I was permitted to review Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' for my college newspaper to review Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22,' Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook' and Gunter Grass's 'The Of the 20 years or so I've spent pretending to be an adult, only five have been devoted to book reviewing. Even if white people dominate him, he’ll dominate his wife and children.Ometimes you get lucky. It’s not totally clear why Macon has so much respect for a naming system that’s clearly a relic of slavery, but based on what we know about him, it seems that Macon is in favor of power and domination. By preserving this naming system, Macon seems to accept the structures of power and domination that kept his ancestors in bondage just as he accepts and never changes the “Sonny’s Shop” sign.

Macon’s family uses randomly chosen Christian names, a clear echo of the way slave masters used to name the people they enslaved. Morrison’s characters live in a world where they don’t have access to “true” names in other words, they either have to make do with the names they’re given, or find a way to create new names. Macon believes in the existence of “true” names, but it’s unclear if such a thing is even possible. The persistence of the obsolete “Sonny’s Shop” sign is yet another signal that Song of Solomon is about the importance of names and, more specifically, about the disagreement between names and the things they’re supposed to describe. It’s interesting, then, that Morrison doesn’t (and won’t) reveal the name of the town where her novel is set - it’s as if it could be happening anywhere. Yet though the town’s Black community fails to establish the name “Doctor Street,” they find a way to rebel against the white officials by giving the street an informal name, “Not Doctor Street.” Names can be a tool of oppression, but they can also be tools of rebellion, they can be a way of hiding a culture, but they are also things that a person or community can make their own. The message is clear: only powerful people have the right to name things - in short, naming is power. In just a few paragraphs, she describes the history of a name: “Doctor Street.” The first conflict between Black people and white people in the novel is a conflict over what to name a place: though Black people live on the street and want to name it after an important Black person who lived there, white people insist on giving it a bland, generic name.

In the process, she establishes a key theme of the novel, the importance of names. Slowly, Morrison begins to explain Smith’s flight.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison