educated black woman who has never been allowed to use her education: "Unfit for any work other than the making of red velvet roses, she had a hard time finding employment befitting her degree" (Morrison 188). As was true for most women, and particularly black women, the only way she could escape from the life she hated was to marry, since all doors were otherwise closed to her. The older she gets, the less likely this will happen--there is a third element of discrimination in getting old.
Milkman, then, is the last male who might achieve something in the family. The fact that the family name is "Dead" refers directly to the state of decay in which black society finds itself, tending toward death rather than life, dying out rather than living. Milkman himself has been pampered and cared for by the womenfolk in his family--his mother breast-fed him too long and the others have tried to protect him, fearful of his being lost as have the other men in the family. The result, however, is that he is not really a man but a boy in a man's body. He has not learned how to show his feelings because he has concentrated on hiding them from the women. When he does want to know about his family and to find a sense of his own identity, he turns to those same women because he knows that they have the answers, just as they always have had.
Milkman's late start is exemplified not only in his name but in the course of his life. He does not meet Pilate until he is twelve years old, and by then he is hungry for the story of his family and for a way to find himself in that story. She tells him the story of his grandfather and how that man, also named Macon Dead (Milkman's real name) was killed while defending his farm from a mob of whites. Pilate knows because she was there, as was his father. The two escaped together. Yet, his distant father never said anything about it to the boy. The older man has shut off his past and by doing so ...