Milkman

Milkman’s ending is ambiguous and, in some ways, anticlimactic. Burns doesn’t depict milkman’s death directly; he dies sometime between the end of Chapter 6 and the beginning of Chapter 7 under circumstances that are themselves murky. The state, after all, had previously “shot a binman, two busdrivers, a road sweeper, a real milkman [...] then another person who didn’t have any blue-collar or service-industry connections—all in mistake for Milkman” (303). Further confusion then arises from the discovery that “Milkman” was actually milkman’s surname. The overall effect of this lack of clarity is to dilute the emotional impact of what has happened; bearing in mind the threat he posed to middle sister, milkman’s unceremonious death may seem too easy a solution.

Throughout the novel, however, milkman’s power has stemmed less from anything about him as an individual and more from the institutions he has at his back—not just the paramilitary, but also the patriarchal norms that privilege a middle-aged man over an 18-year-old woman. None of these power structures disappears with milkman’s death; the very same night, middle sister nearly falls victim to rape or murder at the hands of a different man altogether. In this respect, it makes sense that milkman’s death goes comparatively unnoticed in the novel; the misogyny that enabled his harassment of middle sister is still very much alive.

With that said, there are signs that the situation is changing. Although McSomebody’s assault on middle sister is not what lands him in court, he is initially charged with “one-quarter rape” (311) for having entered a women’s bathroom. The idea of one-quarter rape, which is the “district’s default sexual charge” (312), is a feeble attempt on the part of the paramilitaries to prove that they are up to speed on matters of gender equality. However, as laughable as middle sister clearly finds the idea, the mere fact that the paramilitaries felt pressured to come up with it speaks to a shift in public attitude: “In those days [...] with times achanging, with the approach of the Eighties, it was getting that women had to be cajoled, had to be kept in with” (311).

Ultimately, however, it isn’t the actions of those in power, but rather the actions of the district’s women and girls that make the novel’s ending a hopeful one. Chapter 7 offers three examples of women collectively pushing back against either outright misogyny, or the kind of toxic masculinity it often correlates with: the women who beat up Somebody McSomebody for encroaching on their privacy, the women who intervene on real milkman’s behalf, and the girls who decide to waltz in the streets without the cooperation of the local boys. For instance, when real milkman was arrested for digging up the paramilitary weapons stash, the women staged a sit-in that ultimately forced the paramilitaries to let him off lightly:

Undeniable it was to the renouncers that these women meant their loyal binlids and their loyal whistles, also their loyal sewing-up of arteries. But it was only undeniable to the same extent that they also meant their threatened betrayal of the renouncers (322).

In essence, the women’s protest reveals the men’s authority to be illusory, because without the help of the community’s women, they wouldn’t be able to carry on their separatist campaign. Similarly, these sorts of actions can make the very premise of that authority look foolish; when women begin to go to visit real milkman in the hospital, several paramilitaries are forced to admit that those women are in fact their own mothers. The effect is to make the men look like boys, and their militarism like play—an impression Burns underscores in the novel’s final pages, when the neighborhood boys refuse to give up their mock warfare to dance with the girls, only to be cheerfully ignored.