Summary
Chapter 1 (Frank)
Frank and his sister should not have been out in the field, for most farmland outside of Lotus, Georgia, was not very safe. Yet they crawled through the grass and came up and saw the horses, the males crashing their hooves together while the mares stood nearby and watched.
On the way back they lost their way, and panicked when they heard a voice. Frank pulled his sister down and they saw men pull a body out of a wheelbarrow and throw it into a hole. The children saw the black foot “being whacked into the grave” (4) and Cee began to shake. Frank held her until it was safe for them to leave.
Back at home, they thought they would get in trouble for being out, but the grown-ups were concerned with something else—what happened to that man. Frank only remembers those horses, “so beautiful. So brutal” (5).
Chapter 2 (Frank)
Frank is lying on his bed in Room 17 at the institution. He is pretending to be asleep, hoping the orderlies will skip the shot so he can surreptitiously loosen his cuffs. He needs to think of something that stirs no feelings, but this is easier said than done. His mind drifts to the note he received saying to come fast, that “she be dead if you tarry” (8). He tries to concentrate on a chair, then an image of endless train tracks.
He thinks of his exit strategy: he just has to get to the exit door, which is not locked after a fire broke out years back. He was initially going to knock the orderly, Crane, out, but that is too risky.
Two days earlier he had been apprehended by police and brought to this neighborhood he’d never been in, but he’d seen a sign for the AME Zion church and he planned to go there once he sprung free. He is worried since he has no shoes and does not want to look like a vagrant. Yet, he thinks, simply being inside does not forestall someone from being accosted, and remembers his family being pushed out of a town long ago and how one old man, Crawford, refused to go and was subsequently tortured and beaten to death.
Around four in the morning, Frank loosens his cuffs and puts on his army clothing and sneaks out. The stairs are brutally cold on his shoeless feet. Outside, he heads to the parsonage of the church and knocks on the door until an old man answers. He can barely talk as his body is shaking so intensely.
The old man introduces himself as Reverend John Locke and urges Frank inside. He tells Frank to take a seat, and when he hears that he is from the hospital down the road, grunts that “they sell a lot of bodies out of there” (12). Frank is confused, and Locke says they sell dead bodies to the medical school.
Locke’s wife Jean comes in and says hello, then bustles into the kitchen. Locke asks where Frank is from—Central City—and where he is going—down south to Georgia. He then asks how Frank ended up in the hospital instead of jail. Frank says he honestly has no idea. He doesn't know why there was blood on his face; the police “just hustled me up and put me in the crazy ward” (14).
Jean asks the same question of her husband regarding Frank when she comes in, and Frank’s mind wanders. He has no idea what he was doing to attract police—maybe he started a fight, or started crying, or talked to trees? When he left Lily on his mission he felt extreme anxiety, and the rage that had been there ever since he got back from Korea. He had not wanted to return to Lotus without his two best friends, Mike and Stuff, but the two of them died abroad. Besides, he hated Lotus.
Jean brings Frank crackers and water, and they procure him socks and galoshes. Locke tells him to sleep. Frank does, but his dreams are full of mangled body parts. In the morning he does not remember where he is at first, but he is able to wash up and eat breakfast and feels better. Locke gives him about $17, which will get him a ticket that will bring him closer to Georgia. When he gets to Portland, he should look up Reverend Jesse Maynard at the Baptist church, who will be expecting what Locke calls “another one” (18).
When Frank looks at him quizzically, Locke says “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs” (18). Frank does not think the army is that bad, and even that they treated him well.
Jean gives him food—a lot of it, for even though the North does not have legal segregation, “Custom is just as real and law and can be just as dangerous” (19). Frank bids the couple goodbye and thanks them sincerely, then takes a seat at the back of the bus.
Outside the window the landscape is lonely and bleak. When Frank is sober and alone he usually sees the images in his mind, the blood-red filling a grey world. These images did not come when he was with Lily. He doesn't know if this is a breakup; maybe it is a pause. It has been hard recently, though, to always hear and feel her disappointment. He thought he was doing his best; he’d lost some odd jobs and sat for hours without saying anything, but he needed her. He did not play around with other women, and the cruel pictures in his mind from Korea faded. Such pictures flood his mind now—the girl, Mike dying, the others he killed. With Lily the powerful love took them away.
Jesse Maynard is curt and contemptuous but gives him a coat, a sweater, and two ten-dollar bills. He also lets him copy addresses of a few rooming houses out of the Green’s travelers’ book, and heads back to the train station.
He is not as worried about the incidents happening—the “uncontrollable, suspicious, destructive, and illegal” (23)—incidents. The first time was on a bus near Fort Lawson. He had his discharge papers and was looking at the bright skirt of the woman next to him when all color drained away. He felt like something was wrong with his eyes. The color finally started coming back at the last stop, and this would now be the warning sign that the rage and shame would explode. At least he could hide when it was coming.
Now, though, he feels like he will be okay. He sits down in the passenger car and lets it rock him to sleep. He wakes to see a couple in distress, the woman crying and blood coming from her nose, and a furious husband next to her. Frank asks a waiter what happened, and the waiter tells him the husband got off at a stop to get coffee and was kicked out, and when the woman went to help, they threw a rock at her and the crowd gathered and started to yell.
Frank asks if there is a good place to eat in Chicago, and shows the waiter the list. The waiter says Booker’s, and that the YMCA is fine for sleeping. The waiter offers him a shot and he accepts. He watches the couple, knowing the man will beat the woman when they get home, since “what was intolerable was the witness of a woman, a wife, who not only saw it, but had dared to try to rescue—rescue!—him. He couldn’t protect himself and he couldn’t protect her either” (26).
