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Chapter Three: Replacement Mothering in Song of Solomon
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“I was having some trouble in the beginning, and writing in a desultory, aimless way, and then a terrible thing happened. My father died and I found myself so bereft, knowing he was not there, and so miserable that I gave up. But I remember thinking, ‘I have got to do something about this book,’ and when I sat down to do some preliminary notes, I remember thinking how convenient it would be if I knew what my father knew. For some reason that was the trick; it opened the door for me …. you go into another person’s mind, in this case my father’s, saying, if I knew what he knew about his friends, his father, his life, then I would know how to treat these men…. That gave me a very powerful sense of security.” (Morrison in Bigsby interview 270).
In her 2004 “Foreword” to the reissue of Song of Solomon, Morrison elaborated further on what she saw as her (deceased) father’s role in her creation of the Milkman Dead story—and of that young man’s family through several generations. The novel, originally published in 1977, was dedicated simply to “Daddy.”
In the second paragraph of the “Foreword,” Morrison writes again of her “unmanageable sadness,” this time grouping herself with her three siblings to draw a moving portrait of the family’s loss of their father. “Each of his four children was convinced that he loved her or him...
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