Home

Narrated in third person, this chapter opens with Frank’s arrival in Atlanta, where he is gathering information about Cee’s whereabouts. Frank gets jumped by a youth gang and lands in a fight, where they steal his wallet.

The next morning at the breakfast table of the Royal Hotel, Frank is nervous about finding Cee and facing the truth about her. He thinks about Lily and about how “she had seemed relieved about his departure” and realizes that his “attachment to her was medicinal, like swallowing aspirin” (107). 

When the gypsy cab Frank has been counting on fails to arrive, he boards a crowded bus and walks to Beauregard Scott’s house. Sarah, the housekeeper and letter writer, greets him and leads him to Cee’s room. When the doctor sees Frank, he threatens him with a gun and says he will call the police.

Meanwhile, Frank goes over to Cee, who is cool to the touch, having “none of the early warmth of death” (111). He takes the money out of Cee’s purse and, cradling her in his arms, carries her up the stairs and out: 

As Frank passed around them with his motionless burden, Dr. Beauregard cast him a look of anger-shaded relief. No theft. No violence. No harm. Just the kidnapping of an employee he could easily replace (112). 

As Frank disappears from sight with Cee in his arms, Sarah is thankful, even though there is a strong chance that she will lose her job. Sarah knew that Dr. Beauregard was engaged in underhand dealings such as having his patients drink homemade medicines and performing abortions on society ladies. However, she was unaware that he had a fascination for wombs, developing speculums so he can see further and further in to them. He has been experimenting on Cee, who suffers with extra-long periods, fatigue, and weight loss. 

Following an arduous bus and cab journey, Frank delivers Cee to Miss Ethel Fordham’s house in Lotus.

This chapter is written in the third person. Frank has not been in Lotus since 1949 and finds the place brighter than he remembers and judges that the cotton will soon be ripe for picking and that he will put himself forward for the task. Meanwhile, Frank is worried about Cee and is ignorant about her condition, knowing only that “her boss back in Atlanta had done something—what, he didn’t know—to her body and she was fighting a fever that wouldn’t go down” (119). The neighborhood women will not let him visit the sickroom, and from Jackie, he learns that they think Frank’s maleness will worsen Cee’s condition. Frank sets about cleaning his parents’ house to pass the time, vowing that if Cee dies, “war memories would pale beside what he would do to” the doctor (120). 

It is July before Cee is well enough to move into their parents’ home, and the treatment of country women who “loved mean” has changed her for the better (121). Cee is not sure about what happened to her exactly but recognizes that the doctor lied when he said that the experiments he was doing on her were beneficial to medicine. The women are furious and explain that Cee’s role in life is not to fulfil the doctor’s evil schemes—that instead, she is good enough for Jesus. Unlike the anaesthetized meddling done by Dr. Beauregard, the healing performed by the women is extremely painful. Cee recalls that of all the parts of these tough-loving women’s healing, the most humiliating is being “sun-smacked, which meant spending at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun” (124). However, following the final sun-smacking hour, it “was the demanding love of Ethel Fordham, which soothed and strengthened her the most” (125).

While Cee grows in strength, moving back in with Frank and making quilts to sell to tourists, she has suffered an irrevocable loss: the doctor’s interventions have left her infertile. Cee is devastated and tells Frank that she feels “‘like there’s a baby girl down here waiting to be born […] And now she has to find some other mother’” (131). The news deeply affects Frank, who takes some time alone to process the news. He sees how his “sister was gutted, infertile, but not beaten. She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting” (132). However, something else relating to Cee’s vision of a female child is bothering him.

Writing in the first person, Frank admits to the third-person narrator that he has lied and needs to tell the whole truth. When Cee mentions the baby girl she can see but who will never be born to her, Frank thinks that “maybe that little girl wasn’t waiting around to be born to her. Maybe it was already dead, waiting for me to step up and say how” (133). He admits that he is the one who shot that little Korean girl in the face after she touched him and he liked it. Frank is disgusted with himself and transfers the feeling onto the girl: “How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know was in me?” (134). He tells the narrator now they can “keep on writing,” but they ought to know the truth (134).

The third-person narrator relates that the next morning Frank wakes up uneasy, realizing how he “had spent a sleepless night, churning and entangled” in his guilt about the girl he killed, which he tried to cover with “big-time mourning” for his buddies (135). Frank realizes that he needs to work through his feelings and asks Salem where the horses he and Cee saw as children are; he hears a rumor that the farm got turned into a place for dogfights. One of Salem’s old friends, Fish Eye, relates that the horses were sold to a slaughterhouse, as horse meat was the only kind that was not rationed during the war. Salem and his friends confirm that, even more disturbingly, it was not dogfights that took place but humans fights: “‘They graduated from dogfights. Turned men into dogs,”’ one old man says (139). It turns out that in one fight, a father was persuaded to fight his son in front of a crowd, and the body Frank and Cee saw being piled into a hole was the result of that fight.

This chapter is narrated in third person. Frank insists that he needs Cee’s first quilt for an important task. Brother and sister walk for two miles until they find the plot with the buried body, and Frank tests the earth, trampling on it until he can find the skull from the human fight. He places the bones in Cee’s quilt, “doing his level best to arrange them the way they once were in life” (143). They carry the quilted victim over to an edge of Lotus by the sweet bay tree near the stream. Frank digs a hole, while Cee spots a small man in a funny suit, swinging a watch chain. They sling the “crayon-colored coffin” into the hole (144). Frank pounds a sign that reads “‘Here Stands A Man”’ (145) into the tree trunk.

Writing in first person, Frank contemplates that the tree is “[h]urt right down the middle/But alive and well” (147). After some time, Cee taps her brother on the shoulder and encourages him to come home with her.