SOURCE: Holloway, Karla F. C. “The Lyrical Dimensions of Spirituality: Music, Voice, and Language in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” In Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, pp. 197-211. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Holloway examines Morrison's use of lyrical female voices in The Bluest Eye and The Song of Solomon as a celebration of African-American spirituality and cultural identity.

In the final pages of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, an aged, weary, and dying Pilate grants her nephew Milkman her supreme gift—she gives him her voice and urges him to sing. His song, “Oh Sugargirl don't leave me here” that “he could not stop … from coming,” is a passioned embrace of his lineage. Through voicing the “worn old words” of the text that links him to his past, Milkman acknowledges his...