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“Come on brother. Let’s go home”: Dual-Witnessing in Toni Morrison’s Home

By: Eden Wales Freedman

Trauma theorists document the necessity of “witnessing” trauma to surmount it. To endure

and prevail, critics attest, a wounded subject must face one’s buried truths, piece together an

individual history, and voice a fully-realized narrative (Caruth, Felman, Laub, Herman). This article,

in turn, theorizes a readerly engagement of traumatic literature, specifically Morrison’s novel, Home

(2012),1 to consider how readers can respond productively to those psychically- and socially-charged

texts that center around portrayals of race and gender.2 Explicitly, the essay analyzes Home to

investigate firstly, how the novel witnesses the intersecting traumas of American racism and sexism

and, secondly, how it utilizes constructions of race, gender, and home alongside literary portrayals of

trauma to impel even reluctant readers to engage—or “come home to”—the individual and collective

histories of marginalized Americans.

Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American Korean war veteran living in

Seattle, who is called home to Lotus, Georgia to rescue his sister Cee from a sadistic doctor’s

pseudoscientific experiments. As he journeys South, Frank demonstrates clear signs of post-

traumatic stress: He is frequently disoriented, suffering intrusive flashbacks of his experiences during

the Korean War as well as blackouts. (He cannot remember, for example, why he has been arrested

by the police or hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.) He also encounters—in both the North and

South—the racial segregation and rampant prejudice that pervaded the Jim Crow era. When Frank,

with the help of a group of local women, successfully saves Cee, he and his sister begin to realize

that Lotus, a town they hated their entire lives (and from which they could not wait to escape) has

somehow, to their surprise, become “home.”

Authors and critics define “home” as both a physical place and a psychic space. While the

word commonly denotes a “fixed residence” (OED sense 2a) or “domestic setting” (2c), the concept

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of “home” extends beyond the material structure of a house into a psycho-emotional space of being.

Carole Després explains that home provides a sense of “physical security” for individuals and thus

becomes a “haven” or “sanctuary” wherein one can escape “outside pressures” and maintain “privacy

and independence” (98). Home, she explicates, offers both security and solace, affording its

occupants a sense of “belonging” (98). Clichés such as “there’s no place like home” underscore a

state of safety, comfort, and nostalgia. Accordingly, home becomes a “locus of intense emotional

experience,” offering inhabitants an “atmosphere of social understanding” where one’s identities and

behaviors are often accepted (Després 98). This interpretation may have led Maya Angelou to call

home “the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned” (196) and Robert Frost to

quip, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (38). While

the memories connected to home are often positive, they can also bring pain. If “home is where the

heart is,” as Pliny the Elder affirms (qtd. in Titleman 312), then home, like the symbol of the heart,

evokes not only love and joy but also heartbreak and heartache. Perhaps for this reason, Salman

Rushdie depicts home as a state of trauma and loss (22). In her novel Home, Morrison utilizes

home’s physical and psychological senses to underscore the concurrent difficulty and necessity of

confronting the troubling (and even traumatizing) memories and relationships associated with

“home.” Only in facing—or “coming home” to—trauma, Morrison suggests, can one overcome it—

with the committed support of an engaged reader-listener who accompanies the speaker-survivor on

the journey home.

Although theorists devote significant attention to evaluating why and how speakers witness,

few consider the role of the reader in analyzing testimonial literature. Similarly, while critics have

discussed geocultural displacement in Home (Anders 109), representations of masculinity and

redemption (Ibarrola 110), and how the text converses with Paul Gilroy’s theory of the black Atlantic

(Schindler 111), theorists have not yet considered what it means in the novel—for characters and

readers alike—to come home to a psychic space of mutual healing. To address this critical gap (and

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to explicate a productive approach to reading testimony), I argue that narrative witnessing denotes

not just a one-sided act but an interpersonal interaction. A narrator bears witness to an addressee who

absorbs the teller’s story and testifies to its veracity. This relational mode is conveyed in the word’s

own definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a witness as both the speaker who bears

witness (what I term the primary witness) and the spectator or auditor (or secondary witness) who

bears witness to the speaker’s testimony (sense 6a). When a reader successfully enters into a

speaker’s narrative and an account is mutually witnessed, what I call dual-witnessing occurs. I call

the failure to engage another’s testimony anti-witnessing.

