“Say, Who Owns This House?”: US Violence, Indebtedness, and Care in Toni Morrison’s Home

Abstract

Home (2012), Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, strikes readers with its deceptive slenderness; much like the house in the epigraph, it evokes an atmosphere of nooks and crannies where shadows and truths lie, in both senses of that word. Yet, like the character Frank Money’s paralyzing fugue states that dull his senses to the world, the actual heft of the novel is felt in the possibilities created by things unseen and unsaid. Taking place in the mid-1950s, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to a eugenics experiments headed by her employer that results in her sterilization. As these story lines intersect, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies, ties we can still read in the anti-Black administering of police forces and medical machinations wielded against Black communities, both before and during the long reach of COVID-19.