Home by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison reminds us that home has no physical boundary nor any physical location but is always about love. We find home wherever “our people” be.


Morrison reads the novel for Random House Audio and she reads it slowly, like poetry, like she means every word and every word has a meaning. She sets the scene in the late fifties, early sixties, in a time we may have forgotten. The Korean War has ended but Blacks still do not have the right to vote. A young soldier comes ‘home’, his mind disarranged, and finds himself imprisoned with no explanation. But the army had been “good to him” and told him not to worry about those episodes he has…

His sister has managed without him, but misses him. She has just gotten a job with a doctor who treats mostly poor patients, some of whom die from his treatments…and then shes gets sick, too, because that doctor is trying to create a new series of drugs or instruments and, well, he used her as a subject.

But there is nothing that can be done, because this is just the way it is…was…and home has so many meanings. Home is where we are, no matter we like it or not.

Toni Morrison makes rainbows from rainy days and does what writers might aspire to: to tell the god-awful truth in language so clear and so bald and so beautiful that we read it to know…to know what home really is, what our world really is, what we really are.


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