Placing these theories of reading in conversation with Home, this paper explores the ways in

which Morrison’s novel presents individual and communal reactions to the life narratives of others

and impels readerly engagement. To start, Home highlights the importance of dual-witnessing in and

across our current era. Set in mid-twentieth-century America, when African-Americans are still

treated “like dogs” (19), Home narrates the story of Frank Money who—with the help of an empathic

narrator and engaged reader—struggles to work through untold tragedies, from the childhood trauma

of witnessing a lynching, to the horrors of the Korean War (and Frank’s own potential to victimize

the innocent), to the general mistreatment of blacks in both the North and South. To come to terms

with his past, Frank must return “home” not just to a physical place in Lotus, Georgia, but to the

psychic center of his overlapping traumas. To get there he must journey with a secondary witness

who is willing to share the burden of his traumatic testimony, as, only through the help of another,

can Frank surmount his past. Accordingly, Frank seeks secondary witnesses in all of his

relationships—from his sister, Cee, to the novel’s narrator, to Home’s readership. Through

relationships such as these (enacted both within and without the text), Home emphasizes the ultimate

indispensability of dual-witnessing, underscoring that “home” is less of a physical place than an

active, psychic space.

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Home begins by witnessing the persistence of racism in American society and then asks

readers to witness secondarily racism’s aftermath. As Leah Cohen notes in her review for The New

York Times, in Home, Morrison “raises our gall repeatedly at sickening abominations routinely

inflicted on African-Americans,” including sterilization, institutionalization, Mandingo fighting,

racial profiling, segregation, and shootings of children by the police. When asked why she decided to

set her novel in the 1950s, Morrison explained: “I wanted to rip the scab off that period. There’s all

this Leave It to Beaver nostalgia. That it was all comfortable and happy and everyone had a job. Oh

please. There was violent racism. There was McCarthy. There was this horrible war we didn’t call a

war, where 58,000 people died”3 (qtd. in Minzesheimer). Moreover, such injustices did not cease

with Reconstruction or the Civil Rights movement but persevere today. “Although we have come

close to healing,” Debra Walker King writes in African Americans and the Culture of Pain, “we still

have open sores, injuries bleeding from ongoing assaults of racism and prejudice, blatant and

inadvertent stereotyping, defensiveness, denial, and racial hurt” (160). One way Morrison combats

such subjugation is to refuse to elide the legacy of racial discrimination and to confront instead the

systemic oppression that continues to shape American race relations. To this end, whereas novels

such as Morrison’s Beloved (1987) prompt contemporary readers to acknowledge the trauma of

American slavery, Home teaches us to engage the prejudice that pervades our current era. As NPR

reviewer Heller Mcalpin writes: “You may think you’ve had enough of [topics such as] racism [and]

slavery … but then you read a book like [Home] … and realize, as Samuel Beckett put it, ‘All has

not been said and never will be.’” To propel readers toward this realization, Morrison offers us

Home, prompting us to witness secondarily what we may otherwise elide or negate.

Home not only witnesses wide-ranging instances of American injustice but also delves into

the particularized experiences of its individual characters, emphasizing the need for each person to

confront one’s trauma in order to prevail over it. One who clearly wrestles to work through past

suffering is Frank Money, a protagonist who ardently attempts to repress all he has endured only to

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find that he cannot, as “everything remind[s] him of something loaded with pain” (8). The only way

to dispel the “haunting images” that “dance before his eyes” (97), Home suggests, is for Frank to

witness them primarily. This process, however, proves challenging for Frank, who hesitates to

witness a past in which he acts as both victim and victimizer. A central trauma for Frank is that, as a

soldier in the Korean War, he befriended and then killed a young Korean girl. In the present, Frank

cannot withstand the trauma of being both a victim (as an African-American homeless veteran) and a

victimizer (as a soldier who killed a girl because he was sexually aroused by the child and wished to

eliminate the attraction she awakened in him) (134). That Frank is traumatized by his wrongdoing

does not excuse his victimization of the innocent. Instead, via Frank’s (counter)example, Home

reminds readers to witness not only those moments in which one has been injured but also those

instances in which one has contributed to the suffering of another.

In other words, if we are to prevail individually and communally, we need to recognize the

overlapping positions we have the potential to occupy as victim and victimizer. This process is one

Frank is initially unprepared to undertake. Thus, when he first tells his story, he admits that the death

of the Korean girl was a seminal moment for him but leads Home’s narrator and readership to believe

that not he but another soldier killed the child (95). This narrative lie enables the protagonist to avow

the girl’s death and its importance to him while disavowing his personal responsibility for having

victimized another. Eventually, Frank admits that he murdered the child (135), a belated act of

witnessing that empowers him to heal from his traumatic past. Frank’s struggle to admit (even to

himself) his assaultive tendencies serves as an important reminder to Morrison’s readers. Through

Frank, Home calls us to acknowledge not only America’s independent registers of injustice but also

the ways in which we personally contribute (howsoever unconsciously) to a national record of

violence and oppression. Explicitly, through Frank’s decision to confront his victimization of an

innocent girl, Home encourages readers in the middle of the social power spectrum (and regardless of

race) to scrutinize their behavior toward those lower on the power spectrum—even though they

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themselves are under stress from those above them. As Frank discovers, acknowledging our ability to

victimize others can be painful. Home underscores, however, that until we take responsibility for our

personal role in effecting violence, we cannot overcome it. Until we acknowledge the most difficult

realities, we cannot heal collectively.

