Summary
Chapter 3 (Frank)
Ida was pregnant with Cee when they left Bandera County in Texas. They could bring little, and relied on help from strangers and found food wherever they could.
At the Church of the Redeemer, Mama heard the woman in front of her say and spell her name of Ycidra, which Mama thought was so beautiful that she named her own daughter that. Everyone except Mama called, and calls, her Cee, though.
Frank is simply named Frank after his father Luther’s brother. Their last name is Money, of which they have none.
Chapter 4 (Cee)
Cee is luxuriating in the cool water of the tub, thinking about how a mean grandmother is the worst thing a girl could have. Lenore was unapologetically mean to Cee and Frank, and her husband Salem, the children’s paternal grandfather, said nothing. After all, Lenore was left with a life insurance payment after her first husband’s death and owned her home and a car, and Salem was not going to get in the way of his good fortune.
Lenore and Salem let Luther and Ida as well as Frank and their newborn baby stay with them. Lenore thought it was a bad omen that Cee was born on the road, not in a decent home with a Christian woman helping. Lenore focused her resentment about having to care for these two children on the child Cee herself.
Luther and Ida worked two jobs. Finally, after three years with Lenore and Salem, they could afford their own place. They took their meager belongings to the house with their own gardens and laying hens. The neighbors were generous to strangers, and they felt welcome.
While the local city of Jeffrey had sidewalks, a post office, a bank, and a school, where they were in Lotus had just fifty houses, one of them used as makeshift school. Cee always wanted more books to read and wished she could have gone to school in Jeffrey.
As she grew up, she was “watched, watched, watched by every grown-up from sunrise to sunset and ordered about by not only Lenore but every adult in town” (47). She was annoyed with the boring town and knew she was ignorant because of it. Frank always took care of her, though, and let her tag along with him and his best friends.
When Frank left, she immediately fell for Prince (full name Principal), a handsome young visitor from Atlanta. She wishes now she had asked why he was in Lotus, but at the time she believed everything he said. He loved himself so deeply and when he said she was pretty she believed him. Lenore said they had to be legal, so they had the reverend come and bless them and write their names in a book. They stayed in Frank’s room at her parents’ house.
Prince decided to take her to Atlanta, and Cee relished the vision of a shiny new life in the city. Yet she soon learned Prince had really only married her for the Ford. Lenore had bought a used station wagon and gave her old Ford to Luther and Ida. Luther let Prince use it for various errands, and the young man clearly worshipped the car. They drove it to Atlanta, and it never came back.
After Prince left her, Cee rented a room. She befriended Thelma, the woman upstairs, who helped get her a job dishwashing at Bobby’s Rib House. Thelma often asked why she didn’t go home, and Cee said she could not without the car. She went home once for Ida’s funeral, and Lenore had pummeled her with insults. She never went back, even after Luther died a month later.
Cee longed to talk to her brother, whom she knew would protect her from any bad situation. All she had right now were letters, and the advice he’d doled out over the years.
It is a quiet evening, quiet like the afternoons and evenings when she and Frank tried to figure out what to do in the dull town of Lotus. Their parents were almost always gone, so they invented games, visited the stream, and hung out with Mike and Stuff, Frank’s best friends. They were a real family, the four of them.
Cee gets out of the tub and dries off. She hears a song trilling from the radio, and thinks of how she “was broken. Not broken up but broken down, into her separate parts” (54). She puts on the one nice dress she has, the floral one Prince bought her in Atlanta because he was embarrassed by her clothes. She thinks about her situation, and realizes she has to either get a second job or a better one since she can barely afford everything.
She visits Thelma upstairs. Thelma compliments her dress and scoffs when she hears it was from Prince. She tells Thelma she needs a better job, and Thelma says she heard something at the beauty shop—a couple in Buckhead needs a maid-type person to help out around the house. The man is a doctor, and they are nice people. The pay is not great but you live in the house, so it makes a difference, Thelma adds.
Cee takes this opportunity and travels by bus to Dr. and Mrs. Scott’s beautiful house with its neat lawn. A woman answers the door and introduces herself as Sarah Williams, and welcomes Cee in.
The house is elegant, with cool air wafting through the lace curtains. Mrs. Scott sits down with Cee and asks her various questions such as where she is from, if she has children, if she can read. Mrs. Scott dismisses any of Cee’s extraneous comments, saying she doesn't know much about her husband’s work and does not care to, but he is a scientist and conducts important experiments. If Cee just does what he says, she will be fine. She says Sarah will show Cee to her room, and walks away in her queenly manner.
