”Nothing Made Them Change Their Minds about the Medical Industry”: Medical Abuse, Incarceration, and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Home

Abstract:Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) takes up issues of (anti-)Blackness, eugenics, and the healing powers of communities of Black women. In the novel, Cee, the protagonist’s sister, is hired as a “helper” (explicitly not a “nurse”) for a white eugenicist. Cee is essentially incarcerated at the doctor’s home office, where she is reduced to a sort of living cadaver upon whom the doctor experiments, leaving her unable to bear children. Upon being rescued from the doctor, Cee is nurtured back to health by a community of lay Black women in the South. Morrison’s novel critiques a history of anti-Black racism in the medical field that has situated Black persons (especially Black women) as particularly susceptible to abuse, malpractice, and incomplete or nonexistent care. I situate my discussion of Home alongside an exploration of forced sterilizations of incarcerated Black and Latinx women in US corrections facilities to illustrate Morrison’s illumination of historical and ongoing racial injustices in the entangled US medical, legal, and military systems. This essay explores the modes by which communities of Black women practice an ethics of care for one another and collectively resist anti-Black biopolitical systems. In taking on the role of healers, the Black women in this novel deny white attempts at control over Black persons’ bodies, lives, and reproduction. Morrison’s novel instead presents a move toward Black liberation, care, and safety that sets the stage for thinking about contemporary health and legal issues—namely anti-Black racism and the disproportionality of negative outcomes for Black persons in US medical systems.