The ability to work through past ills, however, is hindered when a potential primary witness

is anti-witnessed. In Home, the suppressive effects of anti-witnessing (and the fortitude required to

dual-witness despite them) are exemplified in Frank’s sister, Cee, a much-abused woman who must

overcome immeasurable traumas if she hopes to survive them. The progress Cee makes toward

realizing this goal is repeatedly thwarted by her grandmother, Lenore, who—rather than witnessing

her granddaughter secondarily—critiques everything about her from the circumstances of her birth to

whatever Cee does thereafter. Because Cee was not born “at home, in a bed” but was birthed “in the

street” instead, Lenore dismisses her as “sinful” and “worthless” (44). Clearly, Cee is not to blame

for being born on the road, as she cannot control how she enters the world. Nor is Cee’s mother

culpable for birthing her daughter in transit, since their family was forced by white supremacists to

abandon their home and to search elsewhere for a place to call their own (128). (One may question,

finally, why being born en route is objectionable at all). Even so, Lenore persists in blaming Cee for

the manner of her birth, for her ensuing “cursed” existence (44), and even for the violent racism that

led up to it (128). Accordingly, Cee is deeply wounded. “Branded early as an unlovable, barely

tolerated ‘gutter child,’” Morrison writes, “she agreed with the label and believed herself worthless”

(128). Rather than striving to witness the trauma of being victimized from birth, Cee internalizes

Lenore’s derision, underscoring the difficulties of witnessing and the repercussions of anti-

witnessing.

Furthermore, Home reveals the contagion of anti-witnessing, which first encourages Cee to

undermine herself alongside Lenore and next leads her to attach herself too closely to anyone she

believes may save her from her grandmother and herself. In seeking outside rescue, Cee

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unconsciously underscores her need for a secondary witness to help work through trauma.

Regrettably, Cee’s pursuit of a partner with whom to dual-witness is beset with difficulties from the

start, as she initially confuses a secondary witness (one who engages a speaker’s narrative in order to

help her overcome it) with a Prince-Charming archetype (the male romantic lead of fairy tales who

rescues the damsel in distress from a villainous predicament). However appealing this fantasy may

be to Cee, her romanticized vision represents a misconstrual of dual-witnessing that results in her

inability to work through trauma, since she consistently surrenders her agency to others. Nor is she

likely to secure a secondary witness, since she looks for not a partner in her relationships but an

imagined savior. Consequently, Cee’s relationships, particularly with men, often result not in dual-

witnessing but in breakdown and abandonment.

Cee’s pattern of searching outside herself for a savior emphasizes the infectious nature of

anti-witnessing and the difficulty of witnessing across it. When Lenore derides her granddaughter,

Cee loses confidence in herself. Following a fairy-tale paradigm, Cee places her faith in men to

rescue her from her grandmother (an evil-stepmother archetype). Cee turns first to Frank for

protection, but, when he leaves for war—a departure that she experiences as an abandonment—Cee

replaces her brother with another knight errant: the first man to visit town or, as Lenore snipes, “the

first thing she saw wearing belted trousers” (47). Cee’s chosen hero initially fulfills her fantasy (he

even calls himself “Prince” [48]), but, after marrying Cee, Prince abandons her, recalling Frank’s

enlistment and subsequent absence (47). Through Prince’s betrayal, the novel exposes Cee’s

individual struggle to dual-witness in the face of persistent anti-witnessing, but the scene also

exposes the social issues inherent in Cee’s pursuit of male protectors: namely, the injury systemic

sexism poses to women. In binding herself to a phony Prince, to an untrue partner, Cee demonstrates

that she has internalized both Lenore’s disparagement (which convinces Cee that she is “worthless”

and must thus find fulfillment outside of herself) and the societal dictates that teach women to seek

salvation in men so that the hapless heroine (in both fairy-tale and heteronormative social discourse)

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may be liberated by the handsome hero—most effectively by his taking her for his own through

marriage. Through recounting Cee’s fraught history, Home reveals the damage anti-witnessing

wreaks on both an individual and a collective level. Because Cee has absorbed both her

grandmother’s contempt for her and society’s denigration of women as a group, she looks for

someone outside of herself to save her. Accordingly, she cannot take the steps necessary to overcome

her traumatic upbringing.

As a final step in this destructive pattern, Cee looks to her white male employer, Dr.