In the kitchen, Sarah warms up some food for the ravenous Cee. Sarah says Mrs. Scott is easy to work for and Dr. Beauregard, or Dr. Beau, as everyone calls him, is quite gentlemanly. They have two children, but both of them are away in a home because they are cephalates. When Cee asks anxiously if there were other employees before her, Sarah says yes, that some quit and one man was fired because he argued with the doctor. The doctor is a “heavyweight Confederate” (62) whose grandfather was killed in a battle up North.
Sarah shows Cee her little room, and Cee delights in this clean space of her own. The next morning she meets her employer, who is “formal but welcoming” (64). He asks if she has children or has been with a man, and she replies that she was married for a time but had no children. He seems pleased with that answer. He says her duties are to clean instruments and equipment, keep things tidy, and keep a schedule. He warns her the reality of medicine is sometimes bloody, sometimes painful, and she will have to be steady and calm.
Cee’s admiration for the doctor grows over time. She sees how he helps poor women and girls and is careful with their privacy. When he cannot help he sends the woman to the charity hospital in the city. Cee loves her work—the house is lovely, the doctor kind, and the wages consistent. She never sees Mrs. Scott, only dealing with Sarah who tells her the lady of the house has a laudanum problem and spends her days painting or watching TV.
One day Cee looks at the doctor’s bookshelves more closely, noticing titles like The Passing of the Great Race and Heredity, Race, and Society. She wishes she was more learned, and hopes she will have time to learn more about this “eugenics.” This is a good place for her, she thinks. She is especially grateful for Sarah, who has become her friend, family, and confidante.
Analysis
In these next two chapters, the reader meets Ycidra ("Cee"), Frank’s younger sister. Like Frank, she is essentially adrift—trying to eke out a life in Atlanta, a city still new to her after she moved there with her now-absconded husband Prince. She is struggling for decent wages and has only one friend to her name, but she refuses to return home to Lotus. There her cruel grandmother reigned over her and Frank when they were young, and she cannot bear to return to the oppressive environment. Thus, when Cee gets a job and free rent at Dr. Beauregard Scott’s home, she feels as if she’s hit the jackpot. There everything is lovely and cool and clean, she has a friend in the housekeeper and cook Sarah, and she is surrounded by books like she always wanted to be when she was a child—yet, ominously, these books are on eugenics and race, and foreshadow what happens to her.
One of the most salient aspects of Cee’s personality is that she grew up depending almost exclusively on her brother. As their parents were absent due to work, and their grandmother was mean and their grandfather indifferent, Frank became Cee’s guardian and defender. He “would, as always, protect her from a bad situation” (51), and “she followed Frank’s advice always” (52). The two of them were family, a veritable Hansel and Gretel trying to make their way in the dark forest of life on their own. This meant that Cee never really developed the self-confidence, fortitude, and autonomy needed to make the right decisions out in the world once Frank was gone.
Returning to Hansel and Gretel, Morrison explicitly stated in an interview, “A reason for Home is that I got very interested in the idea of when a man's relationship with a woman is pure—unsullied, not fraught—It could be masculine and protective without the baggage of sexuality. So the sort of Hansel and Gretel aspect really fascinated me.” Critic Irene Visser looks at the novel through the lens of the fairy tale, especially the tale of Hansel and Gretel. She explains that almost all fairy tales are “dark stories of violence, hardship, and strife…[but] the fairy tale also offers magic and wish fulfillment...Most importantly, it always holds out the promise of victory over villainy and of the protagonists’ living ‘happily ever after’.”
Like Hansel and Gretel, in Home we see a brother and sister alone in the world, navigating its dangers. One of those dangers is their step-grandmother Lenore, who abuses them and deprives them of sustenance and care. Another danger is Dr. Scott, whose house is as deliciously appealing to Cee as the gingerbread house. Like that house, “Dr. Scott’s residence is a sham protection covering a malicious intent, and the doctor parallels the witch, determined to entrap homeless young women in order to cannibalize them.” When Cee first arrives, she is “fattened up,” stuffed to the brim by Sarah. Sarah and Cee joke that the melons they are going to eat are “female” and, foreshadowing Cee’s cutting, “Sarah slid a long, sharp knife from the drawer and, with intense anticipation of the pleasure to come, cut the girl in two” (66).
There are other aspects of fairy tales present in Home, such as the presence of helpers like Miss Ethel Fordham and her women, the defeat of evil, and an ending in which “maturity, happiness, and wisdom are implicit.” We will discuss the path to this healing and triumph in later analyses, but it is clear that “in re-creating the positive imprint of the fairy tale’s happy ending, Morrison aligns herself with the fairy tale’s basic purpose to inspire confidence that real and imaginary dangers can be overcome.”
