“Since you’re set on telling my story, whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men.”

Morrison introduces the idea that Frank’s story is being narrated by someone else. The repetition of the word “whatever” suggests that Frank is acting as though he is indifferent to the narrator’s endeavor. However, his insistence that they know the “truth” about remembering the horses imbues his statement with a defensive edge and implies that he cares about what is being put down on the page.

“Residents of fifteen houses had been ordered to leave their little neighborhood on the edge of town. Twenty-four hours, they were told, or else. ‘Else’ meaning ‘die.’”

As the third-person narrator describes Frank’s experience of escaping from the mental home, Frank recalls the first time in his life when he had to make a swift exit: when he was 4 years old, his family had to leave their neighborhood on pain of death. This account sets up a pattern of transience and a mood of urgency in the novel.

“On a two-cent postcard, Frank wrote, ‘I am back safe. See you all soon.’ ‘Soon’ never arrived because Frank didn’t want to go home without his ‘homeboys.’ He was far too alive to stand before Mike’s folks or Stuff’s. His easy breath and unscathed self would be an insult to them.”

This passage illustrates Frank’s survivor’s guilt, which is preventing him from returning home to Lotus. It is as though he will be ashamed to seem so alive in front of the parents of his “homeboys.”

“Besides, he hated Lotus. Its unforgiving population, its isolation, and especially its indifference to the future were tolerable only if his buddies were with him.”

Frank reveals his hatred of the town he spent most of his childhood in, after his family was evicted from their land in Bandera County, Texas. Frank conceives of Lotus as a backwater town, unattractive in its isolation and full of a community of small-minded people who will drag him backward, too.

“Mama heard the woman ahead of her explain to the volunteer how to spell and pronounce her name. Mama said it was the sweetest thing and the sound of the name was like music amid the heat of the crowd. Weeks later, when her baby, delivered on a mattress in Reverend Bailey’s church basement, turned out to be a girl, mama named her Ycidra, taking care to pronounce all three syllables.”

This passage tells the story of Cee’s unusual full name, which Ida Money came upon by chance in the desperate circumstances of needing assistance from the Church of the Redeemer. The sound of the name itself is beauty and relief in the ugliness of the situation of the baby’s birth and illustrates the mother’s original love and hope for her daughter. Ida’s care to pronounce all three syllables of the complicated name is contradicted by the way others shorten it to “Cee,” a diminutive of diminished power.

“Prince loved himself so deeply, so completely, it was impossible to doubt his conviction. So if Prince said she was pretty, she believed him. If he said at fourteen she was a woman, she believed that too. And if he said, I want you for myself, it was Lenore who said, ‘Not unless y’all are legal.’ Whatever legal meant. Ycidra didn’t have a birth certificate and the courthouse was over a hundred miles away.”

Prince’s self-love and sense of entitlement contrasts entirely with Cee’s lack of both. Underconfident Cee believes that Prince’s notice of her virtues brings them into being. Cee, who does not even have a birth certificate, has no sense of propriety or self-worth, and it is up to Lenore to remind her that she has the moral duty to marry. While Lenore feigns concern for Cee’s reputation, she does not stand in the way of the mistake Cee is about to make by going off with Prince in the first place.

“‘I don’t really understand my husband’s work—or care to. He is more than a doctor; he is a scientist and conducts very important experiments. His inventions help people. He’s no Dr. Frankenstein.’ 

“‘Dr. who?’ 

“‘Never mind. Just do what he says the way he wants and you’ll be fine.’”

Mrs. Scott’s advice to Cee about her new role, working for her husband, Dr. Beauregard Scott, is full of warnings; however, Cee does not have the education or strength of character to pick up on these. For example, Mrs. Scott says that her husband conducts experiments so obscure and potentially controversial that she herself has a distaste for learning about them. The allusion to Dr. Frankenstein—19-century British novelist Mary Shelley’s creator of monsters—is also ominous because in truth, Dr. Beauregard Scott performs similar inhumane operations. The passage ends with Mrs. Scott coaxing Cee to do what she already knows is best, following orders.

“Sarah slid a long, sharp knife from a drawer and, with intense anticipation of the pleasure to come, cut the girl in two.”

While Cee and Sarah are in the kitchen, they assign a gender to their melon dessert, according to whether they have protrusions or indentations at the stem break. The “girl” refers to a female melon, and while the occasion of preparing dessert might seem lighthearted enough, Sarah’s incision on a female-identified object is a premonition of Dr. Beauregard’s devastating operations on human females.

“‘No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or Asiatic race excepting only employees in domestic service.’”

This notice presented to Lily at the estate agent’s is blatantly racist and prohibits her from owning a property that she has the financial means to buy. Nonwhite people are identified as “Ethiopian” by the professed country of their ancestors, thereby underlining that they will never be at home here. However, while they are not permitted to be owners, it is perfectly acceptable for them to reside in the place as transient domestic workers.

“Having been run out of one town, any other that offered safety and the peace of sleeping through the night without a rifle in your face was more than enough. But it was much less than enough for me. You never lived there so you don’t know what it was like. Any kid who had a mind would lose it.”

Frank contrasts his parents’ contentment in Lotus’ peace and stillness with his own dissatisfaction at its inertia. The town’s stasis interferes with his lively mind, his appetite for more. Once more, Frank takes issue with the narrator, who could not possibly know what Lotus was like, having never lived there.