Beauregard Scott, to heal her from the pain of past abuse, abandonment, and internalized self-

loathing. He too compounds her trauma by drugging Cee in order to perform medical, sexual, and

sterilizing experiments on her, which he believes will improve his understanding of the “science” of

eugenics (65). Alongside Lenore’s, the doctor’s mistreatment functions on a particularized and

collective level. From an individual standpoint, Dr. Beau’s violation of Cee’s body and personhood

violates his patient by victimizing her without her knowledge and against her will, by denying her

agency to refuse treatment, and by appropriating her body for his own purposes. From a social

perspective, Dr. Beau’s methods speak to the racial and gendered anti-witnessing that pervades

society. In his review of the novel for The Washington Post, Ron Charles suggests that Dr. Beau

represents a “modern day version” of Beloved’s schoolteacher, a “reminder of African Americans’

historically horrible relation to the science that justified their abuse from slavery to Tuskegee.” In

other words, Home reminds readers that, into the twentieth-century and beyond, white men of

authority (emblematized in Dr. Beau) have used racial privilege to abuse and undermine those

without it. Furthermore, Dr. Beau’s research exposes not only his and society’s pervasive racism but

their sexism as well. An embodiment of white and male hegemony, Dr. Beau recognizes black and

female Cee as not an equal person but a subordinate on which to experiment. The doctor’s presence

in the novel thus warns against the danger of those who abuse their privilege to exploit both their

individual victims and society as a whole.

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How can readers combat such anti-witnessing? As Home proposes, we must become

secondary witnesses both within and without the text. That is, when we engage Morrison’s novels

(and, ideally, even after we finish reading them), we must work to dual-witness, however challenging

the practice may be. To help readers achieve this goal, Home highlights above any one situation the

necessity, difficulty, and process of dual-witnessing. To start, the novel emphasizes the

indispensability of secondary witnessing. Frank struggles to witness primarily because he is haunted

by the suffering he has endured and effected but also because he has not yet found a secondary

witness with whom to dual-witness. In fact, dual-witnessing proves so essential to Frank that he

describes the process as “coming home” not to a physical place but to a stable psychic state in which

the consciousness of the primary witness “takes up residence” in that of the secondary witness—and

vice versa (68). Frank initially hopes to secure such a mutual relationship with his girlfriend Lily, as

only with her do his intrusive memories “fade” (21), but as Cee has learned, Frank discovers that

dating someone does not guarantee dual-witnessing. When Lily finds herself unable to meet Frank’s

demand for a secondary witness, the protagonist finds himself “homeless” once again, unable to

process his past without a partner committed to working through it.

Howsoever important dual-witnessing may be, Lily’s failure to alleviate Frank’s trauma does

not make her a bad person or partner. Instead, the woman’s struggle to minister to Frank highlights

the accompanying strain dual-witnessing imposes on its secondary witnesses as well as the

commitment the process consequently demands from them. Scrambling to make ends meet (and

wrestling with her own marginalization as an Afra-American during Jim Crow), Lily buckles under

the added stress of supporting a traumatized partner. Thus, though she initially attempts to help

Frank, Lily eventually begins “to feel annoyance rather than alarm” at (or compassion for) his

traumatization and begins to separate herself from Frank by disregarding him (or “making no eye

contact” and “trying hard to pretend he was a stranger to her”) (77), a choice that effectively ends

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their relationship. In narrating Frank and Lily’s crumbling partnership, Home underscores how

difficult dual-witnessing is.

To offset the counterexamples of Prince and Cee and Lily and Frank (and to present an

improved vision of dual-witnessing), Home offers readers the paradigm of Frank and Cee, siblings

who, over time, learn to dual-witness with one another in order to come home to (and thereby prevail

over) their coinciding traumas. Though Cee is anti-witnessed by almost everyone she knows, she and

Frank are allied from the start. Frank reflects on his relationship with his sister: “She was the first

person I ever took responsibility for. Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself” (103).

The protagonist’s description of his feelings for his sister mirror what he once hoped to find with

Lily: a stable and shared psychic state in which he takes responsibility for another (thereby serving as

her secondary witness), and she does the same for him (by safeguarding his wounded psyche within

her own consciousness). From a young age, Frank and Cee begin to dual-witness. Thus, when the

children witness the Ku Klux Klan’s burial of a lynched African-American man, they intuitively turn

to one another for support. When Cee watches the victim’s “black foot … being whacked into the

grave, her whole body beg[ins] to shake” (4). In response, Frank “hug[s] her shoulders tight and

trie[s] to pull her trembling into [his] own bones” (4). This moment illustrates the engagement of

personal trauma on an individual level and societal trauma on a collective one: Frank does not look

away but faces catastrophe. He embraces Cee’s experience in order to feel her “trembling” in his

bones.

