Milkman and Antoinette: Social Isolation
As the semester is coming to a close, I thought I’d look back on the books we’ve read this year. I was attempting to find commonalities between the books, but while there are some similarities between a few, it’s difficult to find something that applies across the span of all of the books we’ve read. So I decided to focus on Song of Solomon. Something about Milkman’s situation struck me as familiar and I realized that I could see a lot of similarities between him and Antoinette, especially pertaining to their social status. Neither of them really fit into their surroundings. Antoinette, born on the island with a French mother, doesn’t quite fit in with the Creole community, however since she is still white, she doesn’t fit in with the freed slaves, either. Milkman is in a somewhat similar situation. He clearly doesn’t fit in with the whites because despite his wealth, he is still black and would not fit into white society of the time. However