Summary
Chapter 9 (Frank)
Korea is impossibly cold, but battle is alive, clear, simple. What is worst is solitary guard duty, combating the boredom and the fear of someone coming near.
Hour after hour Frank watched the quiet village below. There was a cluster of bamboo near the place where they dumped their garbage. One day Frank heard a rustling and thought it might be a tiger, but it was a child's hand. Almost every day Frank watched the young Korean girl come to the trash to dig through with her fingertips. She was not picky.
A relief guard joined him one day, and as he approached the girl, she looked up and reached toward his crotch and said something in Korean that sounded like “yum yum.” The soldier blew her away, and only the hand remained.
Frank thinks about this often, and decides that the soldier felt more than disgust—he felt tempted, and that is what he had to kill.
Chapter 10 (Frank)
This morning on the bus the haunting images of Mike thrashing and dying in his arms are filling his head. He had never been a brave young man before, but in Korea after Mike died he was “reckless, lunatic, firing, dodging the scattered parts of men” (98). He wanted to kill as many of the Koreans as he could; the smell of blood gave him an appetite.
Long after Mike and Stuff died, Frank would still turn to look at them when he heard a good joke, as if they were still there. Only alcohol worked to get rid of them in his mind. And then there was the memory of the “yum-yum” girl, which was hard to shake.
But now on this bus, Frank realizes the memories are no longer crushing or push him into paralyzing despair; they are hard, but this might be the “fruit of sobriety” (100).
Outside of Chattanooga the train has to stop for a bit of repair. Frank gets out and starts strolling around to a feed store. He buys a soda and stands outside in the blazing sun. A beautiful Cadillac catches his eye. He walks over to it and then sees two women fighting with each other. Another man is standing there watching, and when he sees Frank looking he growls at him and asks what he’s looking at. When the man comes up to him threateningly, Frank cannot help himself and starts pummeling him. The thrill is familiar and he cannot and will not stop. The women are screaming that he is killing him, so finally he relents.
He runs off and gets back onto the train. A porter looks at him and says nothing. He cleans up in the bathroom, wondering about this thrill. It was different than that in Korea, as those were “fierce but mindless, anonymous. This violence was personal in its delight. Good, he thought. He might need that thrill to claim his sister” (102).
Chapter 11 (Frank)
Frank tells the person listening to his words that they must remember that Cee was a shadow for most of his life, a “presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine” (103). He refuses to watch anyone else die, especially her.
Chapter 12 (Frank)
In Atlanta Frank decides he has to get something to eat, walk around a bit, then find a place to sleep. He likes Atlanta better than Chicago because the pace of life seems more human, more languid. For the past couple days he has had a few sad memories but no ghosts or nightmares, which comforts him.
He is walking around in the evening, daydreaming in his own world. He should have been alert to the smell of reefers and “gang breath” (106), but before he knows it, a few men jump him. One brings a pipe down on his head and he falls down. He crawls over to a wall after the thugs leave and a man comes by to ask if he needs help. He helps Frank up. Frank curses that they stole his wallet. The man gives him a few dollars and when Frank protests, the man says to forget it, and to stay in the light.
Sitting in the diner later, Frank thinks of Lily. She seemed relieved at his departure and truthfully, he was relieved too. She had only “displaced his disorder, his rage, and his shame” (108), and all of this was only biding its time.
When Frank leaves the diner, he hears a few notes of bebop wafting on the air, and settles into a smoky jazz club for a time. The musicians are sweaty, feverish; the piece will only end when they’re all ready for it to end, for the rhythm is in charge.
Frank is due to catch a cab at 4:00 a.m. but it does not show, and he realizes he has no plan, no cab, no money, and no information. Finally around 7:30 he catches a bus heading deeper into the suburbs from the city. His thoughts vacillate from caution to thoughts of violence, but he really does not know what he’ll do when he finds Cee.
Finally he sees the street sign with the name of M.D. Beauregard Scott, and goes around to knock on the back door. A woman answers and he asks where she is. She leads him quietly through to where the doctor’s office and Cee’s room are. The doctor looks up in surprise and asks who he is. He then starts yelling for Sarah and that there is nothing to steal here. As he reaches for his phone, Frank knocks it out of his hand. He scrambles for a .38, but the chamber is empty. The doctor runs out of the room, yelling for Sarah.
As the doctor comes to a small table with another phone on it, he sees Sarah standing there next to it. Her purpose is clear, and he cannot get in her way.
