Cultural Contexts of Home

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Introduction Setting the Scene: Cross Roads, North Carolina Storytelling and the Supernatural God and the Church Reverence for the Land Connect and Reflect

When we first meet Cephus Miles in the beginning of Home, he has returned to his family farm in North Carolina after 13 years—first serving time in prison (for refusing the draft), then trying to find himself in a large northern city. The homecoming, however, is not particularly welcoming. The local children think he may be a ghost and chant, “Cephus Miles. Dead in the grave. Old Cephus Miles. Can’t be saved.” Their taunts prompt Cephus to tell his community, and by extension the audience, his story.

As his story moves through his memories, we encounter what informs his world view: the culture and community of Cross Roads, North Carolina (a fictional rural town inspired by playwright Samm Art-Williams's actual home, Burgaw, North Carolina). Cephus’ early memories evoke country life: “sounds of crickets” and “a crystal clear sky. Billions of stars and a moon.”  He recalls the smells and tastes of particularly Southern foods, such as “catfish stew, corn fritters, potato pone, fresh cold buttermilk, (and) red eye gravy.” A close reading of Samm-Art Williams's script can offer insights into the mid-20th century, rural Southern culture that gave shape to the pillars of his identity: storytelling, God, and the land.

SETTING THE SCENE: CROSS ROADS, NORTH CAROLINA

The people in Cross Roads gather in church on Sundays, and less reverently, cavort at the Saturday night “fish fries.” For Southern Black people, the fish fry tradition traces back to slavery — it provided fleeting opportunities for rest and communal gathering and endured long after Emancipation as a regular social event for many Black communities. Cross Roads is a “dry” county, a term used to describe any locality where alcohol is prohibited to be sold or consumed, and there is no legal alcohol available for 25 miles. After the repeal of prohibition in 1933, alcohol laws were decided on a local level, explaining the presence of “wet” and “dry” counties within the same state. Both during and long after prohibition, people found ways to make and drink “bootleg” alcohol. At age 15, Cephus worked for his Sunday School teacher’s husband, helping him distill illegal “moonshine,” until his uncle and grandfather found out and punished him.  To grow up in Cross Roads was to internalize dichotomies: practical and spiritual, Saturday fish fry and Sunday service, following the law and making a living.

STORYTELLING AND THE SUPERNATURAL

One way to make sense of these dichotomies is storytelling. For Black Americans, the tradition of storytelling traces back to Africa. It became a crucial form of communication and cultural expression for enslaved people, offering a vehicle to relay history, honor ancestors, educate on values and identity, and bring individuals together. Throughout the play we see Cephus carrying on this tradition. At the heart of many of his tales are the idiosyncratic folks that make up his tight-knit community. He fondly recalls playmates, Tommy, Pete, and Joe-Boy, with whom he played hooky from Sunday School to shoot dice in the graveyard, and his childhood sweetheart Pattie Mae, whose soft calico dress haunts him throughout his life. His accounts draw from the experiences of friends and family members, explaining how things came to be (such as how Cephus learned to “speak Indian,” or how One-armed Ike lost his arm), and often contain some kind of life lesson. While these stories are tangential to the major events at the heart of his story, the act of storytelling is central to his personality, and thus integral to his own tale.

At the beginning of the play, the children who believe him to be a ghost are integrating their beliefs and culture into their own practice of storytelling. Their community believes in conjure, magic, and other supernatural events. Much like storytelling, these beliefs helped make sense of the world or provided comfort. Cephus’s cousin Pearline was “born with a veil over her face” and “could foresee the future.” On its face this is an outlandish tall tale, but there is truth to it. The veil refers to a membrane of the amniotic sac that, on rare occasions, remains on the infant after birth. The belief that this portends good luck and prophetic powers traces back to Ancient Rome and persists across cultures worldwide.

