Many people may not be familiar with Toni Morrison, a Black novelist, editor, and professor who won a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award in 1988, and the highest literary award possible, the Nobel Prize in 1993. Other Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature include Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Saul Bellow.
Toni Morrison is a literary giant. Her novel “Beloved” was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and she is now a professor emeritus at Princeton University. She will be 85 years old next month.
In 1977 she wrote a novel titled “Song of Solomon.” It is difficult to read without relating it to the current situation in America regarding the deaths of Black men at the hands of white police officers.
There is a character in Song of Solomon who displays very secretive behavior. His name is Guitar, and he belongs to an underground society called the “Seven Days.” The purpose of this group is to carry out revenge killings in response to the killings of Blacks.
It is composed of seven Black men who are each assigned a day of the week with the purpose of killing white people at random every time a Black person is murdered and the assailants are left unpunished.
Each revenge killing must be similar to the original violence against the Black victim—if he was hanged, the white victim would be hanged—and they are performed on the same day of the week as the murder of the Black person. It is interesting to note that the group members were not young men but rather mature men who had experienced a great deal of racism in their lives.
Guitar was planning a replication of the 1963 bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four little Black girls were killed. However, he died before he could carry this out.
Guitar said that whites are “unnatural” people who would murder and pillage under certain circumstances, and that Adolph Hitler only murdered Jews because there were no Blacks around. His view was that Blacks had to take drastic action to avenge assaults against them because they did not have access to legal recourse.
The novel is not one-sided. Other characters disagree vehemently with Guitar and try to get him to see everyone as an individual rather than painting them all with a broad brush.
When you finish the novel the inescapable conclusion is that nearly 40 years later nothing has changed for Black people. They are still murdered with their assailants left unpunished, and they are still denied legal justice.
How would the Seven Days group handle what has gone on in America over the past couple of years regarding the murder of Black people by white people, many of whom wear police uniforms?
A 17-year-old white boy would be found on the lawn of an apartment complex in Florida with a bullet in his chest, like Trayvon Martin.
A very large 18-year-old white boy would be found dead on a street in Missouri with six gunshot wounds, three to the head, like Michael Brown.
A 12-year-old white boy would be found dead in a park in Ohio with a chest wound, like Tamir Rice.
A 50-year-old white man would be found in a park in South Carolina with five bullets in his back, like Walter Scott.
A large, heavy white man in his 40’s would be found choked to death in Staten Island, like Eric Garner.
These are merely the tip of the iceberg. A modern Seven Days group would be working round-the-clock trying to catch up on revenge.
This would be done in a clandestine manner. There would be no claims of responsibility, no warnings of future activity, no identification of the avengers.
What would white America’s response be to this? Would it be able to figure out why these people were killed? Would there be a call for behavioral change to avoid retaliation, or would white folks just double down and kill more Black people unjustly and invite more revenge?
Don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t win a Nobel Prize, and I didn’t propose this in a novel four decades
ago. I’m just reporting what I read.
I report, you decide.
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