Nobel laureate’s novel probes legacy of slavery
At 145 pages, Toni Morrison’s new novel Home is a slim volume but it still packs a literary punch. Her last work, 2008’s A
Mercy, took us back to a fractured and embryonic America of the 17th century. In this long-awaited new work from the Nobel laureate and Princeton professor, Morrison takes us to a 1950s USA and gives us Frank Money, an AfricanAmerican Korean War veteran, as a protagonist. Home revisits many of the themes explored in Morrison’s other 10 novels: the legacy of slavery; the racism and violence that underscore African-American life; sexual violence faced by women and girls and the complexities of both familial and romantic love in a world where there is little boundary between private and public; and the workings of memory. From the opening page, Home takes us on a journey that questions what belonging means for a man like Frank — who has survived war only to come home to sit at the back of the bus.
Home is all about Frank trying to keep it together long enough to get from Portland to Atlanta. The novel opens with Frank waking up restrained, in a Seattle psych ward, not remembering how he got there but knowing that he needs to get to Atlanta to rescue his sister Cee. His sister is the first person he “took responsibility for,” Frank tells us, and that “down deep inside her lived a strong good me.” Frank has been summoned home with a mysterious letter warning that his sister is in jeopardy. That’s all he knows and that’s all the reader knows as we journey with him on buses and trains across a country on the verge of the Civil Rights movement.
As with many of her novels, memory is central to Home. This is a book about what people choose to hold on to and what they choose to forget. While Frank tries to forget the atrocities of the war, or numb them with drink, his journey to find his sister pulls back memories of childhood. Morrison peels away layers of those days growing up poor and black in shantytown Georgia during the Depression. That town Lotus is recalled as a place where “the sun, having sucked the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing, torturing its landscape but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it.” His memories of a cruel step-grandmother and parents who worked 18 hour days in a futile fight against poverty intermingle with images of a neighbour’s lynched body hanging from a tree.
A terrible place, then, but yet one that still calls to Frank when he finally reconnects with his sister. Home for him is not a refuge, or even a place of redemption. It is a last resort.
Morrison’s style is demanding. The narrative that drives this short novel is circular and layered and reading her writing can be an exercise in temporal and linguistic gymnastics. And while the reward is worth the labour, even after multiple reads, Home left me wanting more, especially of Frank’s memories from Korea.