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 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 3 Summary: “Quey”
The chapter “Quey” takes place around 1799, when Quey, the son of Effia and James Collins, is about 20 years old. As the chapter opens, he is in Effia’s village contemplating a message he has received from “and old friend” named Cudjo (50), the thought of whom is keeping him awake. He thinks of his life: born and raised in Cape Coast Castle, educated in England, and initially a junior officer before he was assigned as a liaison to the slave trade with Effia’s village. He resents this post, feeling no kinship with his maternal relatives, and sees it as “a kind of punishment” (51).
Quey goes to see his uncle Fiifi; while his mother’s strength came from her beauty and his father from his family’s pedigree (as wealthy slave ship builders in Liverpool), for Quey, Fiifi embodies a natural masculine strength that “came from his body, from the fact that he looked like he could take anything he wanted” (51). Not for the first time, Quey tries to convince his uncle to trade their slaves exclusively with the company he represents. Fiifi brings his attention to colorful two birds singing “a discordant song” for an unseen female bird (52). He uses this as a metaphor, explaining that the village is the female bird, evaluating her prospects, looking for the best partner in trade. Fiifi ponders why Effia would have sent Quey to England.
In answer to this, the narrative shifts to Quey’s childhood, where he grows up in a hut not far from the Castle. He rarely sees his father, but Effia is a kind mother, and they are close; she teaches him about his family and how to read and write in Fante and English. Quey is friendless, with only “himself, his books, the beach, the castle, his mother” (54). One day Cudjo Sackee comes to the Castle with his father, who is one of Abeeku Badu’s biggest competitors. At first, Cudjo embarrasses Quey by asking him if he’s White and points out their differences. Seeing Quey’s embarrassment, he changes the subject by asking to see the “big guns.” They become friends, and Quey visits Cudjo’s village, which is vastly different from the Castle. The boys race snails, and they name the losing snail “Richard” because he is “bad like the British” (57), eventually using the name for anything good or bad. Quey finally feels like he belongs somewhere, “fully and completely” (57).
As the boys grow up, Cudjo becomes an unparalleled wrestler whom Quey never challenges, in part because he is aware of Cudjo’s skill, but in part because he is attracted to him. Once, when Quey is 13, Cudjo gets him into a headlock, and Quey becomes flushed by the closeness of his body. Afterwards, Quey insists his friend would never hurt him, and Cudjo says, “Challenge me, then. Challenge me to wrestle” (59), so close Quey can feel his breath on his lips.
The following week, Cudjo is challenged by a white soldier at the Castle. With Quey looking on, he beats the soldier in one minute, followed by a series of other challengers. Quey finally agrees to wrestle Cudjo. Cudjo pins him easily, but Quey refuses to surrender, enjoying his friend’s weight on top of him. The two relax and gaze at each other for a moment, and they are on the verge of kissing when Quey’s father intervenes and sends Cudjo home. The next month, despite Effia’s protests, James sends Quey to England.
Returning to the present, Quey ponders Cudjo’s message inviting him to visit. He reflects on the horrors of the slave trade. Shortly after Quey left for England, his father died, and Quey contemplates how his father must have felt with each slave ship departure, wondering if he felt the same “mix of fear and shame and loathing” (62). He encounters Badu, who asks Quey to tell Effia to visit him, and Quey remembers her begging him to refuse the post in the village, pleading, “Evil is like a shadow. It follows you” (63). Again, his mind returns to Cudjo, who is now chief of his village, and he is skeptical of any good coming from a visit.
Some weeks pass, and Fiifi plans a large raiding party that includes Cudjo’s village. Cudjo and Quey are reunited; Cudjo is now married, but Cudjo encourages him to visit. As the raiding party leaves, Quey tries to imagine a life for himself on Cudjo’s compound. After almost four weeks they return, with Fiifi badly wounded and in possession of the Asante king’s daughter, Nana Yaa, “an important political bargaining tool” (67). Fiifi tells Quey that the next day, Quey will marry Nana Yaa and inherit leadership over the village so that he will “still matter long after the Castle walls have crumbled” (69). Quey accepts this reality and his role in the slave trade, finally “sacrificing” his dream of joining Cudjo in his village.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ness”
Ness is picking cotton on Thomas Allan Stockham’s Alabama plantation, having arrived from Mississippi two weeks ago. She thinks of her time in Mississippi as “Hell,” and she estimates she is around 25 years old. She remembers being sold and separated from her mother, Esi, who never smiled, and missing the “gray rock of her mother’s heart” (71). Her new master is “a good master” (71), giving slaves breaks and water. While waiting in line for water, another slave named TimTam attempts to start a conversation. Hearing him speak English, she remembers how she got her name: Ness used to speak Twi with Esi, until the master began beating Esi for each Twi word. Esi cried out “My goodness!”, which became “Ness.” Ness rebuffs TimTam’s attempts to converse. Later, another slave tries to get Ness to warm up to TimTam, saying he is only being friendly, having “lost his woman” long ago (72).
