The Delicate Imbalance of Home in “Make Your Way Home” https://ift.tt/RHIl162
In stories, place isn’t always a fixed location. Its permanence is sometimes illusory because it changes, whether for a moment or a lifetime, with the lives of the people who pass through. Carrie R. Moore’s debut story collection, Make Your Way Home, captures the delicate imbalance between what we call “home” and where we find it as it follows the lives-in-transition of African American women and men from Southern cities, small towns, and rural enclaves.
Places have histories; things happen in their “here,” but they are shaped by past lives and events. In many of these stories, the central character reclaims a place from their past. Old selves are fused with new beginnings, and place is the stage on which their lives’ transitions are performed. In “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” Ever Robert’s return to his grandfather’s house reveals a misunderstood legacy of enslavement that explains his low self-esteem and detachment from his lover. “What comes over him is the same feeling he often has in museums dedicated to painful histories, a feeling that the world has sucked him back in time through a straw, to remind him how small he once was.” He is at once the discoverer of the truth and its victim. In “Surfacing,” a woman who returns to the house of a deceased foster parent and learns of a young neighbor’s abuse is forced to confront her own past mistreatment. In “How Does Your Garden Grow?” a woman returns to the Mississippi town where she grew up and is reunited with an estranged aunt, a healer, to face her own mortality.
Sometimes, home is the place where you have always lived but never quite belonged. In “Cottonmouths,” Twyla, a pregnant teenager, pressured by her also-pregnant mother to name the father of her child and move in with him, finds that her place is with her mother after saving her from a dangerous snake that has invaded their home. “I’ve made something happen in this place. Or that here is where kind things happen to me.” In “Morning by Morning,” Sariah, a deacon at a Louisiana church, becomes attracted to Jay, a bartender whom she has been assigned to guide to salvation. Questioning her choice to become “a vessel for God instead of a house for her own longings,” she comes to accept that her past is as much of her self as the present. “She wanted what she wanted. And if her old self had never gone away, hadn’t been lost to healing waters, then what was the point in ignoring her?”
Moore’s characters are drawn from pasts that reflect Black experience and trauma. The “time-faded document” discovered by Ever reaffirms an ancestor’s status as property despite the man’s unflinching love for his family. In “Gather Here Again,” a grandmother at the end of her life spends Halloween telling ghost stories with her grandchildren, unable to shed the memories of the lynching of her late husband’s brother and how her mother and brother fought off the “night raiders” who burned her childhood home. The home to which a gay man returns in “The Happy Land” is a settlement for formerly enslaved people, mirroring the estrangement he and his husband feel but also a quiet acknowledgement of their collective past: “the different ways they were Black men and what that meant for how they showed up in the world. Still, they’d vowed to do the one thing they were good at, which was to keep respect for the places they didn’t overlap, to honor them with the same reverence used for the places they did.” In “Till It and Keep It,” two young sisters end up at a farm after fleeing a flood that killed their family, mirroring the uprooting of Black people by natural disasters.
Moore’s characters are vivid, self-reflective, and conscious of the settings in which they move. In “Naturale,” Cher, a hair stylist, picks her husband’s former lover, a university professor, out of a crowd by the way she fits in, yet doesn’t:
I probably wouldn’t have known it was her if not for the way Oriah stiffened. She appeared beside Charles, making a little rip in the cluster of grad students behind him. Her smile hovered curious over her flat champagne. Thin lines pressed deep around her eyes, which were startlingly luminous or else absorbing the reflection on her glasses. Her hair wasn’t short or long but—average. She’d done a bad job of pressing it out, and now it wasn’t straight or curly. Just frizzy. Like she could come to this event comfortable, among her people, knowing how she looked wouldn’t matter.
Moore’s narratives are masterful in their repetition, drawing in memorable phrases and minor yet strong details that give each story cohesion and a clear sense of time.
Make Your Way Home is a colorful, introspective story collection that invites the reader to ponder how we know we are home and whether we truly belong without requiring an answer. We do not own our presents because we cannot control our pasts, “so many ripples through time, joining these other segments” of our lives, “each portion a wave coming to meet another. There is no stopping it: the past, . . . threatening to sweep away what peace” we have. Yet, like the characters in Moore’s collection, we find ourselves drawn to it.
FICTION Make Your Way Home
By Carrie R. Moore
Tin House Books
Published July 15, 2025
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