4 ideas
Instead he finds that local children sing a rhyme about 'Solomon' and 'Jake', and by decoding it he learns his great-grandfather Solomon was an enslaved man said to have flown back to Africa, leaving his wife Ryna and twenty-one children behind. His quest for inheritance as money turns into recovery of the family's lost history.
The family surname 'Dead' came from a drunk Union soldier who filled in a Freedmen's Bureau form wrongly, so a clerical error overwrote the family's real name and origins. The novel treats nicknames, place names such as 'Not Doctor Street', and names in songs as the places where suppressed history survives. Recovering the true names is how a person reclaims a self that official records erased.
Solomon's legendary flight is liberation for him but abandonment for Ryna, who is driven mad by grief. The same pattern repeats when Milkman walks away from Hagar, who dies of heartbreak. The novel holds that one person's escape or transcendence is often paid for by the people, usually women, who are left on the ground.
Macon Dead Jr. measures worth through ownership: rent, houses, keys, and gold. His sister Pilate carries a bag of bones, a geography book, and her name in a snuffbox earring. Reading each character by what they treat as inheritance, possessions or relationships and memory, shows who can reach self-knowledge and who is trapped by accumulation.