“We led him out on a mule.”
“All he won was his life, which I doubt was worth much to him after that.”
“I don’t believe they stopped that mess till Pearl Harbor,” Salem said.
“When was this?” Frank clamped his jaw.
“When was what?”
“When the son, Jerome, came here.”
“Long time. Ten or fifteen years, I reckon.”
Frank was turning to leave when another question surfaced. “By the way, what happened to the horses?”
“I believe they sold ’em,” said Salem.
Fish Eye nodded. “Yep. To a slaughterhouse.”
“What?” That’s hard to believe, thought Frank.
“Horse was the only meat not rationed during the war, see,” said Fish Eye. “Ate some myself in Italy. France too. Tastes just like beef but sweeter.”
“You ate some in the good old U.S.A. too, but you didn’t know it.” Andrew laughed.
Salem, impatient to get back to the chessboard, changed the subject. “Say, how’s your sister?”
“Mended,” Frank answered. “She’ll be all right.”
“She say what happened to my Ford?”
“That would be the last thing on her mind, Grandpappy. And it should be the last thing on yours.”
“Yeah, well.” Salem moved his queen.
SIXTEEN
Cee refused to give up the quilt. Frank wanted it for something, something that was bothering him. The quilt was the first one she had made by herself. As soon as she could sit up without pain or bleeding, neighborhood women took over the sickroom and started sorting pieces while they discussed her medications and the most useful prayers Jesus would take notice of. They sang, too, while they stitched together the palette they had agreed upon. She knew her own quilt wasn’t very good, but Frank said it was perfect. Perfect for what? He wouldn’t say.
“Come on, Cee. I need it. And you have to come with me. Both of us have to be there.”
“Be where?”
“Trust me.”
He was late for dinner and when he came through the door he was perspiring and out of breath as though he had been running. A piece of sanded wood the size of a ruler stuck out of his back pocket. And he held a shovel.
Cee told him no. Absolutely not. Sloppy as the quilt was, she treasured its unimpressive pattern and haphazard palette. Frank insisted. By his perspiration and the steel in his eyes Cee understood that whatever he was up to was very important to him. Reluctantly she slid on her sandals and followed him, embarrassed again by the mediocrity of the quilt he carried over his shoulder. Perhaps anyone who saw them would think they were going out to fish. At five o’clock? With a shovel? Hardly.
They walked toward the edge of town, then turned onto a wagon road—the same one they had followed as children. When Cee, handicapped by her thin sandals, kept stumbling on the stones, Frank slowed his pace and took her hand in his. There was no point in questioning him. Just as long ago, when they ventured hand in hand into unknown territory, Cee accompanied her big brother silently. As annoyed as she was now at her relapse into doing what others wanted, she nevertheless cooperated. This one time, she told herself. I don’t want Frank making decisions for me.
Perceptions alter: fields shrink as age increases; a half-hour wait is as long as a day for a child. The five rocky miles they traveled took the same two hours it had when they were children, yet then it seemed forever and far, far from home. The fencing that had been so sturdy had fallen down in most places—its duplicate threatening signs, some sporting the outline of a skull, were gone or mere shadow warnings poking through tall grass. As soon as Cee recognized the place, she said, “It’s all burned down. I didn’t know that, did you?”
“Salem told me, but we’re not going there.” Frank shielded his eyes for a moment before moving off, tracking what was left of the fencing. Suddenly he stopped and tested the earth, trampling through grass, tamping it in places, until he found what he was looking for.
“Yeah,” he said. “Right here.” He exchanged the quilt for the shovel and began digging.
Such small bones. So few pieces of clothing. The skull, however, was clean and smiling.
Cee bit her lip, forcing herself not to look away, not to be the terrified child who could not bear to look directly at the slaughter that went on in the world, however ungodly. This time she did not cringe or close her eyes.
Carefully, carefully, Frank placed the bones on Cee’s quilt, doing his level best to arrange them the way they once were in life. The quilt became a shroud of lilac, crimson, yellow, and dark navy blue. Together they folded the fabric and knotted its ends. Frank handed Cee the shovel and carried the gentleman in his arms. Back down the wagon road they went, then turned away from the edge of Lotus toward the stream. Quickly they found the sweet bay tree—split down the middle, beheaded, undead—spreading its arms, one to the right, one to the left. There at its base Frank placed the bone-filled quilt that was first a shroud, now a coffin. Cee handed him the shovel. While he dug she watched the rippling stream and the foliage on its opposite bank.
“Who’s that?” Cee pointed across the water.
“Where?” Frank turned to see. “I don’t see anybody.”
“He’s gone now, I guess.” But she was not sure. It looked to her like a small man in a funny suit swinging a watch chain. And grinning.
Frank dug a four- or five-foot hole some thirty-six inches wide. It took some maneuvering because the sweet bay roots resisted disturbance and fought back. The sun had reddened and was about to set. Mosquitoes trembled above the water. Honeybees had gone home. Fireflies waited for night. And a light smell of muscadine grapes pierced by hummingbirds soothed the gravedigger. When finally it was done a welcome breeze rose. Brother and sister slid the crayon-colored coffin into the perpendicular grave. Once it was heaped over with soil, Frank took two nails and the sanded piece of wood from his pocket. With a rock he pounded it into the tree trunk. One nail bent uselessly, but the other held well enough to expose the words he had painted on the wooden marker.
Here Stands A Man.
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but he could have sworn the sweet bay was pleased to agree. Its olive-green leaves went wild in the glow of a fat cherry-red sun.
SEVENTEEN
I stood there a long while, staring at that tree.
