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

Abstract

The simultaneous exclusion from and the complicated desire for inclusion within the narrative of “America” haunts Home (2012), Toni Morrison’s tenth novel. Taking place primarily in 1954, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank Money, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to the eugenics project headed by her employer. As these storylines intersect, by virtue of these two characters being siblings, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies in the United States. I argue that military and reproductive violence are part and parcel of Frank and Cee’s possibilities of being hailed as Americans, to feel at “home.” Yet Frank’s interpellation is only possible when he participates in the murderous imperialism that drives US intervention in Asia, and Cee’s body is made fungible in the name of racist scientific “progress.” To be American is to buttress white supremacist ideologies around American empire and exceptionalism, and to be violent. Morrison demonstrates how exclusion from this narrative is fundamentally, necessarily, a Black feminist framework. I also address debt and indebtedness and how we imagine what is owed to whom. Finally, I draw on Christina Sharpe’s theorizing on “wake work” to demonstrate Morrison’s argument that spaces of home divorced from violence are only made possible through a Black feminist practice of care.