116 pages • 3 hours read
Yaa GyasiHomegoing
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 13 Summary: “Marjorie”
“Marjorie” beings in the early 1980s in Cape Coast, where a 10-year-old boy is offering to show Marjorie the Castle for five cedis. She just made the eight-hour ride from Accra and knows the boy is trying to make money off of tourists, so she shouts at him in Twi that she is African, but he asks her, “But you come from America?” (264). She walks away, lugging her heavy backpack. She is in Ghana to visit her grandmother, Akua, as she does every summer. Akua had moved from Edweso to Cape Coast to be near the water.
Akua, whom Marjorie calls “My Old Lady” (265), welcomes her and sees Marjorie wince as she removes her backpack. Marjorie thinks about how she has hidden pain from her father and grandmother, whose own scars are visible. They travel back to Akua’s beach bungalow, which was built by Marjorie’s parents some years back while she stayed at home in Alabama with a friend. She asks to go to the water in English. Akua knocks her on the back of her head, saying “Speak Twi,” and Marjorie apologizes, remembering how her parents demand the opposite in Huntsville, Alabama, where they live. Her father was livid when a teacher sent Marjorie home with a note asking if she needed special classes because she never spoke in class.
Marjorie loves going to the beach with Akua and knows a little of her troubled past, but to her she is just her grandmother, and “Old Lady dreamed dreams and saw visions” (267). They slowly walk to the water, and Akua asks if she is wearing the stone. Marjorie touches it and thinks of the generations it passed through to reach her, telling her yes. Part of their annual ritual, Akua tells her she is in the water—13 years ago when Marjorie was born, Yaw mailed the umbilical cord to Akua, who put it into the ocean. Akua tells her she put the cord in the water so that if Marjorie’s spirit ever wandered, she would find her way home.
Marjorie returns home to Alabama, but she wants to stay in Cape Coast. While in Ghana she started her period, which Akua celebrated. Starting high school, she is reminded of her status as an outsider: Her neighborhood is all White, and the Black students at the school exclude her and mock her since she is “the wrong kind” of Black (268). She reflects that it is simpler in Africa, whereas in America “White” and “Black” identities are more complex. Her mother, Esther, tells her to ignore the girls. The next day, she eats lunch with her teacher, Mrs. Pinkston, in the teacher’s lounge. Mrs. Pinkston is her favorite teacher and has a copy of Marjorie’s father’s book, The Ruin of a Nation Begins in the Homes of Its People, which he finished at 63 years old. He and Esther had Marjorie when he was nearing 70. Mrs. Pinkston asks her opinion on Lord of the Flies, and Marjorie says she likes it but does not know how to answer when her teacher asks, “Do you feel it inside you?” (270).
She spends three years searching for books she can “feel inside of her” (270), and while at the library she meets Graham as she is looking at Middlemarch. Graham just moved to Huntsville from Germany with his father, who is in the military. They see each other daily from then on. She asks her father when he knew he liked her mother, and he tells her to focus on her studies, and that she is too young to like anyone. Esther is excited at the prospect of Marjorie going to prom, having seen a TV special on proms across America. She encourages Marjorie to let Graham know she is interested, citing her own long wait with Yaw and Akua’s successful intervention.
Mrs. Pinkston is planning a Black cultural event for the school and asks Marjorie to participate and tell her story. Marjorie replies that she is not African American, but she cannot explain to her teacher that African Americans are considered different in Ghana and known as “Akata.” She feels she, too, is beginning to be “too long gone from Ghana” (273), like the Akata. Her teacher tells her that in America “black is black is black” (273). That night, Marjorie goes to a movie with Graham, and after they park in a clearing in the woods to drink whisky. He pulls out a cigarette and plays with his lighter, and she tells him to put it out. She has a fear of fire, in part due to her father and grandmother’s scarring, but also because of her grandmother’s stories of the firewoman. He asks to read her writing, and she says maybe he can read the poem she is writing for the assembly. He mentions prom, and they are both nervous.
Marjorie feels like an outsider because she is a virgin. She is working on her poem when the family gets a call that Old Lady is frail. Marjorie speaks with her by phone, making her promise not to die until she can see her again, to which Akua responds “I promise I will never leave you” (276). Marjorie and Graham go on a date to the US Space & Rocket Center. As he ignores the Do Not Touch signs, he tells her he does not miss Germany much and asks if she would move to Ghana. She says, “I don’t think so” (278) and taking his hand admits that she does not feel like she belongs in Ghana, that people sense her “aloneness,” and only her grandmother really sees her. He kisses her.
Marjorie’s grandmother gets worse, and she withdraws in class and from Graham, who tries to talk to her. While they are talking, a brunette approaches Graham and, noticing Marjorie, tells him he should not sit there because of what people will think, and she invites him over to where she is sitting. Marjorie tells him to go, and he does. The girl takes his hand as he walks away, slipping easily into a new social circle.
