A beautiful short novel about siblings, a man named Frank who has just returned from the Korean War, and his sister Cee (Ycidra).
Frank is dealing with the horror of war and the deaths of his two homeboys. Cee marries and is abandoned in Atlanta. She finds a job with a white doctor whose interest, unfortunately, is eugenics. This is only briefly mentioned but Cee is hurt by his experiments, not sexually, but physically, although she is not aware of what is actually happening.
Their home town is Lotus, Georgia, where Cee is nursed by the woman there. One of them tells her: "You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land. You young and a woman and there's serious limitation in both, but you a person too. Don't let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That's slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world."
Frank too needs healing and Morrison tells his story also.
"In Lotus....there was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else's quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for. If not for my two friends I would have suffocated by the time I was twelve. They, along with my little sister, kept the indifference of parents and the hatefulness of grandparents an afterthought."
Home is truly a gem of a book.
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