Homecoming (novel)

Plot introduction

Characters

• Dicey Tillerman is the novel's main protagonist. Dicey is a thirteen-year-old girl who is unconcerned with external appearances – her haircut and clothes makes many people think she is a boy. Dicey has brown hair and hazel eyes. She displays a fierce determination to survive and keep her family together. Dicey, as the oldest child of a mentally unwell single mother, is used to playing the role of an adult in her family, but when their mother abandons them, Dicey steps into greater responsibility than she ever had. Dicey is tough, pragmatic, and suspicious of anyone outside of the circle formed by her immediate family, only taking help from others when she absolutely needs to do so. She is willing to do everything within her power and take any risks necessary to protect her siblings and keep them together.
• James Tillerman is the next eldest child. At ten, he is a thinker rather than a doer, and a natural loner. He loves books and learning, and likes to think out the answers to difficult questions. James did well academically but did not have any friends at school. He respects those whom he believes are intelligent, sometimes without questioning their morals. When he falls and hurts his head during an overnight stay in a park, he pretends to be more injured than he really is so that the family can stay a few more days in the company of teenage runaways Louis and Edie, because he believes Louis is smart, even though Louis is a thief and a nihilist. When Sammy starts to emulate Louis by stealing food for the family, James supports his act, quoting Louis by saying that everyone must look out for himself and the only certainty in life is death. Later in the novel, James steals money himself and only listens to the rational explanations of Stewart, the student from whom he stole.
• Maybeth Tillerman is nine years old, and very pretty with blonde hair and a gentle, accommodating personality. She is extremely quiet and shy, and is thought to have learning difficulties, although the novel does not go into details about what these might be. We learn only that she has been kept behind a year at school, that she worried her teachers who sent many notes home to her mother. The notes went unanswered, and it is believed by Maybeth's teachers that she cannot read or do simple mathematics. In reality, although slow, she is just far too shy at school. She is scared and distrustful of others, apart from her family. Maybeth demonstrates mature, developed emotional perception and awareness, capable of seeing the real character of people. She is a talented singer and looks like Momma physically. Dicey and James are afraid that Maybeth may have inherited her mother's tendency to depression and insanity.
• Samuel "Sammy" Tillerman is the youngest Tillerman. He is a robust child, who had problems with discipline at school, often getting into fights when the other children taunted him about his "crazy" mother, lack of a father, and his slow sister Maybeth. Sammy prefers physical activity to thinking out ideas, is brave and very loyal to his family. Of all the Tillermans, he is most affected by his mother's sudden disappearance and has difficulty in accepting that she is not going to come back to them. Sammy is capable of being recklessly happy, although the difficulties he has faced in his short life, and the trauma of losing his Momma, has dampened this side of his character. During the long journey, he is sometimes stubborn and sullen.
• Momma is Liza, the Tillermans' mother. Momma features in the story mainly via the reminiscences and thoughts of the four children and Gram – she only appears in the novel once, briefly, at the very beginning, when she says goodbye to her children before abandoning them in the car. According to Gram, Momma was a gentle and quiet young woman who decided when she left home at the age of 21 never to marry, having learned from her parents that marriage leads to bitterness and lies. The images of Momma that are filtered through her children's and mother's memories paint a picture of a loving and beautiful woman, but one who is neither particularly reliable nor practical. There appears to have been an idealistic and almost reckless side to her character; she has four children by her itinerant, gambling boyfriend – with whom Dicey remembers her having "real fights", although the couple do not have the financial means or stability to bring them up. However, Momma truly does love all her children and gave them everything she had. When Momma becomes pregnant with Sammy, their fourth child, the children's father is angry about it and soon leaves her, under legal duress as Dicey remembers a visit from the police following his absence. Momma struggles under the responsibility of raising her four children on her own, but eventually buckles under the pressure. Immediately prior to the events of the novel, Dicey recalls that Momma lost her job as a supermarket checker, and started to behave more and more erratically, going missing for hours on end and not speaking to the children.
• Gram is Abigail Tillerman, the children's maternal grandmother, although Dicey and her siblings had never heard anything about her and she did not know of them either. The children hear about her first through Cousin Eunice in Bridgeport, where they learn that Gram is considered extremely eccentric, even crazy. When the children meet Gram for the first time, she is a widow, her husband John having died only a couple of years previously. Gram is enjoying her solitude and voluntary isolation after years of reining in her strong personality to accommodate her strict husband. Gram had always obeyed her husband even when she knew he was wrong. Her inflexibility, it is inferred, helped to drive away her three children, John, Liza and Samuel, who was killed in Vietnam. Gram, like Dicey, is fiercely independent and at first is not ready to accept responsibility for her four abandoned grandchildren because she fears the emotional attachments that this will bring, and also that she will repeat the same mistakes she made with her own children.
• Cousin Eunice is the only daughter of Aunt Cilla, their mother's cousin and Grams is her aunt. Eunice is unmarried and a pious Catholic, whose life is governed by routine and what she sees as her duty. Her greatest desire is to become a nun and enter a convent. Eunice is "silly", almost completely incapable of spontaneity and affection. While she does take in the Tillerman children, she does so from a sense of "duty" and expects the children to show gratitude and to earn their keep through good behaviour, and, in Dicey's case, through taking on nearly all of the household chores.