The effort to maintain this reciprocity is where many prospective witnesses falter. If Frank

and Cee are to dual-witness, then, they must work consistently to renegotiate and to reassess their

relationship. The energy required to witness secondarily is not steady or constant but is dynamic and

fluid, demanding from participants a careful navigation of an often-turbulent space in which one

acknowledges one’s indivisible roles as potential victimizer of, empathic bystander alongside, and

survivor-in-solidarity with the traumatized speaker. Both siblings struggle to sustain this protean

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position. Cee, for one, at first relies too heavily on her brother. Instead of witnessing to him, she

gives herself over to him, as she will do with Prince and Dr. Beau. As a result, Frank becomes more

of a comforter-guardian to Cee than secondary witness. Hence, when Frank goes to war and can no

longer watch over Cee, she feels “defenseless” and abandoned, “adrift in the space where her brother

had been” (48). She yearns for the days when Frank would, “as always, protect her” (51). What Cee

fails to realize is that protecting a primary witness is not the same as dual-witnessing with her. Rather

than shielding Cee from her own trauma, Frank, as secondary witness, must enter into Cee’s reality

without usurping it. Cee, as primary witness, should work to assert her own agency instead of

handing herself over to someone else before she has developed an independent self to share.

A benefit, then, of Frank’s perceived abandonment is that, “adrift in the space” he leaves for

Cee, she begins to fashion an independent identity from which to witness. Thus, when Frank returns

to rescue her from Dr. Beau,4Cee has a nascent self from which to testify, and the siblings can begin

to dual-witness anew—a shift that proves beneficial for both. Cee, for one, is able not only to witness

primarily to Frank but to teach him how to witness her secondarily (by engaging her life narrative

instead of trying to save her from it) and how to witness himself primarily (by confronting his

intersecting roles as victim and victimizer).When Cee tells Frank, that because of the doctor’s

experiments, she cannot have children, Frank responds: “I’m sorry, Cee,” acknowledging her painful

condition while also “mov[ing] toward her,” a kind of physical dual-witnessing that offers Cee the

freedom to “beg[i]n to sob” (131). In this scene, the siblings start to build a foundation on which to

dual-witness, but Frank veers from it momentarily: “Come on girl. Don’t cry” (131). Formerly, Cee

may have welcomed this style of comfort, but, having begun to witness primarily, she bristles at

Frank’s attempt to disavow her emotional state. She thus responds: “Why not? I can be miserable if I

want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It shouldn’t go away. It’s just as sad as it ought

to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s true just because it hurts” (131). Here, Cee teaches Frank

that witnessing trauma is not the same as negating it. To prevail over the past, one must face it

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directly (as the children did the lynched man’s burial) rather than flee from trauma (as Frank does his

victimization of the Korean girl).

Cee’s newfound ability to witness primarily and to help her brother witness secondarily

transforms him. Frank reflects: “His sister was gutted, infertile, but not beaten. She could know the

truth, accept it, and keep on” (132). Inspired by her example, Frank examines his own life in order to

“sort out what … was troubling him and what to do about it” (132), and, for the first time, he is able

to come home to his victimization of the Korean girl and to witness to amend his life. He begins the

following chapter of the novel by testifying: “I have to say something to you right now. I have to tell

you the whole truth. I lied to you and I lied to me. I hid it from you because I hid it from me” (133).

Here, Frank admits to the novel’s narrator, readers, and himself that he repressed the memory of his

victimization because he was ashamed of it. He also recognizes, however, that he cannot surmount

his past or become the person he wishes to be until he comes home to the darkest moments of his

history and then strives to improve himself (as Cee has) through sustained dual-witnessing. The

urgency of Frank’s confession (e.g., “I have to say,” “I have to tell”) underscores the necessity of

witnessing in general—a practice both Frank and his readership must undertake in order to heal.

Following this revelation, Frank begins to confess to the violence he caused, taking

responsibility for his perpetuated victimization. “I shot the Korean girl in the face,” he confesses. “I

am the one she aroused … How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know

was in me?” (133). Frank admits that he killed the child for provoking him to recognize the depravity

within him. Fittingly, he attempts to atone for her murder by witnessing his overlapping positions as

victim and victimizer, i.e., by acknowledging the inner corruption he once killed to deny. He

concludes his testimony with the query: “What type of man is that?” (133). Frank’s question is

rhetorical. He is explaining (not justifying) why he shot the girl, but he is also entreating Home’s

readership to help him determine what type of person he is. That is, as he witnesses primarily, he

asks readers to witness him secondarily. A potential answer to Frank’s question “what type of man is

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that?” is “a bad man,” but a more productive reply may be: “a human,” one who is capable of

causing harm but also of effecting good. To blame Frank for killing a child is easy. A more

constructive response may be to recognize that, alongside the protagonist, we all contribute to the

pain of others. We may not murder children, but we do, to whatever small degree, continually wound

others. In fact, a key component of secondary witnessing is to come home to our own potential to

anti-witness and then to strive against it.

