On February 18, 1931, about fifty black people have gathered to watch Robert Smith—a black insurance agent who works for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company—prepare to fly, using homemade blue silk wings, from the roof of Mercy Hospital across Lake Superior. The group of onlookers includes a stout woman with several children, a gold-toothed man, and a well-dressed pregnant woman—“the dead doctor’s daughter”—with her two daughters. Startled to see Mr. Smith perched atop the hospital roof, the pregnant woman drops her basket of red velvet rose petals, which temporarily distracts the spectators from the spectacle of Mr. Smith. Suddenly, as the crowd scrambles to help the woman’s daughters save the rose petals from being trampled in the snow, another woman, wearing an old quilt and a navy-blue knitted cap, starts to sing.
The hospital’s white staff, who have been watching the black spectators from inside the hospital and are relieved that the crowd has not gathered to riot, cautiously venture outside the hospital and begin moving through the crowd, shouting orders and creating confusion. As the crowd anxiously awaits the arrival of the fire truck summoned by one of the hospital staff, they marvel that a quiet, unassuming man like Mr. Smith would attempt such a daring feat.
Meanwhile, the singing woman advises the pregnant woman to keep warm because her expectant baby will be born the next morning. Suddenly, a roar from the crowd interrupts the two women’s conversation as Mr. Smith temporarily loses his balance. Immediately, the singing woman shifts her attention back to Mr. Smith and resumes her song. By the time the fire truck finally arrives at the hospital, Mr. Smith has already leaped to his death. The next morning, as the singing lady foretold, the pregnant woman gives birth to her baby, a son, who is the first “colored baby” born inside Mercy Hospital.
The narrative now shifts to four years later, and the dead doctor’s daughter, Ruth Foster Dead, is entertaining guests in the spacious house she inherited from her father. As Ruth’s guests eat her nearly inedible sunshine cake, they discuss her “peculiar” four-year-old son, Macon Dead III, who is also in the room. Noticing her son’s discomfort, Ruth allows him to escape upstairs, past the room where his sisters, Lena and Corinthians, are making red velvet roses.
After her guests have gone, Ruth retires to what used to be her father’s study, where she proceeds to breast-feed her “peculiar” son and lose herself in daydreams and fantasies. Consequently, she is startled and embarrassed when Freddie, the “gold-toothed man,” comes to pay his rent and interrupts her secret afternoon ritual of suckling her son. Soon after this incident, Ruth learns that the townspeople are referring to her son as “Milkman.”
The rest of Chapter 1 focuses on the background and history of the Dead family: Ruth and her husband, Macon; their daughters, Lena and Corinthians; their son, now nicknamed Milkman; and Macon’s sister, Pilate, “the singing woman,” a bootlegger who lives in a remote house in the woods with her daughter, Reba, and granddaughter, Hagar. Macon is a domineering, abusive misogynist who hates his wife and sister, is disappointed in his daughters, and generally ignores his son. Ruth and Macon have been married for approximately twenty years but have not had sex since Ruth’s father died several years ago. Macon, who makes his living in real estate, is hated and feared by blacks, who detest his arrogance, and is ignored by whites, who use him to control the town’s black population. We learn that Freddie, one of Macon’s tenants, works for Macon and imagines himself a friend of the Dead family. Knowing Freddie to be an incorrigible gossip, Macon relies on him for information concerning his tenants, totally unaware that Freddie is responsible for nicknaming his son “Milkman.”
As we follow Macon through a typical workday, we share his daydreams concerning his father, his sister, and his early days with Ruth, and we witness his confrontations with two of his tenants, Porter and Mrs. Bains, the “stout woman.” That evening, as Macon walks home after his stressful day and passes Pilate’s house, he pauses to listen to Pilate, Reba, and Hagar singing. Reluctant to return to his own house, where “there was no music,” he heads back to Pilate’s and, under the cover of darkness, again listens to the women singing and watches their peaceful evening ritual.
