“Strutting” Black Fathers: The Pitfall of the Black Middle-Class Patriarchal Vision in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

This essay discusses the black middle class patriarchal vision for black liberation that is portrayed in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Unlike her previous novels, Morrison foregrounds the strong black fathers who are domestically authoritative and economically affluent. The “strutting” black fathers in the novel seemingly liberate blackness from its necessary association with poverty/servitude and fashion a new vision for racial uplift. For this reason, Morrison criticism has vastly read Song of Solomon as the novel that revises the myths of black manhood and finds a hopeful vision from the middle class black patriarchy. However, this essay contends that the middle class black fathers are not redemptive nationalists but greedy businessmen who are servile to and complicit with whites in order to accumulate their wealth. They simply capitalize on the racial segregation of the United States to gain the material basis for self-authority. Their self-authority and economic power are only limited to and recognized only within the segregated black community; they still remain servile to the white people outside the black community. In this context, rather than finding a hopeful vision in the patriarchal fathers, this essay reads Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a novel that registers the failure of the vision projected to strutting black fathers which was prevalent during the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In other words, the seemingly redemptive black patriarchs are not able to offer any liberatory vision for black Americans because their vision was not accompanied by political and racial consciousness and simply attempted to bleach their blackness with material success.