1 “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