Extract

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A man leaps from a hospital roof, convinced he can fly, and the image lingers like a prophecy waiting to be understood. This 1977 masterwork follows Milkman Dead from a stifling Michigan household southward through time, toward a family history tangled with myth, violence, and the memory of ancestors who, legend says, flew back to Africa. The prose moves between lyric intensity and devastating wit, and the supporting cast, especially the fierce Pilate carrying her name in a brass earring, is among the richest in American fiction. Morrison recovers a genealogy slavery tried to erase, making naming itself a form of resurrection. To know where you come from is to know whether you can fly. The leap at the end answers the beginning.