Frank enters his sister’s room and sees her there on her bed, sleeping and small and cool to the touch. He grabs money from Cee’s purse and picks her up and cradles her into his arms. They come to where Sarah and Dr. Scott are staring at each other with an indecipherable look. Dr. Scott looks at him in “anger-shaded relief. No theft. No violence. No harm. Just the kidnapping of an employee he could easily replace” (112). He tells Sarah not to overplay her hand. She says she won’t, but keeps her hand on the phone.
Frank eases his way out of the house with Cee in his arms, and then sees Sarah waving at him from afar.
Sarah thinks it is a miracle the brother got here in time. She blames herself almost as much as Dr. Beau. She knew he did some things, but she did not know that he was becoming more interested in wombs in general and putting instruments in them. She started seeing Cee losing weight and having long periods, so she wrote to the only relative she knew Cee had. She did not know if the letter made it but thankfully it did in time.
Frank gets Cee on the bus, and he is actually relieved to be relegated to the back where they can sit in private. Once off the bus, they find a gypsy cab. The driver is reluctant, and says the drive to Lotus is long and Frank will have to pay, but Frank urges him on. The driver is worried that Cee is bleeding on his seat, and Frank tells him to be quiet.
Cee is unconscious and moaning, and her skin is now hot. The cab drops them off at Miss Ethel Fordham’s house and Frank carries her up the front steps. Frank can hear Miss Ethel singing inside, and starts hollering for her. She comes out, and sees Cee in his arms. Frank cannot explain and she does not ask. He helps get Cee onto the bed and Miss Ethel tells him to go outside. She opens Cee’s legs and whispers “Have mercy...She’s on fire” (116). She then crisply tells one of the little kids playing around the house to take care of the beans, as she has work to do.
Analysis
Frank finally shares some of the traumatic things that happened in Korea—the soldier murdering the girl (we learn later the soldier was Frank), the deaths of Mike and Stuff, his killing rampages—but he is not yet ready to admit their full truth or extent, or to fully take the path to reconciliation and healing. That will come with his rescue of Cee and her subsequent healing, which give him the confidence and space to deal with his trauma. Trauma is one of the novel’s most potent themes, so we will look at how Morrison navigates it in all of its manifold permutations.
Frank experiences his trauma through nightmares, blackouts, a loss of sense of self, violence, alcoholism, and repression. He blames himself for his friends’ deaths and is ashamed to be a survivor. With his killing of the Korean girl he also suffers from moral injury, which Shira Maguen and Brett Litz call “an act of serious transgression that leads to serious inner conflict because the experience is at odds with core ethical and moral beliefs” (quoted in Ramirez).
Though most of this trauma is due to his experiences in Korea, as Manuela Lopez Ramirez notes, “To the black soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder, an exacerbating contextual risk factor is incorporated, the dominating white society, which both violates and denies the black self, compromising its ability to cope with extreme events.” Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy add, “In comparing the stateside medical facility to the Korean battlefield, Morrison underscores not just the lingering effects of posttraumatic stress, but also the racialized battleground of 1950s American society and the African American war for survival.”
Frank begins to move through his trauma because he “regains his lost sense of purpose” in rescuing Cee. It is a “redemption quest of the shattered black self.” When he arrives at the doctor’s house, he is calm and collected; he “retrieves his manliness and dignity, and breaks with the Western stereotype of the black man as a beast. His non-violent actions make him feel proud for the first time in a long time.” By the end of the novel, Frank is able to cry for the first time, to see his sister as a real person, and to honor another lost Black man through the burial at the bay tree.
Cee’s childhood trauma is similar to Frank’s, but her adult trauma is different than his in that it is physical. Maxine L. Montgomery notes that “the black body is a potent site of trauma before, during, and after slavery,” something that Morrison comments on with the doctor’s experiments on Cee and her resulting infertility. Morrison also alludes to her own novel Beloved with Cee’s “images of an unborn child whose eerie visage brings to mind the ghost child Beloved, an embodiment of a buried history tied to slavery and the perilous transatlantic voyage...The ghostly apparition is also a constant reminder of the physical wound—the scab—that the young woman must carry for the rest of her life.” Additionally, as Katrina Harack explains, “Morrison illustrates how the body is related to identity, as Cee’s race, gender, and age work together to form limitations that she must learn to negotiate if she is to survive.” Cee is able to cope with her trauma due to the community of women who heal her (more on this in the last analysis) and her coming to terms with her self-worth and independence.