Major themes

• Belonging: The theme of belonging runs throughout the whole book. The children search for a home, a physical place where they can belong. They search Toesses, they belong together. The children also struggle to see where they belong in the wider world, in society. The children have trouble belonging in schools, they each are different on whether they can stand their grounds.
• Breaking societal conventions: This theme is strongly linked, and often inseparable from, that of Belonging. Because the Tillermans come from a non-traditional family, they are to some degree on the margins of society. Dicey lies to the younger children, saying she remembers a wedding. At school, all the children are bullied because of their parentage: James and Dicey do not have friends, Sammy and Dicey get into fistfights. Cousin Eunice and her religious adviser similarly disapprove of their status and lack of religion: Dicey is told that she "must have another name". Gram is a woman who has deliberately removed herself from mainstream society, choosing to live alone and adopt "eccentric" behaviour, such as bare feet, and odd dress. Both Gram and Dicey grow to realise that it is not possible to live in isolation. Gram accepts first her grandchildren and then the Welfare money necessary to help feed and clothe them. She takes charge of enrolling the children in local schools. Dicey accepts that she, too, will go to school and learn like a normal child. She learns at various points in the novel that she must accept outside help, or that she must rely on others rather than on just herself, if she is to survive. Yet, at many points in the novel, breaking conventions is shown to elicit personal growth, or at least to help the characters survive a difficult situation, whereas following convention is shown to inhibit growth and harm characters. By breaking gender roles, Dicey is able to escape authority and look after her family. However, by her rigid adherence to habit, Cousin Eunice is unable to properly love the children, bound as she is by her ideas of "duty" and of doing what she believes the world to expect of her. Gram, too, has harmed herself and those around her by adhering to convention and to "duty": by sticking by her rigid husband even when she knows in her heart he is wrong, she has destroyed her family.

• Family as home: The children learn the importance of families throughout the novel. Their "Homecoming" is a journey that leads them to a long-lost grandmother, the mother of their beloved - and now lost - Momma, and a key to unlocking their family history. They start to learn that families can be fragile, and that if they are not nurtured and protected, they can fall apart as Gram's family has. This is a theme that is explored in much more depth in the next novel in the Tillerman Cycle, Dicey's Song.

  Geography

• Peewauket, Connecticut: The town in which the children are abandoned. Although no place with this name exists, there is a town near Stonington, Connecticut, named Pawcatuck, which is probably the place Voigt refers to.
• Rockland State Park, Connecticut: There is a Rockland State Park, but it is ninety miles from the coast and so is not the shoreline park the children stay in for a few days after James hurts his head in a fall. This park is likely to be Rocky Neck State Park, which fits the description and location.
• Landing Neck Road, Crisfield, Maryland: While Crisfield is a real town and the descriptions of it appear accurate, there is no Landing Neck Road, although there are run-down farms in the area described.

  Homecoming in the Tillerman Cycle

Release details

• 1981, USA, Atheneum Publishers
• 1984, UK, Collins
• 1999, UK, Collins Modern Classics

  Other Books in the Tillerman Cycle

• Dicey's Song
• A Solitary Blue
• The Runner
• Sons from Afar
• Come a Stranger
• Seventeen Against the Dealer