The Home Place Lanaham Analysis

J. Drew Lanaham quotes The Wiz on the first page of “The Home Place,” a chapter in his book The Home Place: Memoirs of a colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2016): “Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing” (p. 11). Home defined as knowing comes, closest to the expressing the expanse of its intimacy. At the end of his chapter about the home place, Lanaham acknowledges a cliché we’re all close to, home is where the heart is (p. 33). This expression of home has always incited in my mind warmth, comfort, and love. With not a lingering of negativity conveyed to me through its phrasing, home is where the heart is was simplified in my mind. It wasn’t until the film Moonlight that I

thought critically about the home and the heart (Esberg & Jenkins, 2016). Through comparing Lanaham’s home to the home of Chiron, Moonlight’s central character, instantaneously, I realized something I’d felt and spoke of all along but was lost to me in the droning of home is where the heart is--hearts are more than love, and love is more than happiness. Home and love are both knowing; born of knowing, and grown and complicated by knowing.
Lanaham’s life on the home place was full of wonder and responsibility.

Exploration and understanding were encouraged, and sometimes forced, but all in all he had a tender childhood. The location and isolation of his home facilitated intimacy with his family and the surrounding nature. As he grew, he learned more about the struggles of his family, and the struggles of a black man in a prejudiced society. But home went above and beyond for Lanaham, “Edgefield...was and is a sanctuary for creatures that aren’t subject to the prejudices of men” (p. 18, 2016). Assumedly absent of racists, the terrain encircling the home place was a safe haven for Lanaham to experience his boyhood and nature without thought of the socially posed barrier of his

skin.
On the other hand, Chiron has no such home place.

Growing up in a poor and predominantly black neighborhood, he had mostly to deal with the effects of racism rather than its perpetrators. For Chiron, there was scarce a place or time to escape the systems and expectations thrust upon black men in the United States. At home was his mother, a functioning crack addict who really did love him, wanted to love him the way a mother should, but her functioning seldom went beyond economic necessities. Even when she would say loving things to her son they were tainted by the yelling she had just done, or her desperation for validation from her only child (until later in the film when she had overcome her addiction and they met peace). There was no learning and growing at home for Chiron, only alienation and the occasional soul cleansing bath. Even when one day he’s taken in by a concerned, caring man in the neighborhood, he soon learns his new mentor perpetuates his mother’s addiction by selling her drugs. However, vital to Chiron’s development, this man takes him to the beach and teaches him how to swim. Throughout the movie the sound of swishing waves is employed to moments when Chiron feels most

safe.
Like Lanaham, Chiron was drawn to nature for salvation from the pain felt in the social realm. Nature was their constant, their sanctuary. Only by leaving the human erected world could either growing boy experience themselves. Their home in nature allowed them to know and feel themselves. In Moonlight, Chiron was sitting on the beach, talking to friend at the time about how the hushed waves on sand left space for Chiron to hear his own heartbeat (Esberg & Jenkins, 2016). There, he could know himself better. Lanaham’s and Chiron’s homes in nature brought more home to them...home in themselves through knowing of themselves.