Jackie’s ironing was flawless […] It was a delight to see those small hands lift the heavy iron effortlessly, a pleasure to note how easily she manipulated the wood stove’s flame. […] She was twelve, with that combination of raucous child’s play and adult execution of chores.”

In this passage, Lenore admires Jackie, a neighborhood girl who is confident, alert, and agile in a way that Cee never was. Jackie, a minor character in the narrative, is nevertheless important for showing how Lotus is capable of producing able and sensible young women.

“She was a profoundly unhappy woman. And although she had married to avoid being by herself, disdain of others kept her solitary if not completely alone. What soothed her was a fairly fat savings account, owning property and having one, actually two, of the few automobiles in the neighborhood.”

Unlike others in Lotus, Lenore’s unhappiness comes from her disdain of her neighbors and her refusal to associate with them; however, she takes comfort in her personal wealth. Like Lily, Lenore is an example of an African American woman who gains a sense of security and home from owning things and being self-sufficient, rather than through community.

“Mostly I just watched her hand moving between the stalks to paw garbage. Each time she came it was as welcome as watching a bird feed her young or a hen scratching, scratching dirt for the worm she knew for sure was buried there.”

Frank watches a young Korean girl scavenging for garbage with a kind of fraternal tenderness. She is appropriately childlike, as delicate and determined as a bird. However, the worm is a phallic symbol, indicating that there is a sexual significance to her visits. It is later revealed that Frank shoots this girl in the face after she touches his crotch because he feels both arousal and tremendous shame at that arousal.

“Every civilian I ever met in that country would (and did) die to defend their children. Parents threw themselves in front of their kids without a pause. Still, I knew there were a few corrupt ones who were not content with the usual girls for sale and took to marketing children.”

In giving a factual, almost omniscient account of how some Korean parents marketed their children to American soldiers during the war, Frank sidesteps the truth—that he is the soldier who is guilty of taking advantage of these parents’ lassitude.

“Now, with Mike gone, he was brave, whatever that meant. There were not enough dead gooks or Chinks in the world to satisfy him. The copper smell of blood no longer sickened him; it gave him appetite.”

After Frank’s “homeboy” Mike dies, he gains a new ruthlessness in battle. He learns to apply derogatory racial stereotypes to the enemy and feels his mission is to eliminate them. This determination invades his senses when the coppery smell of blood gives him appetite to kill more.

“Sometimes, long after he’d been discharged, he would see Stuff’s profile in a car stopped in traffic until the heart jump of sorrow announced his mistake. […] For months only alcohol dispersed his best friends, the hovering dead he could no longer hear, talk to, or laugh with.”

This passage, in contrast to the last, expresses Frank’s deep sense of loss and nostalgia for his fallen friends. His hunger to see them is such that he imagines they are part of his everyday surroundings. The fact that the dead are hovering rather than resting suggests that they haunt him.

“Her eyes. Flat, waiting, always waiting. Not patient, not hopeless, but suspended. Cee. Ycidra. My sister.[…] When you write this down, know this: she was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine. Who am I without her—that underfed girl with the sad waiting eyes?”

Frank wishes to convey to the narrator how Cee haunts him in her own way, in the sense that she always waits for him to come back to her. Imagining Cee in her “suspended” state, Frank pictures that her life has stood still since he has been away. However, questioning who he is without her, he feels that he does not know himself without having some relation to her. It is therefore as though his own life has stood still in her absence.

“He liked Atlanta. Unlike Chicago, the pace of everyday life was human here. Apparently there was time in this city […] time for old men to gather outside a storefront and do nothing but watch their dreams go by: the gorgeous cars of criminals and the hip-sway of women.”

This is an atmospheric account of Frank’s entry back to the South, beginning with Atlanta, before he goes to find Cee. He finds it a humane, welcoming place, despite the omens of criminal violence. The feeling that he has time indicates his own more relaxed state of mind.

“There were very few passengers on the bus back to town, and he was relieved to be relegated to the back, where bench seats allowed the two of them space and protected passengers from the sight of a man carrying, dragging, an obviously beat-up, drunken woman.”

Frank finds the Jim Crow law that means that black passengers have to sit in the back of the bus convenient in this instance for shielding himself and Cee from prying eyes. He realizes that, to outsiders, Cee must seem drunk, rather than gravely ill, and they might appear to be stereotypes of African American urban unrest.

“‘Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake—otherwise it just walks on in your door.”’

This warning, given by one of the healing women to Cee, is prophetic of how she needs to learn to stay awake and alert to predators. This is news to Cee, given her predisposition to naively obey orders.

This warning, given by one of the healing women to Cee, is prophetic of how she needs to learn to stay awake and alert to predators. This is news to Cee, given her predisposition to naively obey orders.

This passage describes the Lotus women’s style of communal living. Excluded from the general economy by their remote location and relative poverty, they have their own system of abundance, which revolves around sharing goods and making use of everything they own.

“‘Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seed your own land. […] Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.’”

Miss Ethel’s speech to Cee after she has dealt with her physical ailments as best she can is one that encourages her to save herself, to take responsibility for who she is rather than being defined or dependent on others. It is the key to Cee’s personal development.

“I shot the Korean girl in her face. I am the one she touched. I am the one who saw her smile. I am the one she said ‘Yum-yum’ to. I am the one she aroused.”

In this passage, punctuated by the subjective pronoun “I,” Frank owns up to his guilt regarding the Korean girl. It is not something he witnessed in the third person, but something he experienced in the first person. The shocking revelation follows Cee’s own sadness at her infertility and her inability to conceive the little girl she feels is waiting to be born to her.