, so
they thought he was probably a nice man. But he was heavily
associated with illness and death, neither of which was
distinguishable from the brown picture of the North Carolina Mutual
Life Building on the back of their yellow cards. Jumping from the
roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done. None of them had suspected he had it in him. Just goes to show, they
murmured to each other, you never really do know about people.

The singing woman quieted down and, humming the tune, walked through
the crowd toward the rose-petal lady, who was still cradling her
stomach.

”You should make yourself warm,” she whispered to her, touching
her lightly on the elbow. ”A little bird’ll be here with the
morning.”
”Oh?” said the rose-petal lady. ”Tomorrow morning?”
”That’s the only morning coming.”
”It can’t be,” the rose-petal lady said. ”It’s too soon.”
”No it ain’t. Right on time.”

The women were looking deep into each other’s eyes when a loud roar
went up from the crowd--a kind of wavy oo sound. Mr. Smith had lost
his balance for a second, and was trying gallantly to hold on to a
triangle of wood that jutted from the cupola. Immediately the
singing woman began again:

O Sugarman done fly
O Sugarman done gone . . .

Downtown the firemen pulled on their greatcoats, but when they
arrived at Mercy, Mr. Smith had seen the rose petals, heard the music, and leaped on into the air.

The next day a colored baby was born inside Mercy for the first
time. Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark,
because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr.
Smith had learned earlier--that only birds and airplanes could fly--
he lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single
gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he
appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother. The
ones who did, who accepted her invitations to tea and envied the
doctor’s big dark house of twelve rooms and the green sedan, called
him ”peculiar.” The others, who knew that the house was more
prison than palace, and that the Dodge sedan was for Sunday drives only, felt sorry for Ruth Foster and her dry daughters, and called
her son ”deep.” Even mysterious.

”Did he come with a caul?”
”You should have dried it and made him some tea from it to drink.
If you don’t he’ll see ghosts.”
”You believe that?”
”I don’t, but that’s what the old people say.”
”Well, he’s a deep one anyway. Look at his eyes.”

And they pried pieces of baked-too-fast sunshine cake from the roofs
of their mouths and looked once more into the boy’s eyes. He met
their gaze as best he could until, after a pleading glance toward
his mother, he was allowed to leave the room.

It took some planning to walk out of the parlor, his back washed
with the hum of their voices, open the heavy double doors leading to
the dining room, slip up the stairs past all those bedrooms, and not
arouse the attention of Lena and Corinthians sitting like big baby
dolls before a table heaped with scraps of red velvet. His sisters
made roses in the afternoon. Bright, lifeless roses that lay in peck
baskets for months until the specialty buyer at Gerhardt’s sent
Freddie the janitor over to tell the girls that they could use
another gross. If he did manage to slip by his sisters and avoid
their casual malice, he knelt in his room at the window sill and
wondered again and again why he had to stay level on the ground. The
quiet that suffused the doctor’s house then, broken only by the
murmur of the women eating sunshine cake, was only that: quiet. It
was not peaceful, for it was preceded by and would soon be
terminated by the presence of Macon Dead.