Forever coming home

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Told in alternating first and third person narratives,Home is the story of an African American soldiers return from the Korean war. Frank Money is a man cut adrift plagued by hallucinations,sleeplessness,sudden bouts of memory loss,irrational mood swings. What we would now term post-traumatic stress syndrome was,back in the mid-fifties,nothing more than a good reason to consign him to the nut house.

The story opens with Frank feigning being sedated and planning his escape from hospital. The trick of imitating semi-coma,like playing dead face-down in a muddy battlefield,was to concentrate on a single neutral object. He rejects ice too much emotion attached to frozen hills,fire too active,a blank sheet of paper,a chair Everything reminded him of something loaded with pain.

His dilemma everything reminds you of something is Toni Morrisons bread and butter. Everything comes steeped in history: personal,familial,racial,political. As the greatest chronicler of black American history,she uncovers these hidden stories in a language which is characteristically lean and muscular and lyrical at once. No detail extraneous,and barely a superfluous word in this slim volume,little more than a novella.

The characters in each of Morrisons ten novels since her debut with The Bluest Eye 1970,are no strangers to horror,each marked by slavery,war,rape,domestic abuse,and racism. In Home,too,there is no shortage of violence: the casual brutality meted out to Frank and his sister as children by their stepmother,Lenore; the horrors of the battlefield and the swift execution of a Korean girl scavenging for scraps; the medical abuse suffered by Franks sister Ycidra. But in Home,more than her earlier works,we are left with an overarching impression of love,kindness and redemption.

On his first night,having escaped from hospital,Frank is taken in by the Reverend Locke and his wife,who then send him on his way with a pocketful of money: dimes slipped from small coin purses; nickels reluctantly given up by children who had other sweeter plans for them. The kindness of strangers helps him a penniless,friendless and,initially,shoeless vagrant to return home to Lotus,Georgia. Then there is the bond between Frank and his sister Cee,that saves him from madness and depression. The kindness of Sarah,the doctors housekeeper,who helps Cee get a proper job,and whose intervention,when she realises something terrible is happening,ultimately saves her life; and the tough love meted out by the women of Lotus,as they set about mending Cee,rebuilding a body shattered by the good doctors experiments in eugenics.

Like Morrisons most famous work,Beloved,Home has to do with the uncovering or even recovering of a terrible truth. The narrative works almost like psychotherapy as Frank recounts,corrects,misremembers and unwittingly reveals the truth of his trauma and we,as readers,are invited to witness the unravelling,strangely complicit and active in it,as a therapist is with a patient. We are gently,firmly,cast by Franks hypnotic voice in the role of good listeners: compassionate but passive,as he articulates the horror and ultimately,finds a way to come to terms with it.

Towards the end of the book,one of the townsmen asks Frank how his sister is doing now. Mended, he replies. Not better,not healed,but mended in the way that broken pots or torn clothes are,as though Morrison is insisting on the importance of scars.

As in Beloved,and indeed many of Morrisons novels,the story is also about laying things to rest. The novel,that won her the Pulitzer in 1988,centres on the vengeful ghost of a baby whose mother,Sethe,had killed rather than see her recaptured into slavery. The emotional highpoint in Song of Solomon 1977 concerns another grieving mother,Pilate,who sings a heartbroken lullaby over the body of her damaged and outcast daughter,Hagar,at her funeral: Suddenly,like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh of his amazing strength,Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear,And she was loved!

The decent burial is,perhaps more than anything,what sets us apart from the animals that confirms or confers the humanity of both the mourners and the departed. The horror of genocide in Rwanda,the mass graves in Kashmir,the killing fields of Cambodia,the extermination camps of the Third Reich,the Sixty Million and more slaves who died during the Atlantic slave trade to whom Beloved is dedicated,lies as much in the way the victims were disposed of as in the fact of their murder.

Frank recalls an incident when an entire black neighbourhood was forcibly evicted from their homes. One old man who refused to leave was found the next day swinging from the old magnolia tree in his yard,his eyes gouged out: Maybe it was loving that tree which,he used to brag,his great-grandmother had planted,that made him so stubborn. The townsfolk creep back later and bury him under the same tree. At the end of the book,Frank takes his sister back to the place where,as children,they had unwittingly witnessed the hasty burial of a black man,brutalised and killed by whites. Disinterring the body and re-burying the gentleman under a sweet bay tree helps Frank lay to rest his own inner demons a poignant act of self-mending marking the grave with a plaque that reads,simply,Here Stands a Man. It brings us full circle from the opening scene where the children,hidden in the grass,watch stallions fighting: They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood. … They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men. In Toni Morrisons world,the line between the bestial and the humane is fine.

She offers us not a happy ending but the possibility of redemption: people may not be healed but they can,with care and loving attention,be mended. In her inimitable voice,with its syncopated rhythms of scat and bebop and ever-present strains of big-hearted,soul-stirring gospel music,Morrison has crafted a song,a song of brutality and humanity. And we are left with no doubt as to which wins out in the end.

Anita Roy is senior commissioning editor at Zubaan Books