Cephus also recalls Black Sarah, a Conjure Woman “well known and respected throughout five or six counties.” Yvonne P. Chireau, a Professor of Religion and specialist in conjuring traditions, defines conjure as “the African American tradition of healing and harming,” often used for protection and security against violence.  Conjure practices include use of plants, roots, potions, and charms. Chireau’s research demonstrates how African Americans, from slavery up to present day, have integrated Christianity with supernatural beliefs; Cephus, however, claims to see them as incompatible. He rejects Sarah’s offer to help him connect to his dead ancestors, citing his love of God and his refusal to “(turn) my back to the cross.”  

GOD AND THE CHURCH

Cephus is a man of faith and declared Christian, but he follows a uniquely personal approach to religion that he developed over the course of his life. Cephus’ views on organized religion and the church reflect Chireau’s description of “traditions (that) emerged from the culture of Southern Black Protestantism, but...(are) not necessarily limited to institutional expressions.” On the one hand, the play opens with a traditional spiritual hymn “In That Great Getting Up Morning,” suggesting that the song echoes in his mind. Yet, Cephus shows little interest in formal churchgoing at any point in his life. As a boy, he dislikes dressing up for church and sneaks away from Sunday school to play dice with his friends (in the church graveyard, no less). As a young adult, he is reluctant to join his girlfriend Pattie Mae at the revival meetings she enthusiastically attends. He rejects the belief that he is “a sinner” who needs to be saved, while keeping habits, such as his fondness for “cussing,” that cannot be considered pious. He reluctantly agrees to be baptized only so that Pattie Mae will have pre-marital sex with him. He clearly internalized some Biblical teachings, particularly “Thou shall not kill” (Matthew 5) and “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22), and we see how these become deeply held beliefs that guide his choices as an adult and change the course of his life by being the foundation for his draft refusal. Other scriptural references echo in Cephus’s thoughts, but do not guide his actions. He relates that when offered cocaine in the big city, a voice tries to remind him of Gethsemane (the garden in Jerusalem where Jesus prayed before his arrest by the Romans), Paul the Apostle (who preached the importance of living a pure moral life), and from Exodus 20:5, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (a warning against worship of false idols). But at this moment, Cephus rejects these ideas from “a time far removed,” declaring they “did not mean me.”  

Chireau and other scholars use the term “vernacular religion” to understand religion “as what people do, and not just what specific authorities do in specific buildings on specific days of the week or write down in specific books.” In other words, it’s religion as people experience, understand, and practice it. While it may appear that he picks and chooses teachings as he sees fit to justify how he wants to live, it is obvious that he has a core of steadfast faith in God, even if that connection feels one-sided. He uses the metaphor of a long-distance phone call (“Ten minutes. Person to person. For eighty-five cents”) as his attempt to reach God, but from early on, God does not accept the call. Rather than completely reject his faith, Cephus rationalizes that God is “on vacation in Miami.”  

REVERENCE FOR THE LAND

Closer than his relationship with God, is his relationship to the land. Cephus considers himself “a man of soil,” and his childhood memories evoke his relationship to nature:

The land of sand flies and lighting bugs.
Back to his beginning.
Young boy runs the fields, with Brownie by his side.

The way he speaks of the land and nature is almost religious. He perceives land as alive and communicative, and what ultimately draws him back to Cross Roads: “The land sadly cries. Come home from where you’ve all gone. Children of the land. Babies of the soil.” While he may not be a devout churchgoer, he is reverent with nature: “Take some time with me please. I had my day in the warm, I have felt God’s hot rays.”  Even if he believes God has ignored him for much of his life, Cephus can connect through nature, “When you hold a plant, you can feel the heartbeat of God.” This reverence and love of the land literally grounds Cephus. “Home” for Cephus is not a house, a family, or an extended community.  God may eventually return from Miami, but for Cephus, the land calls him, renews his faith, and gives him a sense of belonging. Home is the land itself.

CONNECT AND REFLECT

How do you define home? What does home mean to you? Is home based on your location or is it a feeling or is it a community? What qualities of your home do you value most?

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