Summary
Chapter 13 (Frank and Cee)
Lotus is brighter than Frank remembered, and full of colorful flowers. The trees seem a deeper green; “color, silence, and music enveloped him” (118). There is a feeling of safety and goodwill that he knows is real.
He plans to go to the cotton fields right outside Lotus to get a job with the laying-in and then the picking.
All he thinks about is if Cee is getting better or worse, but he is not allowed to visit the sickroom. Every woman in the neighborhood blocks him, for they believe men’s presence would worsen her condition. Once he goes to Miss Ethel and she waves him away. He busies himself improving his parents’ empty house and making sure to get the job in the cotton fields.
He thinks that if Cee dies because an evil doctor sliced her up, his behavior in war would pale in comparison to what he’d do to the doctor. Finally, though, in June Jackie comes to tell him he can stop by, and in July he can move Cee into their parents' home.
Cee is different, changed by two months of country women who loved mean. These women “handled sickness as if it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping. They didn’t waste their time or the patient’s with sympathy and they met the tears of the suffering with resigned contempt” (121). After the fever died and they douched out what was in her vagina, Cee told them what happened. They did not ask prior. They rolled their eyes when they heard it was a doctor. Cee tried to defend herself that she did not know what he was up to, and they admonished her to always stay awake and remember she is good enough for Jesus and nothing else matters.
As she healed, the women stopped berating and brought their knitting and made Ethel’s house their quilting center. Cee paid them attention as she never had before, listening to their stories and their songs. They shared everything, they had a use for everything. They valued business, and thought mourning was useful but God was better. She knew they had hard lives but they did their best.
The final stage of healing had been to sit in the sun with legs spread, which embarrassed Cee, but the women would not take no for an answer. Ethel sat with her, telling her she needed a permanent cure beyond human power. It took Cee a while to relax but she did, and finally was able to sit modestly in a rocking chair enveloped by the “demanding love” (125) of Ethel Fordham.
Ethel told her she knew her since she was young and saw the sadness in her pretty eyes. She could go home and she would be mended, but she could not let Lenore or anyone else decide who she was. She was free and no one was obliged to save her but herself. She was a person, not just young and a woman, and she could not let the slavery of someone else dictate her life. Cee leaned back and licked her finger after putting it in the blackberry jar. She said matter-of-factly that she wasn’t going anywhere, and this was her home now.
Together in their parent’s house now, Frank can see how healthy Cee is. She is working on a quilt since Miss Johnson from Good Shepherd buys them from the Lotus women and markets them to tourists in Mount Haven.
In their interactions, Frank is pleased to see she is not the girl who “trembled at the slightest touch of the real and vicious world” (127). He does not know what went on in the women’s care but their devotion to Jesus and each other “delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones” (128).
Miss Ethel had told Cee her womb would never bear fruit. She did not know how to feel then, and initially blamed her dumbness on her lack of schooling but then thought of how all these women who had varying states of illiteracy were able to repair what a doctor had wrought. Thinking of her childhood, she realizes only Frank valued her, but this made her into a person who needed to be rescued. She never wanted that for herself again. So she couldn’t have children—no problem. She would find out what she loved and how to earn a living. She was happy her brother was here, but she did not need him anymore.
When she tells Frank she cannot have a child he is saddened, but she says she is fine, and it is like there is a baby girl somewhere deep down waiting to be born but now she’ll have to find another mother. She begin to cry and Frank urges her to stop, but she says she will not hide her pain anymore.
Frank walks outside to sort through his thoughts. He has never cried before, not even when Mike and Stuff died, but the thought of what the doctor did to his young sister makes his eyes prick. He walks through the town to calm down, waving at neighbors. He cannot believe how much he hated this place. Now it is “both fresh and ancient, safe, and demeaning” (132). Cee is “gutted, infertile, but not beaten. She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting” (132). Frank needs to figure out what is troubling him and do something about it.
Chapter 14 (Frank)
It was Frank. He killed the Korean girl. He shot her. She touched him, he felt aroused, then horrified. He had to kill her after she took him down into a place he never thought was in him.
He tells the person listening they can keep writing, but they ought to know what is true.
Chapter 15
Frank doesn't sleep well, realizing how he had kept his guilt and shame and sorrow buried together, not letting himself think of the child. Now it is loose and he must face it.
Frank asks Cee if she remembers the place with the horses they used to sneak off to. She does not, and tells him to ask Salem.
Frank knows Salem spends time with other old men on Fish Eye Anderson’s porch after supper. The men are all veterans of WWI and WWII. They play checkers and chess and whist, and Frank comes over to Salem and Fish Eye while they ponder moves on the chessboard.
