A place called home

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison is one our greatest living writers. Her novels combine lyrical prose with haunting stories of African-American life in different historical periods. She reveals both the horrors and the joys people experience at the frayed edges of life and death.

Home, her 10^th novel, is short, really a novella. Its use of symbols make it seem almost an allegory as it explores the meaning of “home.” Yet it retains the bite of realism with its detail about life for blacks in 1950s America.

Frank Money is a veteran of the Korean War suffering from what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, “the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.” He has frequent flashbacks of the deaths of two army buddies from his hometown of Lotus, Georgia. The book opens with Frank in a psych hospital after being arrested by police. He escapes and stops at AME Zion Church, where Reverend Locke takes him in and helps him on his way to Chicago through a series of contacts, like the Underground Railroad.

Money, Lotus, Zion, Locke all carry multiple meanings and tell us to look beneath the surface of the story as it explores the meaning of home. That word often carries a cozy, safe resonance for people, but for Frank, Lotus was not such a place. His family moved there after being forced under threat of death by men “both hooded and not” to leave their home in Texas on foot, along with 14 other families. In Lotus, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” Frank tries to protect his younger sister Cee from their mean grandmother, while their parents work themselves to death.

Now Frank is back in his homeland, America, where he faces racist attacks and must be on constant alert, much like on the battlefields of Korea. He receives a letter telling him Cee is in trouble. “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry,” it says.

Morrison intersperses her chapters, which offer not only Frank’s but Cee’s and even the grandmother’s points of view, with short asides, almost like hallucinations, of Frank addressing the omniscient author.

We learn that Cee, who fled Lotus at 14 with a man who married her, then left her in Atlanta, survives, moving from job to job. She ends up working for a wealthy white doctor who does experiments related to eugenics. His experiments on Cee’s womb leave her near death, and the house’s black housekeeper writes Frank.

He arrives and takes Cee back to Lotus. Though filled with dramatic tension, the story has the feel of a Greek myth. In Lotus, a place of lethargy (a la the lotus eaters in Homer), he takes her to a woman known for healing. She takes in Cee and calls on other women in the community to help. They use natural remedies to help her body and their wisdom to heal her spirit.

Morrison is a master of capturing a community’s folk wisdom (see her early novel Sula). She writes: “The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping.” The women tell Cee, whose grandmother treated her like dirt: “You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know.”

These women practice what their mothers taught them “during that period that rich people called the Depression and they called life.” They’ve learned that “mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life.”

Cee returns to Frank, who takes her to a place where as a child he had seen horses. Later, a horrible incident took place there, one that parallels an experience of his from Korea. Up to now, the novel has sometimes bordered on cliché, and parts have felt didactic, but at the end, Morrison draws together her themes with some powerful images that bring some redemption to the meaning of home, which up to then had been anything but safe or peaceful for Frank and Cee.

And this story set long ago resonates in powerful ways with readers in a different era and helps us all explore what can make our homeland a true home.