It looked so strong
So beautiful.
Hurt right down the middle
But alive and well.
Cee touched my shoulder
Lightly.
Frank?
Yes?
Come on, brother. Let’s go home.
READING GROUP GUIDE FOR
HOME
by Toni Morrison
The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s searing new novel, Home.
Introduction
After the terrors of war in Korea, Frank Money returns to the terrors of racism in America. On the battlefield he witnesses his two best friends die agonizing deaths, unable to save them. He does his own share of vengeful killing, and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder—a condition unrecognized at the time, which he medicates with alcohol.
As the novel begins, he finds himself, inexplicably, in a mental institution, drugged and strapped to a bed. He has no idea how or why he got there, only that he must escape. Able to free himself, he takes refuge with a minister who helps him begin his journey back to Georgia, where his sister, Cee, lies gravely ill.
Cee had taken a job “assisting” Dr. Beauregard Scott, an unrepentant Confederate. In fact, she has become the subject of his experiments in eugenics, which have made her infertile and endangered her life.
As he travels back to Georgia, we learn his story and his history: how his family was driven out of Texas; how he and Cee witnessed, as young children, the hasty burial of a murdered man; how
he hated the stifling atmosphere of Lotus, Georgia, and the cramped life his family endured in the house of his coldhearted grandmother, Lenore. Going off to war in Korea had seemed a better option than the dead end of his hometown. But in doing so he left the sister he had always cared for and protected. Now he must return to a place he never wanted to see again.
Home follows the classic structure of the hero’s journey. Frank leaves home, undergoes horrific trials, descends to the depths of human cruelty and his own capacity for violence, and then returns home a chastened and changed man. He cannot save his homeboys on the battlefield, but he is given a chance to rescue his sister.
But Home is not only about the violence men both suffer and inflict. It is also about the healing power of women—of Miss Ethel Fordham and her friends in Lotus. Fierce, unflinching, deeply compassionate—and rooted in their traditional healing practices—their methods are sharply contrasted with the self-serving, aggressive techniques of a patriarchal medical industry.
Writing about a war that has received little attention in American fiction, Morrison vividly evokes—through the trials of a brother and sister—the particular brand of racism that prevailed just before the end of Jim Crow and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. In dramatizing the abuses of the medical system, the devastating effects of war on those who fight it, and the meaning of both leaving and coming home, she holds a mirror up to our own time as well.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why has Toni Morrison chosen Home for her title? In what ways is the novel about both leaving home and coming home? What does home mean for Frank, for Cee, for Lenore, for Lily?
2. The race of the characters is not specified in the novel. How does Morrison make clear which characters are black and which are white? Why might she have chosen not to identify characters explicitly by their race?
3. What is the effect of alternating between Frank’s first-person (italicized) narration and the third-person omniscient narration through which most of the story is told? What is the implied relationship between Frank and the narrator?
4. Talking about the horrors of war in Korea, Frank tells the reader: “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there” [this page]. Does the reader succeed in imagining it even though he or she was not there? How close to another’s experience, even those radically unlike our own, can imagination take us?
5. How has Frank’s war experience affected him? What symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder does he exhibit? In what ways does he suffer from survivor guilt?
6. In what sense can Home be understood as Frank’s confession?
7. In what very concrete ways does Cee’s lack of education hurt her? How might she have been saved from infertility had she understood the implication of the books about eugenics in Dr. Beau’s office?
8. Why do the women who heal Cee have such contempt for “the medical industry”? [this page]. In what ways are Frank and Cee both victims of a medical system that puts its own aims above the heath of its patients? Does Home offer an implicit critique of our own health-care system?
9. What methods do Miss Ethel Fordham and the other women use to nurse Cee back to health? Why do they feel Frank’s male energy might hinder the healing process? What larger point is Morrison making about the difference between feminine and masculine, or earth-based and industrial, ways of treating illness?
10. Frank doesn’t know “what took place during those weeks at Miss Ethel’s house surrounded by those women with seen-it-all eyes,” only that they “delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones” [this page]. In what ways is Cee transformed by the treatment, and the wise counsel, that Miss Ethel gives her?
11. Both Frank and Cee were eager to leave Lotus, Georgia, and never return. Why do they find it so comforting when they do go back? What is it about the place and people that feels to Frank “both fresh and ancient, safe and demanding” [this page] and makes Cee declare that this is where she belongs?
12. How have Miss Ethel and the other women in her community learned not just to live with but to rise above the limitations imposed on them? What moral code do they live by?
13. Why does Frank decide to give a proper burial to the man killed for sport—and whose undignified burial Frank and Cee witnessed as children—at the end of the novel? Why would this act be emotionally important for him? Why has Morrison structured the novel so that the end mirrors the beginning?
14. The flowering lotus is a plant of extraordinary beauty, but it is rooted in the muck at the bottom of ponds. In what ways is the fictional town of Lotus, Georgia, like a lotus plant?
15. Why is it important that Frank does not resort to violence against Dr. Beau? In what ways has Frank been changed by the experiences he undergoes in the novel?
16. Much has been written about racism in America. What does Home add to our understanding of the suffering blacks endured during the late 1940s and early ’50s? What is most surprising, and distressing, about the story Morrison tells?
Suggested Further Reading
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Zadie Smith, White Teeth; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy.
ALSO BY TONI MORRISON
Fiction
A Mercy
Love
Paradise
Jazz
Beloved
Tar Baby
Song of Solomon
Sula
The Bluest Eye
Nonfiction
The Dancing Mind
Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
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