SparkNotes - Homecoming

2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC

Spark Publishing
A Division of Barnes & Noble
120 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
www.sparknotes.com /

ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7562-5

Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com/.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

During her childhood, Cynthia Voigt experienced little of the privation and trauma that characterizes the lives of the Tillerman children in Homecoming. Voigt grew up as the second child of six to parents well off enough to send her to an exclusive private school in Wellesley, Massachusetts near her family home in Boston. Voigt, according to Anne Commire, remembers her childhood as a happy one, marred only by competition with her older, more graceful sister. Though she began pursuing publication from the time she was in ninth grade, she did not persevere in her dream until many years later, as she labored under the illusion that if one publisher rejected a manuscript, it was not fit to be published. Voigt majored in English at Smith College, lived in New York City for a year, and then married and moved to New Mexico, where she gave birth to her daughter and began to teach. Voigt and her husband moved to Annapolis, Maryland, not long after, where Voigt taught in public and private schools and she and her husband divorced. Several years later, Voigt remarried and, while pregnant with her son, began to devote more time to her writing. She found inspiration in the engaging young adult literature she taught to her middle school students, and when she found her daughter raptly reading her first manuscript, she sensed she had something that worked. The publication of Homecoming and the award of the Newbery Medal to its sequel, Dicey's Song, ushered both success and fame into Voigt's life. While she enjoyed the thrill of success and the immortality the Newbery would give to her characters, little about her life and priorities actually changed as a result of the award. In an interview with theChristian Science Monitor, Voigt asserts that she does not necessarily see herself only or even primarily as a writer: she sees both her family and her teaching as playing at least as major a role in her life as writing.

Critics have questioned whether the intensity of Voigt's writing and subject matter makes her books appropriate for young readers. But Voigt, in her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, expresses esteem for literature that "engages the imagination, sets to work the intelligence, fills the spirit," and believes that young people are much tougher than most adults imagine. She wants her work to raise questions and challenge her readers to question conventions. In the same speech, Voigt expresses delight in the fact that not only does she learn from her characters and from the process of writing, but that her readers themselves, in their comments and discussions with her, teach her about her work. To Voigt, writing is a process through which she engages the world and her inner self in conversation and which results in her, like her characters, growing up and transforming.

According to Reid, the inspiration for Homecoming and the entire Tillerman series came to Voigt one afternoon when she saw a station wagon full of children waiting for their mother and found herself wondering what would happen to the children if their mother did not return. Voigt uses both her familiarity with the Northeast and her knowledge of sailing and the ocean as a basis for her detailed description of the Tillerman's perilous journey along the northeastern seaboard and tenuous homecoming on the Chesapeake Bay. According to Commire, the themes of reaching out, symbolized in song, holding on, symbolized in wood, and letting go, symbolized by the ocean and by sailing, guided Voigt as she crafted this story of a girl trying desperately to hold her family together through song, memory, love, and determination, while at the same time struggling to let go of past disappointments and her childhood self. Voigt views her characters as entities entirely independent of her, but admits that she sees an idealized picture of herself as an old woman in Gram, and an idealized picture of her childhood self in Dicey. Like Dicey, Voigt is tempted and soothed by the faceless, ever-changing and eternal call of the ocean, while remaining anchored by and rooted in the love of her family and her life upon land.

One day in early summer, Dicey Tillerman's mother begins a trip with her children in their battered station wagon to see their Aunt Cilla in Bridgeport, Connecticut. When they have driven about half the distance between their home in Provincetown and Bridgeport, Momma stops the car and gets out, telling the three younger children, James, Maybeth, and Sammy to mind Dicey. Their Momma does not return, and the next day the children, under Dicey's determined leadership, set out to walk to Bridgeport, with only a map, a change of underwear, and seven dollars. The children walk for days on end, buying food as cheaply as possible, scrounging for change alongside of the road, and sleeping in or near empty houses. After several days, they stop to rest in a state park, where clams, mussels, and fish abound, and they meet a young runaway couple, Edie and Louis. In the park, Sammy, to Dicey's dismay, steals both food and money, and they leave in a fright when the police begin looking for them.

By the time they reach the Connecticut River, they are completely out of money. Dicey decides to earn money by washing windows, and soon has the children carrying bags in the parking lot of a grocery store. Before long, they have enough money to continue on. They cross the forbidding river in a rowboat, and continue on towards the west. When they reach New Haven, however, they are once again out of money, and Dicey is near despair. A couple of Yale students, Stewart and Windy befriend them, take them in for the night, and feed them. That night, James steals twenty dollars from their benefactors, which he grudgingly returns the next morning. Dicey chastises him severely, and Stewart talks seriously to him about the moral implications of his actions. The next day, Stewart drives them to Bridgeport, leaving them at their aunt's door.

The children find that Aunt Cilla is dead, and their fussy and pious cousin, Eunice, occupies the house alone. Eunice takes the children in, and soon the three younger children are attending a church camp every day while Dicey helps Eunice care for the house. Dicey also begins to earn money by washing windows around town. In Bridgeport, Dicey talks to the police about Momma's disappearance, and before long, the police have located her: she is comatose in a mental hospital in Boston. The Tillerman children are unhappy in Bridgeport. Sammy gets in fights, upsetting Eunice, the nuns want to label Maybeth as retarded and give her special schooling, and Dicey feels the children growing apart from one another. When Eunice decides to give up her dream of becoming a nun and adopt the childrenalthough she still considers handing the belligerent Sammy over to the stateDicey acts quickly. While in Bridgeport, they have learned of their grandmother, Abigail Tillerman, who lives in Crisfield, Maryland, and Dicey decides they must meet her.