Loving Mean: Racialized Medicine and the Rise of Postwar Eugenics in Toni Morrison’s Home James Fitz Gerald Bentley University, USA America’s recent eugenic past should serve as a warning of the dangerous po- tential inherent in the notion that social problems are caused by reproduction and can be cured by population control. —Dorothy Roberts (59) I was interested in the 1950s because we associate it with the postwar Doris Day decade, when it really wasn’t like that.... It was the time of the McCarthy hearings and a lot of medical apartheid, the license of [eugenics practitioners] preying on black women, the syphilis trials on black men.... There were a lot of moments like that. —Toni Morrison (“Toni”) When Korean War veteran Frank Money escapes his Seattle hospital bed at the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), he does so with his mind trained on “something loaded with pain”: a letter he received just days earlier, calling on him to “come fast. She be dead if you tarry” (8). Chained to his gurney, shoe- less, penniless, and clothed only with “his army pants and jacket,” Frank slips away from the psych ward at 4 a.m. Letter in hand, “avoiding shoveled pavement for curb snow, [and running] the six blocks as quickly as hospital drug residue would let him to the parsonage of AME Zion,” he finds sanctuary with Reverend John Locke and his wife, Jean (11). There, Frank warms up “while stamping his feet and trying to rub life back into his fingers,” fielding questions from Reverend Locke along the way. “You from down the street? At that hospi- tal?” the Reverend asks, adding, after Frank nods, that “you lucky, Mr. Money. They sell a lot of bodies out of there.” “Bodies?” Frank responds, “wondering what the man was talking about.” “Uh-huh. To the medical school,” Locke explains. “Well, you know,” he tells his confused guest, “doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich” (12). ...................................................................................................... ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab035 MELUS  Volume 46  Number 3  (Fall 2021) 140 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/melus/article/46/3/140/6427472 by Bentley University Library user on 24 January 2022