To help us witness our own traumas primarily, the suffering of others secondarily, and the

psychic and social violence we perpetuate collectively, Frank and Cee serve as fictive guides. The

siblings’ dual-witnessing is modeled most clearly in Home’s final chapter when Frank and Cee

exhume the body of the man they saw buried as children, rearrange his bones as “they once were in

life,” enfold his skeleton in a quilt Cee has made, and rebury him beneath a bay tree (143). In doing

so, they symbolically dual-witness their childhood trauma. First, they excavate the past (in digging

up the man and examining his remains). Next, they work together to heal (by sorting through his

bones, as they would the details of a trauma, and then setting the fragments of his skeleton together

in proper order, as they would a series of traumatic memories). Then, by placing the man’s remains

in Cee’s quilt, the siblings honor his passing (by enshrouding the corpse with dignity, thereby

creating a communal bond among them), and they also claim ownership of the trauma they

experienced at his death. The Moneys do not appropriate the man’s individual suffering (e.g., the

agony he endured during his lynching), but they do recognize that his passing has become a part of

them, just as his remains are now swaddled in Cee’s quilt. Finally, in burying the man beneath the

tree, Frank and Cee jointly inter the past. This scene reads as a powerful metaphor for the process of

dual-witnessing, in which two witnesses enter into to a traumatic history, work through its details,

and, together, lay it to rest. As Valerie Smith explains, “[b]y reclaiming their personal secrets,” Frank

and Cee are finally able to “reclaim Lotus as their literal, physical home. Through their willingness

to confront their past, they find their true home within them in the memories they share” (135).

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The fact that Frank and Cee bury the man beneath the “sweet bay tree—split down the

middle, beheaded, undead” (143) is also significant, as the tree itself symbolizes the process of dual-

witnessing: two parts unite to form a whole without sacrificing their own alterity. Like Frank and

Cee, the tree-made-gravestone is wounded but thriving, marked by the scars of past traumas

(whatever caused the tree to split in the first place) but not debilitated by them. If anything, the tree’s

disfigured trunk adds to its grandeur, signifying its strength in survival despite all it has weathered.

As such, it illustrates the marked resilience survivors demonstrate in withstanding the unbearable and

witnessing the unspeakable. Perhaps inspired by this sight, Cee touches Frank’s shoulder lightly and

says: “Come on brother. Let’s go home” (147). These words are the novel’s last, underscoring—as

Frank initially sensed with Lily—that “go[ing] home” in Morrison’s work has less to do with

arriving at a physical state (e.g., returning to one’s residence) than with entering into a psychic one

(e.g., sustaining dual-witnessing). As if to emphasize this point, the last chapter is narrated by Frank,

but the final sentence is Cee’s, revealing how a woman who began the novel without a voice or sense

of self has come not only to witness herself but to guide others (like her brother and their readership)

to witness as well.

While scenes such as this one testify to the transformative power of dual-witnessing, Home

does not restrict witnessing’s cathartic potential to pairs of two but extends the practice’s restorative

promise to the entire community. Following Dr. Beau’s exploitation of Cee, for example, a group of

neighbor women unite to nurse the broken woman back to health (125). In attending to Cee, the

women do not attempt to appease her (as Frank has done) but insist instead that she locate and

witness her own self-worth. Home’s narrator describes the group’s tendered care as “demanding,”

noting that its members refuse to “waste their time or the patient’s with sympathy” (121). This tough-

love approach could be read as a form of anti-witnessing, since the women who tend to Cee do not

appear to engage her trauma empathically. Alternatively, however, the treatment of Cee reflects the

strength and stamina required of those who witness with one another. Confronting trauma (as Frank

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and Cee learn firsthand) can elicit great pain, but until such pain is faced, it cannot be overcome.

Accordingly, a primary witness is not always best-served by hastily-expressed sympathy. In fact, pity

can mask readerly disavowal. A secondary witness, for instance, may ignore or negate a survivor’s

experience to avoid having to address it. In this light, the “demanding” medicine the women practice

does not anti-witness Cee or her trauma but requires instead that she—with the support of the

group—engage her suffering in order to surmount it. For Cee, such communal witnessing proves

curative. “Surrounded by those women with seen-it-all eyes,” i.e., who have witnessed everything

and still survived, Cee is “delivered”—not rescued but re-born (121). As a result, she is able to

witness primarily, first to the community and then to Frank, all she has endured (121). In doing so,

she prompts her brother to witness his own untold trauma, thereby setting a process in motion that

highlights the intersecting power and contagious benefit of dual- and communal witnessing.