He nods off again, and wakes to see someone sitting right next to him even though there are plenty of open seats. It is a man in a blue zoot suit. The moment he leans back to rest, the man gets up and leaves without so much as an indentation on the seat.
When the train reaches his destination, Frank gets off. The noise in the station overwhelms him and he reaches for a sidearm that isn’t there. He waits for an hour, then goes to Booker’s. It is cheap and delicious and everyone is friendly. He befriends a man named Billy Watson, and the two eat together.
Many in the diner share stories of life during the Depression, laughing and commiserating. Billy says Frank can stay with him and his family, and he’ll help him out at Goodwill tomorrow for shoes.
At Billy’s home, his wife Arlene greets him before heading off to her night shift at the metal factory. He also meets Thomas, Billy's son, who has a bad arm from, as Billy relates, a drive-by cop shooting him because he thought he had a cap gun. He thinks this is good, though, for Thomas is incredibly smart and the injury kept him off the street. Now he’s a math whiz and wins competitions all the time. Frank talks to the child briefly, and marvels at his self-assuredness. The boy tells him he ought not to drink, and asks if he killed anyone. When Frank says he did, and that it felt bad, the boy says good, as it should.
Frank settles into sleep but wakes to a sound like the squeeze of a gun without ammo. He sees the zoot-suited man again. He sighs, not wanting a new ghost around. He wonders if the ghost has something to do with his sister, perhaps indicating that she is dead. Both of their parents are dead too, and the grandparents are not great, but maybe his life has been preserved for Cee. They had been close since she was born, and her first word was his name. He took care of her the entire time before he left, but he could never take away the panic in her eyes when he said he was enlisting. Lotus had been killing him and his two best friends so he had to go, but she did not feel good about it.
In the morning Billy takes Frank to Goodwill, where they pick out a few clean clothes and shoes. On the way out they are stopped for a random shakedown by policemen. One tells the other the men are vets, so they ease up on them. Billy and Frank have nothing to say; this is very common.
They get Frank a wallet as well, and return to Booker’s where they shake hands goodbye, promising to visit.
Frank then gets on the southbound rails to Georgia and to Cee.
Analysis
Toni Morrison stated in several interviews that, in writing Home, she wanted to counteract the stereotypical view of the 1950s as a wholesome, peaceful decade. In 2013 she commented, “When I heard these people for the first election of Barack Obama they were saying we want to take our country back and I was wondering, ‘Back to where?’ and it was really the ‘50s.” She also explained that she was “trying to take the scab off the ‘50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic, Mad Men. Oh, please. There was a horrible war you didn’t call a war where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy.”
And, of course, there was systemic racism. From the very first pages, the reader gets a glimpse of the realities of life in Jim Crow America for a Black person—a surreptitious and ignominious burial in a field, and a hushed and scared community. As the narrative shifts to Frank as an adult, restrictions and violence perpetrated on Black people manifest in Frank’s forced “rehabilitation” for a reason he cannot even discern—not to mention the maiming of a Black child for playing with a cap-gun on the street and Black families being pushed out of their home by a white mob.
Another historical reality of the 1950s was the uneasy, to say the least, situation with a newly integrated military (President Harry Truman passed an executive order in 1947 ending its segregation) and a home front that still refused to undergo a reckoning for its racist sins. The novel is set sometime in the early 1950s, long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation throughout the nation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rectified 100 years’ worth of subverting the 15th Amendment to disenfranchise Black people. Frank is navigating a South with its de jure segregation and a North and West with de facto segregation—the latter Locke tells him is just as powerful as law. Coming home from war, even with a service medal, did not mean equal treatment from the government or one’s fellow citizens. Scholar Manuela Lopez Ramirez writes of Home and Sula, which also features a veteran: “Morrison seems to use the tribulations and emotional turmoil that these returning soldiers had to cope with back home to express the tensions of the society they returned to live in as well as the ensuing breakdown of social patterns. Morrison depicts the symptoms they suffer and the reception of these damaged veterans by a racially-prejudiced America.” Ramirez also notes that “many soldiers did not admit that they needed treatment to overcome their mental impairment, or felt that they could not complain about their plight.” In Home, Frank cannot even come to terms with this situation, wondering at Locke’s comment that “An integrated army is integrated misery” (18) and telling himself “The army hadn’t treated him so bad. It wasn’t their fault he went ape every now and then” (18). He lets them off the hook by saying they knew about his “craziness” but “assured him it would pass” (18).
Given the title of the novel, it’s no surprise that the concept of home is one of the most pervasive themes of the text. When we first encounter Frank, it is clear he doesn't have a home. He is a veteran not long returned from war, stuck in an institution, and about to begin a journey back to Georgia to a town that he despised. He is an itinerant, seeking a home with a woman—Lily—but never feeling quite right about it. His experiences of home are mixed at this point. There is his knowledge that “being outside wasn’t necessary for legal or illegal disruption. You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your family, your neighbors to pack up and move” (9). The white mob drives fifteen Black families out, and brutally tortures and murders the one man, Crawford, who tries to stay and protect his home.
Frank’s lack of a home isn’t his only problem. He has blackouts that leave him wondering, among other things, what he did to end up with blood running down his face in the back of a cop car. He is full of anxiety and “free-floating rage...self-loathing disguised as someone else’s fault” (15), noxious and traumatic memories that won’t leave him alone, a penchant for the numbing power of alcohol, and mysterious figures that haunt his peripheral vision.
