Home, 19 June 2024

Home was the perfect Broadway excursion for Juneteenth, and I have to say that it shook me to the core. This tale was the story of Cephus, and was told partially by him, and partially by two actresses who stepped into a variety of roles on his journey. Thematically, it touched on honor, loss, love, belonging, freedom, and how the concept of “home“ is so much more than where you are living.

The other central character (beside Cephus himself) was his girlfriend, Patty Mae. She was his first love, and left him to go to college, and live a more sophisticated life than the one he was offering her as a farmer. Shortly after he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. He refused to go because Patty Mae had taught him the Bible, and he felt that killing was morally wrong. He was incarcerated for five years, and upon his release, he discovered that the land that had been his inheritance now belonged to someone else. He decided to move up north.

The north was a disaster for Cephus. No one would hire him because of his criminal record. He couldn’t make a living, and quickly ended up unhoused. His whole life slipped away from him. He was somewhere radically different, he was in trouble, and it was hard to get help. For me, his time in the north, spoke of the cruel reality of so-called “equality“. A lot of Black southerners moved north expecting a better world, only to fall into systemic crises, because discrimination was, is, and always has been, alive, and well. This undefined period of wandering and not belonging, coupled with the false promise of freedom is, regrettably, a common story.

When the play started, Cephus’s story was told with so much detail about his life that it was impossible for the audience to hold all of it in our heads. The actors spoke really fast and delivered many specifics about people and places. As Cephus began to lose himself on his journey, we started to lose the detail in the way his story was told. There were fewer words, and they were vague. It felt like the onset of a slow slumber, as Cephus became less and less himself – less and less a person – and more and more an empty shell, and a husk holding space for where a person once was. He was the vessel for an allegory – no longer himself, but anybody and everybody. His details stopped mattering.

At the end, Cephus discovers that someone has bought his former land back and put the deed in his name. He returns to the land he once lived on, thanks to the generosity of a P. Harper. Yet the community of his childhood does not embrace him. Folks who lost loved ones in the war, resent him for dodging the draft. Cephus find ma himself isolated, until one day his former girlfriend pulls up in his driveway. She tells him she’s getting divorced, and he tells her she can stay. After Cephus says she can stay, the big reveal at the end. Is that “Harper“ was Patty Mae’s married name – she is the P. Harper, who bought Cephus back his land – without asking for anything in return.

“Home” turns out not to be a place, but a person who loves you and wants to share a life with you, even though it might not be an easy one. It’s someone who gives freely, but is not afraid to ask when they need you. It’s someone who tests you, someone you’re willing to make compromises for. It’s someone who makes amends and forgives, and provides you with a place to come back to.

This is a beautiful story of a man reborn because he finds that home and was lucky to have someone in his life able to provide it. The closing moments acknowledge that a lot of people don’t get that, and never make it out of the discombobulated loss of freedom of heading up north and hoping for the best. Taken as a whole, it’s a powerful statement about “home” being something you can never really lose, but without a reminder you can fall into oblivion, and never find your way back. We mostly hear the stories of those who survive these journeys, and it was especially moving on Juneteenth to have space for the incredible struggle it takes to regain your sense of self and acknowledge the pain and tragedy of those who don’t.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.