Authors: Toni Morrison
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
.
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
.
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.
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?
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
.
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