Home by Toni Morrison

This novel, Home,is mainly about Frank Money and his sister, Cee and their family. The brother and sister love one another deeply. However, the love between a brother and sister can’t protect neither one from the sharpness of emotional pain. While Frank fights on the war front in Korea, Cee is home in Lotus, Georgia fighting poverty and discrimination during 1938. Toni Morrison’s novel helped me see better the underside of war. Still, there is no way, I believe, to fully understand a veteran’s battle without fighting in a war like these men and in our time women.  It hurts to lose one friend to death. How must it feel to lose three close friends? I think the pain would be unimaginable. War brings out the worse in the best of men. This is one of the secrets from the war so disturbing to Frank’s mind.
Then, there is the pain only truly understood by another woman. When a woman wants a child and finds out this is not possible for whatever reason life becomes deeply painful like a deep scratch without a scab. Children are all around her. Where can she hide from what her heart so desires? Cee fights with the fact daily that she can’t bare a baby. Cee begins to see the faces of children wherever she goes or while she is looking at whatever she looked at around her.
“You know that toothless smile babies have?” she said. “I keep seeing it. I saw it in a green pepper once. Another time a cloud curled in such a way it looked like….”
Ultimately, the novel confirms that life is possible after the worst of circumstances comes my way. The spirit is indomitable it seems.
“The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape, but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted…”