n that is not obvious but rather concealed by varying accounts of family history and the emotional investment that individual family members have in keeping family secrets or altering the facts of their own experience. Milkman's project of ferreting out the facts of his family history leads him to act on his discovery of the facts in a way that establishes an absolute reality and absolutely clear identity for himself, thereby liberating what Campbell would refer to as the flow of his family's life into the body of the world. It is the supreme irony of the novel that this discovery and the enactment of liberation occurs at the moment of Milkman's (and therefore the Dead family line's) death. However, that irony transfigures the realism of the narrative in a way that dissolves into magic because it symbolically completes the assertion of freedom made by Milkman's great grandfather, the liberated slave. The process by which Song of Solomon arrives at that moment of transfiguration is, as Campbell might have it, "alive with symbolical suggestion" from such varied sources as Biblical tradition, classical myth, and the history of Africans in America--all in the context of a recognizable family working out problems that are at once familiar in structure and eerily peculiar in detail.
Morrison merges traditional Western mythic and cultural referents with invented family history and African myth to uncover mythic resonances, or more exactly to assert a mythic resonance by means of her characters' project of uncovering historical family truth. The history of the Macon Dead line may not speak for the whole of American black culture because the details of that history are highly idiosyncratic. On the other hand, the particular facts of the Dead family experience can be read as an example of the more general historical experience of race-based oppression. The fact that Grandfather Macon Dead, a moderately prosperous farmer in rural Appalachia, wa...