Namwali Serpell

Somebody ought to tell your murderer that, said Guitar.

Morrison emphasizes the joke for us by capitalizing the D in I'm already dead.

This wouldn't be audible in a spoken exchange, but he's talking here about his own name.

Morrison felt that naming and the way black Americans name each other was a particular form of language.

It was very – when she's listing off various things we do, call and response –

The blues form antiphony back and forth.

She'll say, and naming.

And it's because the specific way that people named each other often has a kind of pun in it, right, or kind of irony to it.

So you have, for example, Milkman is named Milkman because he breastfed too long.

So it's punning on Macon, Milkman.

They sound a little bit similar.

But this is – in his name is built in an insult that he received for breastfeeding too long, right?

And Pilate is a wonderful example because it's said very specifically that Pilate, whose name comes from Pontius Pilate in the Bible, that –

anything about Pontius Pilate, the figure, the character, the person that inspired the naming of this young girl, it was the look of the letters, that her father liked the look of the letters.

Her father couldn't read, so he just liked what the letters looked like.

But for Morrison, there's another pun available here, which is that pilot sounds like pilot, like an airplane pilot, and this novel is all about flying.

Right.

So you have Morrison kind of taking advantage of the irony of punning names to do her own thing aesthetically.

It's so interesting because that specific historical incident, the killing of Emmett Till, also became the basis for Morrison's play, Dreaming Emmett.

And when you look at the drafts of Dreaming Emmett, which you can now do in Morrison's archives at Princeton, what you find is this movement toward greater and greater distortion of the history.