Reviewed by Tony Medina

In Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, Home, home is both motif and mindset. Her main character’s disposition is as fractured and fragile as the various others he encounters on his mad dash escape from the home he hates as much as his own loathsome inner demons. Morrison juxtaposes Frank “Smart” Money against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South, with its cultural landscape of racism, violence and segregation (depicted as the fictional Lotus, Georgia), and the Korean War where the American military is just as segregated.

In Frank Money we have the embodiment of a man unhinged by the traumas of war where he witnesses the brutal deaths of his childhood best friends (Mike and Stuff) as well as the haunting memory of an impoverished Korean girl whose head, he claims, was blown off as she rifled for discarded leftover food in a military refuse bin. Frank is also hounded by a recurring childhood memory involving dog fighting, menacing white men, horses and an unidentifiable black body discarded like trash in a grave without a coffin. When we first encounter him, he is escaping, barefoot, from a sanatorium to the snow-covered doorstep of Reverend John Locke and his wife, Jean. Reverend Locke takes Frank in as if he were expecting him. The Lockes care for him overnight as if he were a runaway slave hiding and moving along the Underground Railroad.

A race man, Reverend Locke tells Frank— just before sending him off with money, food and contacts — that “an integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.” With that, Frank is bound for Atlanta in search of his sister, Ycidra (who he nicknamed Cee), summoned by her co-worker’s letter recounting her imminent danger.

Frank, whose sense of identity was defined by his role as his sister’s protector, finds his way South through a haze of homelessness, alcoholism and nightmarish memories suffered from the post-traumatic stress of warfare at home and abroad. He subsequently meets and falls in love with Lily, who also had been searching for home — albeit through real estate — but had been denied by Jim Crow redlining. She’s told of her denial by a reluctant yet forthright real estate agent who reveals to her a racist directive about selling and renting, which reads: “No part of said property hereby converged shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or Asiatic race excepting only employees in domestic service.”

Morrison’s classic construction reads like a combination slave narrative and bildungsroman in which each intermittent chapter is a confessional (either oral or written) narrated by Frank, introducing each main character’s story with chapters delving into the characters’ psychological landscape and search for place.

Lily, who yearns for a house of her own, finds solace in caring for Frank, who finds some semblance of equanimity from the harried trauma of his past. Ycidra is depicted as slow, abused by a narcissistic grandmother (who begrudgingly takes the homeless Money family in) and trusting to the point of naïveté. She searches for her place in a complicated, controlled world where she never really feels loved, except by her smothering, overprotective brother who “was always … soothing her as though she were his pet kitten.” This behavior on older brother Frank’s part seems innocent enough until the novel’s climax makes this depiction a strange foreboding in Morrison’s surgical narration. The vagabond Frank (who, when asked by the Lockes where he’s from, says: Korea, Kentucky, San Diego, Seattle, Georgia) tries to escape his home by joining the military and the war, only to make it back as he faces his past, wrestles with an inner turmoil he’d become inured to, and, as he’s always done, sets out to save his sister.

In Home, Morrison constructs a taut, psychological blues thriller that riffs on race, place, and the rocky, ephemeral terrain of memory where past and present move fluidly in and out of Frank’s dreamlike, surreal recollections in scenes reminiscent of the hallucinatory Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s Ironweed. Her depiction of race and racism is nuanced and pointed: a South where dogs are treated better than black folks; a segregated wartime Army; a seemingly benevolent doctor who turns out to be a scientist secretly experimenting with eugenics. This latter subplot is explored sparingly in Ycidra’s story and forms the basis for Frank’s journey to rescue her.

But Morrison does not delve too deeply into this theme and it is not entirely clear if the mad scientist, Dr. Beauregard Scott, is white or black; nor is it determined whether Frank knows what he was up to regarding his sister who was under his employ. Morrison treats this scene both mysteriously and subtly when Ycidra, who after being assigned her live-in quarters, comes across books that are unfamiliar and intriguing: The Passing of the Great Race; Out of the Night; Heredity, Race and Society.

These disparate themes all factor into Morrison’s quilt-like narrative equation of a home that is not solely about people finding their place in the world, but about what America was, is and continues to be. Home further extends Toni Morrison’s continuing odyssey and disquisition on the peculiarity and historiography of race and racism in America.

Tony Medina, a professor of creative writing at Howard University, is the author or editor of 16 books for adults and young readers, the most recent one titled Broke on Ice. An Onion of Wars is the latest of his seven poetry collections; My Old Man Was Always on the Lam was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.