The chapter flashes back to when Tom Allan bought Ness. He insists she is too pretty to be in the field, with light skin and long kinked hair. Margaret warns him “she ain’t fit for da house” (73), but he insists, and his wife, Susan, joins him to evaluate her. Ness comes out in a maid’s uniform that bears her shoulders and calves, and Susan faints because Ness is covered in scars from a whip. Ness is quickly whisked away, and Margaret remarks that it is a pity.
At the new plantation, Ness works in the field as she did in Mississippi. She keeps her distance from other slaves as a result of the trauma she endured under her previous master, which they interpret as conceit. One night, TimTam rushes into the women’s quarters with his daughter Pinky, whom he says needs help. Ness pushes through the crowd and, seeing the girl hiccupping, says there is nothing wrong with her. TimTam pulls Ness aside and explains they know she is fine; the girl hasn’t spoken since her mother died, and they are simply trying to get her to speak. Ness scolds them all for “makin’ like you actors in a travelin’ show” and says the girl will speak when she’s ready (76). She goes to lay down again, and Pinky, seeking a mother, nestles in beside her.
From then on, they are inseparable. Pinky is a water girl for the house, and one day, Mary and Tom Jr., two Stockham children, are playing and bump into her. Water splashes on Mary, and Tom insists Pinky apologize. When she cannot, he gets the switch to whip her, but Ness grabs the tip of it before he can follow through, and he falls down. Tom Allen appears and evaluates the scene, saying he will deal with Ness “soon enough,” for while he can likely see what really happened, the scars on Ness’s back make him doubt her character, assuming she merited the whipping for bad behavior.
That night, Pinky snuggles up to Ness as they try not to worry about her impending punishment. Ness remembers her life in “Hell,” where she is married to Sam, a new slave that she is in awe of. He is “the most beautiful man” she has ever seen (80), and he fights his enslavement, refusing to learn English, fighting with other slaves, and spitting at the overseer. One night he destroys their quarters, and Ness takes the blame, for which she is whipped until barely conscious. Sam is devastated and cares for her and says his first English words to her when she wakes: “I’m sorry.” They form a bond, begin to love each other, and make love a month later.
The next day out in the field, TimTam thanks her for defending Pinky, though Ness shrugs him off. Everyone speculates as to what Tom Allen will do to Ness, knowing he does not have a stomach for violence. Ness remembers giving birth to Kojo during an unusually heavy snowfall. Kojo’s birth brings happiness to Ness and Sam. One day at church, Ness meets Aku, who offers to help Ness and her family escape to freedom in the North. Ness and Sam begin to plan their escape when Kojo is one. In the spring, they all escape together. After days of walking, their master catches up to them, and Ness and Sam are captured while Aku escapes with Kojo. Ness is whipped and then forced to watch Sam being hanged to death. She remembers all this as she awaits her punishment from Tom Allen, saying a prayer for herself and her son, “wherever he may be” (87).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Quey and Ness are cousins, unknown to one other, but born in the same generation and living vastly different lives. One common feature defining their lives is that they are both racially mixed, or “half-caste,” as they both have English fathers; another is their proximity to the slave trade. For Quey, this means a life of relative comfort and an education in England, as well as the advantages of being well placed at the nexus of a booming slave trade when he returns to Ghana. Ness is at the other end of the spectrum, living through the horrors of enslavement in the American South. Her lighter skin is considered a sign of beauty to her owners, and it would normally earn her a more privileged position in the household, but her excessive scarring horrifies them and keeps her in the fields. Both of their lives are profoundly shaped by the English slave trade, and each story illustrates the literal and figurative enslavement of participants from the top to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Despite the relative ease of his life and social advantages he is born into, Quey can be viewed as a prisoner of the slave trade as well. Gyasi illustrates this captivity through his story of unrequited love, where Quey is unable to live a life of happiness and personal choice. While his homosexuality is his secret, his mixed-race identity is obvious to everyone, already marking him as “different” in his community. Quey becomes especially aware of this playing with Cudjo for the first time, when “he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness” (56). Visiting Cudjo in his village, Quey finally feels like he belongs somewhere. The boys invent an imaginary English scapegoat named “Richard” (58) to displace the foreignness between them, allowing Quey to accept his African identity more fully.
Just as Quey begins to fully know himself through his attraction and friendship with Cudjo, James sends him to England. Quey is not yet 14 years old, and as such his life is never quite his own. Like the daily slave shipments James Collins sends across the Atlantic, his own son’s voyage aboard a ship to England symbolizes his loss of agency. Getting an English education only opens Quey’s eyes to the horrors of English imperialism and slavery, and it is not the life he wishes to lead. Instead, he intends “to have an easier life, away from the workings of slavery” (50), but because of his parent’s marriage and Fiifi’s intervention, he is relocated back to his mother’s village and inextricably tied to the slave trade in a critical role.