Frank asks about the place with the horses and dogfights. Salem and Fish Eye tell him it was more than that—there were men forced to fight for the amusement of other men. They used switchblades on each other, and one had to kill the other or both would die. Once there was even a father and son match, and the father begged the son to kill him so he could live. Frank is shocked.
On his way out he asks about the horses, and the men say they were taken to the slaughterhouse.
Chapter 16 (Frank and Cee)
Cee’s quilt is not very good but she is proud of it, so when Frank says he needs it she is reluctant. He insists, and says she has to come with him too. She can tell this is serious, and does not question him, but also tells herself this is for one time only, because she doesn't want him making decisions for her.
They walk through the fields and encounter the once-sturdy fencing that has now fallen down. They find the spot Frank is looking for, and he begins digging. He finds the small bones and a few old scraps of clothing. Cee tells herself not to be scared and not to look away.
Frank wraps the bones in Cee’s quilt, which becomes a shroud. He carries the man in his arms and they go to the sweet bay tree, split down the middle. He digs again and they place the body within it.
As he is digging, Cee looks out to the stream and sees a man in a funny suit. She asks who it is but Frank sees no one.
Evening is falling. Frank puts the man in his quilt coffin into the grave and then hammers into the ground a wooden marker that says “Here Stands A Man.”
Chapter 17 (Frank)
Frank stands for a while looking at the tree. It is beautiful even though it is split; it is strong and alive. Cee touches his shoulder, and tells him it’s time to go home.
Analysis
Cee’s rehabilitation is one of the most powerful sections in the novel. Back home in the town she thought she hated, she is surrounded by its women, women who “loved mean” (121) and never make Cee feel anything less than valued and safe. The feminine space they create for her excludes even the well-meaning Frank; the Black space they create for her excludes the cavalier cruelties of white medicine. Thus the recovery takes place not in the institutional places that harmed Cee (and Frank), but, as Maxine Montgomery writes, “outside conventional places and within the perimeters of a nurturing, redemptive community of outcast women.” It is a safe space, a place “no longer an oppressive space of white, patriarchal domination.”
Katrina Harack notes that Morrison “emphasizes the power, strength, and knowledge of women in the country, and the persistent presence of traditional gender roles.” They are grandmothers, wives, and mothers, uneducated, ensconced within the home, but that does not mean they are weak. They exhort Cee to be independent and take care of herself, saying things such as “Men know a slop jar when they see one,” “You ain’t a mule to be pulling some evil doctor’s wagon,” and “Who told you you was trash?” (123). As Cee never had proper mothering, the mothering she gets now helps form her into a fully realized human being. Her quilting “indicates how Cee is piecing together the fragments of her identity and creating art that is a means of self-expression as well as of economic independence.” She lives with Frank as an equal, not as an inferior, and takes on a dominant role at the end of the novel when she is the one who suggests they go home. She becomes pragmatic, resilient, thoughtful, and rational; for example, she knows she can cry for her lost child, but it will not break her.
Along with Cee’s bodily rehabilitation is her finding her way home, in all meanings of the word. Mark A. Tabone writes of how the women’s treatment, which includes sitting in the sun for an hour a day to cleanse her vagina of the doctor’s malevolent medicine, is not only treatment for the body but for the mind: “[it] indicate[s] how Morrison’s “home” disinhibits women rather than the opposite. Equally important, this openness not only moves Cee beyond the confines of the house; it lets the outside world in. This signifies how ‘home’ requires confronting rather than retiring from the world.”
There is, Irene Visser observes, a transitional period before Frank and Cee come together in their home. Cee is recovering while Frank is on his own, fixing up the house and looking for work. He is “symbolically traversing the lake of his memories and childhood fears and finding in crossing this lake that Lotus...can now be a home to him.” He admits to himself (and the unknown narrator) what he did in Korea, finally lets the tears come, relinquishes his role as Cee’s protector in order to simply be her brother, and recognizes Lotus as a place of safety and succor.
At the end, the siblings come together to properly bury the man whose haphazard interment they witnessed all those years prior. Critics debate whether or not this is a lynching victim or the father from the father-son battle described by Salem and Fish Eye, but it doesn’t matter—it is an anonymous Black man, buried ignominiously by a frightened community. The siblings rectify this indignity, burying him below a tree redolent with symbolism—split, hurt, but still intact and thriving. This final scene thus parallels the opening scene, but, Montgomery notes, “Mnemonically and discursively, narrative action returns full circle as the pair re-bury the bones of the lynching victim in a ritual reenactment of an ancestral past linked, not with the brutality of lynching, but with ancient beliefs about the continuity of life and death.”