Morrison celebrates communal witnessing throughout Home, but the novel highlights above

all else the individual’s need to witness secondarily. Thus, while the novel explores the relationship

between the individual and one’s community (i.e., how Frank and Cee’s personal traumas reflect

larger social concerns), Home ultimately emphasizes individual accountability above societal

responsibility—as if to remind each reader of the real importance of one’s readerly response. To

underscore this need, Frank turns to the narrator within the text (and reader without it) to journey

“home” with him toward healing. This narrative-readerly dual-witnessing is represented explicitly in

the novel’s form, in which alternating chapters of third- and first-person dual-witness Frank’s life-

narrative. In fact, to ensure that the reader does not mistake these chapters for individual narrations

(as opposed to shared conversations), Frank repeatedly speaks back to his narrator (and the reader

through her), challenging what she (and we) understand of his past. This narrative style, in which the

protagonist shapes the narrator’s version of events indicates that the “truths” of Frank’s history are

not controlled by Home’s narrator or author but are worked out collectively through character-driven

narrative- and readerly-dual-witnessing.

16

Reviewers of Home note the importance of the novel’s narrative structure but do not often

analyze how or why it is significant (and when they do, they tend to critique it). Michael Miller of

The New York Observer, for one, dismisses Frank’s first-person “interjections” as “disruptive,”

taking the form of a “self-handicap on Ms. Morrison’s part, as though the shortcomings of her novel

were intentional, all part of the stylistic game she’s playing with the reader.” Here, Miller overlooks

the appeal to dual-witness inherent in Home’s form. Rather than acknowledging Frank’s attempt to

witness to his narrator and to his readers, Miller mistakes the dialogue between Frank and his

narrator for a manipulative “game” that Morrison plays with her readers. Leah Cohen does not

outright reject Home’s form, but she also does not actively engage it. Instead, she simply poses

questions about Frank’s intrusion into the narrative, asking: “Are these signs that he’s regaining

psychic integrity, a sense of self-authorship, or are they evidence of his further disintegration?” The

answer to Cohen’s query may be that, in crafting a conversation between Frank and the narrator,

Morrison models in Home’s very form the necessity of dual-witnessing. That readers are perplexed

by the novel’s structure underscores the difficulty that accompanies secondary witnessing. Moreover,

Home’s structural witnessing is not confined to the pages of this particular novel but, as Tayari Jones

proposes in The San Francisco Chronicle, extends outward, speaking back to Morrison’s earlier

work. In this sense, Frank’s conversations with Home’s narrator parallel and exemplify Morrison’s

dual-witnessing with her previously-published texts. Jones explains:

When Money awakens in a mental institution, shell-shocked and hallucinating, there is an

echo of the insane veteran Shadrack of “Sula,” who is also haunted by the memory of a little

girl. There is a reference to “women who loved mean,” reminding the reader of the mother in

“The Bluest Eye” who hates not sick children, but sickness itself. And finally, there is a set of

human bones, recalling Pilate, the mysterious heroine of “Song of Solomon,” and her

knapsack of bones.

17

Jones does not explicate the link between Home’s narrator and protagonist and Morrison’s current

and previous novels, but one may build on her insight to posit that conversation (or dual-witnessing)

lies at the center—or home—of all Morrison’s work. In fact, Jones’ insight evokes Henry Louis

Gates Jr.’s explication of the “trope of the Talking Book,” a symbol in African-American literature

of double-voiced narratives that converse with other texts (127).5 Evidence of the “Talking Book” is

found in Home (in conversations between the narrator and protagonist) and also outside it (in

intertextual dialogues between the author’s novels), underscoring, once again, the call to dual-

witness both within and without Morrison’s texts. As Anne Whitehead attests, “through intertextual

reference to her own fiction,” Morrison underscores that the traumas of the past (such as slavery and

systemic racism) have not in fact “been laid to rest” but resurrect instead in the “lives and actions” of

her protagonists” (85).

Although Home models dual-witnessing, the novel does not suggest the process is simple or

easy. Instead, the conversations held between narrator and protagonist are often combative, fraught

with anger and distrust. Frank needs the narrator to help witness his unprocessed past. By his own

admission, he cannot remember key details of his history (5). He thus requires a secondary witness to

help him work through repressed memories. But Frank also resents his reliance on Home’s other

speaker, since granting her access to his narrative also offers her the opportunity to anti-witness it.

Accordingly, Frank challenges the narrator’s construal of his life. When discussing his relationship

with Lily, for instance, Frank rails: “You are dead wrong if you think I was just scouting for … sex.

… I wasn’t. Something about her floored me, made me want to be good enough for her. Is that too

hard for you to understand?” (69). Frank caustically clarifies that he sought not only a sexual

relationship with Lily but also a secondary witness in her (and wished to be a primary witness “good

enough” to elicit her dual-witnessing). This is also the relationship that he seeks with the narrator,

hoping to be the kind of speaker who will prompt her to witness him secondarily, though his vitriol

often disrupts their mutual progress.