The night of prom, she is home with her parents. Graham calls and tries to explain again why he could not take her to prom, and how he tried to convince his parents and the school to let him, but they thought it was inappropriate. She thinks about her father’s love for her mother, “A love that didn’t require fighting or hiding” (281), and ends the call to watch a movie with her parents.
On the day of the Black cultural event, Marjorie is nervous to read her poem, and Mrs. Pinkston reassures her. As the program starts, she gets a familiar stomachache that is like a premonition for her of things to come. She braces herself and reads her poem. She can see her father is in a doorframe listening but cannot see he is crying. Old Lady, Akua, “the Crazy Woman of Edweso” (283), dies in her sleep, and Marjorie takes the rest of the year off. They bury her grandmother on a mountain overlooking the sea, and while others mourn, Marjorie still has not cried. The men lower the coffin into the ground and cover it with the red clay, and then Marjorie realizes she forgot to drop her poem into the grave. She finally cries, throwing herself on the grave. Esther helps her up, telling her it looked like “she was going to fly off the cliff, down the mountain, and into the sea” (283).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Marcus”
“Marcus” begins in 1999 in California. Marcus is a graduate student, and he thinks about his fear of water—he has never learned how to swim and only saw the ocean for the first time in college. The salty smell of the ocean nauseates him, and he can feel it “thick in his throat” (284). His father, Sonny, told him that Black people did not like water because of their history on the slave ships and spoke to him frequently about a range of injustices against the Black community in America. As a child he lived with Sonny in Willie’s apartment. Sonny’s days were structured around his visit to the methadone clinic in East Harlem, followed by his work as a custodian at a hospital. Marcus knows his dad is brilliant but “was trapped underneath something” (285), limited by his heroin addiction.
The narrative returns to the present in Northern California, where Marcus is invited by his close friend Diante to celebrate the new millennium at a pool party. Diante has been looking for a girl at school events whom he met at an art museum, and not seeing her at the party, he decides to leave. Marcus is getting his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford. Sonny cried when Marcus got accepted to the program. Marcus leaves the party soon after and walks home. Marcus makes weekly calls to his family. Sonny lies and tells him his mother, Amani, says hi, but Marcus tells him, “Don’t lie” (287), since the last time he saw her was at his high school graduation. Marcus asks his father if he is still sober, and Sonny says yes, “Don’t be thinkin’ ’bout me” (287).
A month later, Marcus is trying to return to his research. He originally wanted to focus on the convict leasing system that his great-grandfather H was caught in, but that topic is tied to another and another, and he finds himself increasingly angry about the injustices of the Black experience in America. This anger paralyzes him, but his desire to research is a way for him to connect to the branches of his family he has lost. This desire began at his grandmother’s apartment, where, moved by her singing, he would picture “a fuller family” (290): a patriarch in Africa, a young woman in a cramped apartment, a burning tree, and a classroom. Willie tells him he might have “the gift of visions” (290), but he does not believe in her religion and searches in his own “tangible way, through his research and his writing” (290).
One evening Marcus and Diante attend a gallery night/Afro-Caribbean dance party in San Francisco. Diante has spotted the woman he has been searching for, and he indicates to Marcus two women standing together. One is light-skinned with long dreads; the other, who catches Marcus’s attention, is dark skinned with a “wild Afro.” The dreadlocked woman, named Ki, is the woman Diante was searching for, while Marcus is introduced to her friend, Marjorie.
The narrative jumps back to a time when Amani stole Marcus away as a child when she came to visit him, luring him away “with the promise of an ice cream cone” (292). She cannot afford the cone, going from store to store, and eventually end up in a bad neighborhood, where she shows him off to her “dope fiend friends” (292). By dusk, Sonny and Willie find him, as Willie slaps and threatens Amani, telling her, “Touch this child again and see what happens” (293). Marcus thinks about the “fullness of love and protection” he felt when they finally found him that day (293). He feels the same thing whenever he sees Marjorie, like she has found him.
Marcus and Marjorie form a friendship that lasts long after Diante and Ki’s relationship has fizzled. Marjorie tells him about Ghana and the Asante, and they share stories about their grandmothers. He admits his fear of the water, and she admits her fear of fire. She tells him she has not visited Ghana since her grandmother died and shows him the black and gold stone necklace. Her parents have since died as well, and while she jokes that her Twi is too rusty to return, she turns away to hide her emotion.
Marcus still struggles with his research but receives a grant to travel to Pratt City. He travels there with Marjorie, where they meet a blind old man who claims he knew H. After this encounter, Marcus is troubled because his research about Pratt City and the convict leasing system is too narrow—he is aware of the weight of his accumulated family history in his current freedom, going back generations. He agrees to go with her to Ghana.
They visit Ghana together, first visiting Edweso and Takoradi, to pay respects to her parent’s birthplaces. In Cape Coast, Marcus convinces her to take him to the Cape Coast Castle after they leave their bags at a resort. He notices the beach spread out for miles with “sand like diamonds in the once gold coast” (297). They approach the “powder white” castle for their tour, but entering it, the “dirty skeleton of a long-past shame” becomes more apparent (298). A man who knew Marjorie’s grandmother welcomes her, saying “akwaaba” (298). They tour the upper levels and then the dungeons, where Marcus feels sick and pushes at a door, which leads him out onto the beach.