Quey’s imprisonment in this system is the direct, intended result of the marriage of Effia and James, meant to establish political bonds between Europeans and Africans. Quey essentially figures into that structure as a pawn, the legacy of the practice of cassare in West Africa. His story demonstrates how enslaving the other leads to enslaving the self, for “he was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made” (69). The tragedy is that his “sacrifice” is his true self, his possible happiness with Cudjo, who has extended an open invitation for Quey to live with him in his village. Significantly, by the end of the chapter, neither Quey nor the reader knows if Cudjo has survived the raid or not, but it does not matter—Quey has chosen not to be “weak,” letting go of his romance and accepting the role imposed upon him by obligation.
The daughter of Esi, Ness was born on a Southern plantation in the United States, and she has only known enslavement her entire life. Gyasi’s depiction of her enslaved life is marked by a sense of distortion in time and reality. Her grounding is unsteady, as for Ness “even the Northern Star was a hoax” (70). The Northern Star is the fixed star by which sailors guide their ships (recalling the origins of her enslavement); however for her, even the fixed predictability of the cosmos cannot be trusted. Likewise, she cannot remember how old she is—she has lost her place in time—and “each year since the one where she was plucked from her mother’s arms” feels like 10 years (70). Ness likewise only remembers her previous life in Mississippi as “Hell” (70), further disassociating herself from her past. The reader later discovers this disconnectedness is the result of the extreme trauma of living on that plantation, watching her husband be murdered, and losing their only son while trying to escape to freedom.
Ness’s life in America is a world away from Quey’s and reveals the devastating reality of true (rather than figurative) enslavement on an American plantation. Her story is also the first story viewed from the perspective of a mother, creating a sharp contrast between her drive to nurture, a role she easily slips into while caring for Pinky, and the emotional distance she manifests with other slaves. That distance is in part an inheritance of the legacy of violence suffered by Esi, whose stoic presence causes Ness to “associate real love with a hardness of spirit” (71). Like Quey, who struggles with his own type of difference, Ness is markedly different from the other slaves at this new plantation, like TimTam and Margaret, who are “black people who smiled and hugged and told nice stories” (71), and who have formed a close community at Thomas Allan Stockham’s farm. By contrast, Ness grows up hearing stories of her mother’s passage on a slave ship across the Atlantic and mutterings of being “cursed by a Little Dove long, long ago” (70), all recounted in her native language (Twi). Ness’s inheritance is one of violence and separation, passed down through stories and remembrances and repeated in the separation of Ness from Kojo in a struggle for freedom.
Speech and speaking are prominent themes in this chapter, underscoring the voicelessness of the slave. Pinky is mute since the death of her mother. Even when Ness can speak up for herself or Pinky, she refuses to do so, knowing the futility of a slave’s word against a White man’s word. However, speech is likewise a path to freedom and liberation for the slave. Sam’s first words in English track the depth of connection between Ness and her husband, as he utters “I’m sorry,” “don’t worry,” and “love” over time. Likewise, her knowledge of Twi is what gets the attention of Aku, who connects her to her unknown Asante origins and ultimately carries her Kojo to freedom.
To a greater degree than Quey, Ness’s life is marked by separation—from her mother, her identity, their African origins, and eventually from her own son and husband. This cycle of separation plays out over three generations and is rooted in the inherent violence of slavery. Providing a juxtaposition to the “Devil,” who was her slavemaster in “Hell,” she considers her current owner, Tom Allen Stockham, as a “good master” who is horrified by violence and generally forgiving of his slaves, punishing them out of sight of the others. However, being a slave owner requires one to uphold standards that dehumanize the slave, and despite his own reservations, he must punish Ness for humiliating his son. In fact, the previous violence inflicted on her prompts this violence, as her scars make Tom Allen suspicious of her nature. As such, even White slave owners who sought to treat their slaves with kindness were required to uphold the structures of violence that keep the enslaved subservient and objectified.
The chapters “Quey” and “Ness” both illustrate the horror of slavery as its effects pass from generation to generation, where no participant is spared from its devastating effects and inherent violence. Much of Ness’s life is marked by repeated tragedy from which her descendants will not escape for generations. Likewise, despite his efforts to avoid his family’s legacy in slave trading, Quey finds himself firmly fixed in a system he abhors in an effort appease his English father, whom he “still wanted ardently to please” (63). As Effia warns Quey before he journeys to her home village, “Evil is like a shadow. It follows you” (63), but he does not heed her warning, and he carries on the legacy of evil begun in the previous generation. While the reader learns no more about Ness, this “evil” will return to steal her grandson H from her son, Kojo, plunging her family back into the ever-morphing system of enslavement through future generations.