18

Just as Frank did not know how to witness with Lily, he does not know how to elicit the

empathy of his narrator. Instead of working to explain his history, therefore, he berates the one he

hopes will engage it. When describing a life of poverty, for instance, he reproves: “I have eaten trash

in jail, Korea, hospitals, at table, and from certain garbage cans. … Write about that, why don’t

you!” (40). Frank is confrontational, infuriated by the control the narrator wields in shaping his life

narrative and anxious to ensure that she witnesses his story instead of appropriates it. Similarly, when

attempting to relate his experiences in Korea, he rants: “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t

there” (93). If Frank is convinced that no one can understand—or “imagine”—his life history, one

may wonder why he imparts it. A potential answer is that the protagonist’s desire to witness to an

engaged listener (coupled with his resentment at having to do so) helps remind readers that, even as

we dual-witness, elements will exist of another’s experience that we cannot understand, truths that

language cannot contain. Howsoever unpleasant, Frank’s fraught interaction with the narrator is

understandable. He is angry not only at the narrator but also at the existence of those traumas that

have scarred him severely. Furthermore, his fear-aggression implicitly acknowledges that, whatever

their intentions, secondary witnesses can still anti-witness a speaker’s testimony. Ultimately, the

narrator and protagonist’s conflict underscores the difficulty at the heart of the novel: survivors need

to witness what can never be witnessed to prompt readers to understand what can never be

understood. Holding on to this view helps us balance a tendency to anti-witness with a sustained

effort to dual-witness.

Home does not suggest that dual-witnessing is impossible but that it challenges us, requiring

a degree of psychological finesse and a commitment to constant practice. While this process is

clearly demanding, if we are able to sustain it Home extends to readers the same benefit it offers its

characters: the healing that proceeds from reciprocal engagement. Judylyn Ryan attests that Morrison

“reveals” in her fiction “the world as it is with such clarity that readers are prompted to consider

what needs doing, what must be done” (160). That is, through novels such as Home, Morrison

19

testifies to some of our nation’s darkest realities and then provokes readers to come home not only to

her novel’s revealed truths but also to those of our country. Here, the author testifies to the

multiethnic, non-patriarchal, and traumatic experiences at the heart of American personhood,

literature, and history and then invites us to take up her mantle and to carry her work forward.

This readerly response-ability is explicated in Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, which takes the

form of a parable. In her tale, two children, in an attempt to toy with their town’s blind elder,

approach the woman and tell her they hold a bird in their hands. They demand to know whether the

bird is living or dead. The woman responds: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is living

or dead; … what I do know is that it is in your hands” (199). In her explication of the fable, Morrison

explains that the bird symbolizes language (i.e., all that is witnessed in her novels), and the woman

represents the “practiced writer,” like Morrison, who worries about how the messages she witnesses

will be “put into service” or witnessed secondarily (199). When the woman tells the children that the

bird’s life is in their hands, Morrison expounds, “her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you

have either found it that way” (i.e., the text did not witness in the first place) “or you have killed it”

(the reader did not respond productively) (199). “If it is alive,” she continues, “you can still kill it,”

as the reader can always anti-witness what has been witnessed primarily. “Whether it is to stay

alive,” she concludes, “it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility” (199). That is,

once the bird (or text) passes from an author to her readers, the power to dual- or anti-witness is our

own. The best novels (such as Morrison’s) sing to us, witnessing beautiful and terrible truths, like the

live bird. As engaged readers, we struggle to keep the bird alive, allowing its testimony to resonate

long after we have finished reading the novel in which it witnesses. As Home testifies, keeping the

bird alive is hard work, demanding much of an author, her characters, and her readership. But only

with such effort may we dual-witness with the wise woman her final, Nobel words of hope: “How

lovely it is, this thing we have done together” (203)—or with Cee to Frank, “Come on brother. Let’s

go home” (147).

20

Notes

1 Morrison’s Home can be read as an example of “trauma fiction,” which works, in the words

of Anne Whitehead, to “rescue previously neglected historical periods” in order witness “generally

repressed” or marginalized stories from the standpoint of the underprivileged (82).

2 To link literary portrayals of race, gender, and trauma is not to suggest that any individual or

group—literary or otherwise—is somehow “traumatized” by virtue of social identity. I do maintain,

however, that literature that witnesses constructs of race and gender also testifies to the status of

subordination that emanates from one’s sociopolitical positioning, in this case, as black and/or

female.

3 The Korean War

4 This rescue is indeed necessary. Dr. Beau’s experiments have nearly killed Cee. Rescuing a

person on the brink of death is not the same as attempting to protect her from herself. Here, Frank

needs to save Cee physically so that she may begin to heal psychically.

5 In The Signifyin(g) Monkey, Gates explains that the African deity and original Signifier, Esu

(who becomes the “Signifyin(g) Monkey” in African-American literature) is depicted in African art

as possessing two mouths (xxv), suggesting that the god himself—like the “Talking Book” that

witnesses both primarily and dually—represents a mode of witnessing that ranges across time and

between texts.

21

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