Has anybody read "Song of Solomon," by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni
Morrison? My son will be reading this book in a high school English
literature class next year. Because I had not read any of Morrison's
works, I picked up the book and have just finished it. I would certainly
like to be a fly on the wall during a class discussion.
A major event in the story is the surprising of a mother nursing her four
year old son, at home, by a kind of janitor-handyman who sees them through
the window. He spreads the word throughout the community, the mother hides
away at home for 2 months, and the child acquires the nickname "Milkman,"
by which he is known into his adulthood. The mother's extended nursing of
her child is portrayed as the result of her frustration over the lack of
any sexual relationship with her husband, who despises her. It is the
mother who encourages her son to nurse, not the child who initiates it.
This child grows up unable to feel any closeness with others in his family
(either parent or his two older sisters). He uses other people as objects,
never appreciating them as human beings.
I worry about the message this gives to any readers, but high school and
college-age readers especially. What reactions have other Lactnetters had
to this book? How would you approach this subject with the teacher? I am
against censorship of school reading materials, but I had thought of
perhaps writing a note to the teacher to give my perspective as a lactation
consultant on the topic of extended nursing, or even inviting him to Kathy
Dettwyler's lecture on "the Natural Age of Weaning," to be held here in
September at the LLL Area Conference. I am not sure my son would be willing
to bring up this perspective in a class discussion. (He hasn't read the
book as yet.)
Here is a partial quote from the text, so that you can see the beauty of
the language and imagery, as well as some of the misinformation that
disturbs me:
"She sat in this room holding her son on her lap, staring at his
closed eyelids and listening to the sound of his sucking. Staring
not so much from maternal joy as from a wish to avoid seeing his legs
dangling almost to the floor.
In late afternoon, before her husband closed his office and came
home, she called her son to her. When he came into the little room
she unbuttoned her blouse and smiled. He was too young to be dazzled
by her nipples, but he was old enough to be bored by the flat taste of
mother's milk, so he came reluctantly, as to a chore, and lay as he had
at least once each day of his life in his mother's arms, and tried to
pull the thin, faintly sweet milk from her flesh without hurting her
with his teeth.
She felt him. His restraint, his courtesy, his indifference, all of
which pushed her into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his
lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were
a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller's daughter - the one
who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power
Rumplestiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very
own shuttle. And that was the other part of her pleasure, a
pleasure she
hated to give up. So when Freddie the janitor, who liked to pretend
he was a friend of the family and not just their flunky as well as
their
tenant, brought his rent to the doctor's house late one day and looked
in the window past the evergreen, the terror that sprang to Ruth's eyes
came from the quick realization that she was to lose fully half of
what
made her daily life bearable. Freddie, however, interpreted her
look as
simple shame, but that didn't stop him from grinning.
'Have mercy. I be damn.'
He fought the evergreen for a better look, hampered more by his
laughter than by the branches. Ruth jumped up as quickly as she could
and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for
him what he had begun to suspect - that these afternoons were strange
and wrong..."
Anne Altshuler, RN, MS, IBCLC and LLL Leader in Madison, WI
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