Yet in spite of the threats from men, both hooded and not, and pleadings from neighbors, one elderly man named Crawford sat on his porch steps and refused to vacate...Just after dawn at the twenty-fourth hour he was beaten to death with pipes and rifle butts and tied to the oldest magnolia tree in the county—one that grew in his own yard. Maybe it was loving that tree which, he used to brag, his great-grandmother had planted, that made him stubborn. In the dark of night, some of the fleeing neighbors snuck back to untie him and bury him beneath his beloved magnolia.
Morrison bookends the novel with scenes of Black men, trees, and white violence. Here, Black families are ordered to leave by a white mob, and the one man who stays is brutally tortured and murdered. His community buries him beneath the tree, which is the same thing that Frank does for the Black man at the end of the novel (who may have been lynched or the father killed by his son in the fights). There is a clear acknowledgement of the violence perpetrated on the Black body, but also of the community's role in honoring their members' lives and deaths.
"My name is Locke, Reverend John Locke."
Not a single detail in this spare, beautiful book by one of America's best novelists is capricious or accidental; thus, the name of this reverend Frank meets at the beginning of his journey doesn't allude to the Enlightenment philosopher for naught. As Maxine Montgomery writes, "More than any other, it is Reverend Locke who assumes paramount importance in an understanding of the novel's concerns recuperating the past. John Locke was one of the most influential of Enlightenment figures, someone who espouses the notion of the mind as a tabula rasa or blank slate shaped by knowledge, sensations, and emotions, so Morrison presents him as a major figure who helps to shape Money's thinking. It is Reverend Locke, an elderly wise man, who offers a historical perspective on the plight of the returning soldier." Even though Frank initially brushes off Locke's comment about the misery of the integrated army, he comes to embrace such thinking as he evolves and works through his trauma from the war.
He would have to concentrate on something else—a night sky, starless, or, better, train tracks. No scenery, no trains, just endless, endless tracks.
Home is a novel about journeying, both mentally and physically. Frank traverses the landscape here in his mind, conjuring up a barren wasteland with only tracks, and traverses an equal ominous landscape as he travels through Jim Crow America to get to his sister. Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy write that Morrison "imagine[s] the landscape as evocative of the region's often submerged history of racialized violence." The southern landscapes are "engraved with the menace and memory of white terror," yet as the arc of the novel bends "toward resilience," the terrain "appear[s] mutably as bleak and beautiful, frightening and futurist." Ultimately, the critics write, Home "insist[s] that not even the bluntest disregard for history can sponge off the imprint it leaves on the virtual and actual bodies and on the earth itself."
"Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous."
With this brief but memorable comment, John Locke lays bare the reality of life in Jim Crow America: just because the North and the West don't have de jure segregation (segregation by law), doesn't mean they are free from racial discrimination or violence. White supremacy is embedded in the history of the United States from its very founding, and no place was free from its clutches. A Black man in the 1950s still had to be very careful where he went, what he did, and how he behaved, even if he wasn't in the South.
"Drive-by cop," he said. "He had a cap pistol. Eight years old, running up and down the sidewalk pointing it...Cops shoot anything they want."
Billy tells Frank the story of what happened to his son, which sounds very much like contemporary police violence perpetrated against Black people. Writing in 2012, Morrison could draw on decades worth of traumatizing examples of how police and "citizen vigilantes" like George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin in 2012, took it upon themselves to mete out life and death with an absence of justice. Even though over 60 years have intervened between the time period in which Home is set and the time in which Morrison writes—years in which the civil rights movement achieved the end of segregation—not enough has changed. This is perhaps Morrison's point—resisting nostalgia for to the 1950s, and wondering if we aren't closer to it than we might think.
He would, as always, protect her from a bad situation.
There is much to admire about Frank and Cee's childhood relationship. Their parents were absent and their grandmother cruel; Lotus was dull and stultifying, school was nonexistent, opportunities were few. Frank stepping up to take care of Cee was noble and powerful, and offered her a profound sense of safety and him a profound sense of meaning. However, what this meant was that Cee never really learned to take care of herself. She depended on Frank to guide her and never developed a sense of self; thus, she easily fell into harmful situations as a result of not knowing how to navigate the world. This is not to blame Frank, of course, but it is part of Cee's journey to selfhood that she learns to take care of herself and see her brother as an equal, not a guardian.
Frank and Cee, like some forgotten Hansel and Gretel, locked hands as they navigated the silence and tried to imagine a future.
The Hansel and Gretel tale informs much of the novel, a fact that Morrison herself has acknowledged. We have a brother-sister pair, alone in the world and dependent upon only each other. They are navigating that world with very little to guide them but their own wits, which often fail them. There is a cruel grandmother and a deceptively appealing house, perilous near-death experiences, and a miraculous escape. Then there is the healing and the fairy-tale ending in which Frank and Cee have triumphed over their own traumas and flaws to arrive at a place where they can be unified and at peace. Calling out the aspects of the fairy tale in Home is not meant to negate the novel's seriousness, but instead to show how it has a universal resonance.
The doctor raised his gun and pointed it at what in his fear ought to have been flaring nostrils, foaming lips, and the red-rimmed eyes of a savage. Instead he saw the quiet, even serene, face of a man not to be fooled with.
The doctor is a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate and a eugenics practitioner; thus, he is extremely racist and inclined to harbor stereotypical views of Black people in order to sustain his own white-supremacist worldview. He expects to see Frank, a man who has broken into his home, in the most grotesque fashion, but instead sees a serious, calm man intent on rescuing his sister without bringing harm to anyone else. This defies the doctor's expectations, and also proves to be an important moment for Frank. In not choosing violence, he elevates himself above not only stereotype but above the doctor, who did cruelly enact violence on Cee.
"It's like there's a baby girl down here waiting to be born. She's somewhere close by in the air, in this house, and she picked me to be born to. And now she has to find some other mother..."
Several critics have compared this "ghost baby" of Cee's to the child Beloved in Morrison's famous novel of the same name. Maxine Montgomery says the "eerie visage" of Cee's unborn daughter is reminiscent of Beloved but also has "a more abstract, ephemeral role as the incarnation of maternal guilt the young woman feels because she cannot bear children." Irene Visser comments that in Home the baby girl is actually acknowledged, unlike Beloved, which is a "form of closure...that is essential to recovery from trauma."
Come on, brother. Let's go home.
At the end of the story, Cee takes charge in a gentle but powerful way. She knows what is right for her brother and for herself, and it is to turn their sights toward their new home. This new home is, of course, their old home of Lotus, but the two siblings are the ones that are new—rather, renewed. They are finally in a place that is sustaining and nurturing, a place where they can be the best versions of themselves and continue to work through the traumas that once defined them. Here they are making their own way in the world but with a supporting community of people, especially women, that will encourage their growth.