Marcus runs down the beach and stops by some fishermen cooking fish over a fire. Marjorie catches up to him, and he remembers her fear of fire, beckoning her closer and holding her hand on the edge of the water. She releases his hand, runs into the ocean, and gestures for him to follow her. He walks in and then begins to run, joining her while they both laugh. She gives him the stone necklace and says, “Welcome home,” and he feels its surprising weight and warmth. She splashes him and returns to shore.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
The penultimate chapter, “Marjorie,” spans the 1970s and 1980s and brings Effia’s family line to the United States. American society has seen enormous progress for Black Americans since the previous chapter, but Marjorie’s experience speaks to lingering, unspoken inequalities. Marjorie herself is lonely and aware of the differences among Black people in American society, with her African identity making her an outsider among White and Black peers alike. However, it is her skin color that makes her relationship with Graham impossible, with her African American teacher, Mrs. Pinkston, reminding her that in America “black is black is black” (273).
Through Marjorie’s loneliness, Gyasi examines the alienation of Africans from African descendants in the United States. Marjorie, who has lived most of her life in the United States, does have one place where she feels she belongs, and that with her grandmother Akua in Ghana. Correcting the mistakes she made as a young woman, Akua, having lived for at least a century, is a survivor. She shares everything she knows of their heritage, learned from visions of the firewoman, with Marjorie, in turn strengthening Marjorie’s sense of self and belonging within a family. This process of sharing and storytelling, taking place in the ocean each year of her childhood, echoes Yaw’s emphasis on sharing one’s story and allows Marjorie to continue to heal the wounds of her family long after Akua and her parents have died.
More than any of the major characters in the book, Marjorie has the deepest sense of her place in the family and the cleaving of two sides that the slave trade created. This sense is demonstrated at the culmination of the chapter, where Marjorie shares her poem before the school audience. In that poem, she speaks to the slave trade, represented by the Castle, where the two sides of her family represent all of African descent—those shipped away into slavery, and those who stayed. Both sides of the family are wounded; where one side “felt whip. Whipped once shipped” (282), the other has “skin uncut, still bleeding” (282). Her poem closes with the question and answer, “Who knew? Not me. Not you.” (282), speaking to the lost family bonds from that separation, yet to be rediscovered.
In “Marcus,” those bonds are reestablished through Marcus’s deep friendship with Marjorie, symbolized by her passing the black stone necklace to Marcus at the end. Like Marjorie in her own chapter, Marcus benefits from a better understanding of his family’s struggles and has set out to study the structures of oppression that first ensnared his great-grandfather H at the end of the 19th century. Marcus is aware of the limitations on his grandmother’s and father’s life, seeing the brilliance of his father’s mind crushed by his heroin addiction. However, because his father and grandmother raised him, giving Marcus the solid, family base that had been missing for generations, Marcus has the chance to excel in an elite graduate program.
Like Akua, Marcus is also gifted with the ability to dream of his ancestors, triggered by the beauty of his grandmother’s voice. Marcus is unaware that he is seeing the history of his family in Africa, but the reader can recognize moments from the lives of Esi, Anna, James, and Akua, among others. Willie suggests he has “the gift of visions” (290), but more like his father, Marcus is motivated to learn more about his family by reading and writing and then sharing those stories with the world.
Although his family life is supportive and allows him to succeed, he is still lost in a way he does not realize until he meets Marjorie. With her, Marcus feels, “Not the being lost, but the being found” (293), as those two separated sisters’ descendants finally reunite. In a different way than Marjorie, Marcus is keenly aware that his freedom to study their family history is due to the sacrifices and suffering of the generations before him. As the narrator observes, “They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was the accumulation of these times” (296). Even their ability to find one another is contingent on the 20th-century changes that enable them both to get an education, study their own culture and heritage at a top-tier graduate school (with financial support), and then find each other at a party celebrating Afro-Caribbean heritage. Relatively speaking, both Marcus and Marjorie are free of the limitations of their parents’ and grandparent’s generations, while Marcus is the first of his family to even travel outside of the United States. None of these accomplishments could have been possible even one generation earlier.
In finding one another, Marjorie and Marcus are finally able to heal the deep wounds of their families by helping each other. These wounds are symbolized by Marjorie’s fear of fire, which speaks to the original fire set by Maame and her family’s long involvement in the slave trade, and Marcus’s fear of water, rooted in the deadly voyage of enslaved people across the Middle Passage between Africa and America, where millions of Africans died and were buried at sea. At the end of the book, they face their shared history of slavery together by visiting Cape Castle, and then on the shores outside, they help each other overcome their fears of water and fire. When the two halves of the family finally become a whole, both move forward together as one, as symbolized by the shared necklace. Marjorie has welcomed him home and back into the family, as he has finally gone home. In this last moment of the book, Marjorie and Marcus are like the firewoman’s two daughters in Akua’s visions, returning to the sea.
