Homegoing

“And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” 

Abronoma, the captive slave girl in Esi’s household, names the separation of Esi and Effia but also foreshadows Esi’s voyage across the Atlantic as she is sold into slavery. Like the sisters in the saying, Esi and Effia, and their descendants, exist on opposite shores until Marcus and Marjorie find their way to one another.

“Quey had wanted to cry, but that desire embarrassed him. He knew that he was one of the half-caste children of the Castle, and, like the other half-caste children, he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.” 

Part of Quey’s struggle in this chapter is with his mixed identity, which is brought into focus when he meets Cudjo, who later becomes a love interest. Quey is a lonely child, in part because he does not feel he belongs to either culture, neither English nor Fante. When he becomes part of his mother’s village, he feels a sense of belonging for the first time. However, that vulnerability also gives Fiifi the opportunity to capitalize on Quey’s connection to both cultures, leading him into an unhappy marriage of convenience and away from his true self.

“This was how they lived there, in the bush: Eat or be eaten. Capture or be captured. Marry for protection. Quey would never go to Cudjo’s village. He would not be weak. He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made.” 

At the end of the chapter, Quey’s fate is already decided for him by Fiifi, who has forced him into an arranged marriage. Quey finally accepts his role in the slave trade, letting this be his new identity, becoming a “Big Man” in the village. Quey finally has a place in society, but the moment shows the sacrifice Quey must make to be part of the slave trade and his own sort of enslavement in the system. He must let go of his love for Cudjo to appear strong rather than weak (represented here by his homosexuality), but this means giving up his own freedom and desires.

“The Dove has failed. Oh, what to do? Make her suffer, or you’ll fail too.

Ness didn’t know what she was singing, for Esi had never taught her what the words of the song meant, but in the pew in front of her, a woman turned and whispered something.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand,’ Ness said. The words the woman spoke had been in her mother’s tongue.

‘So you are an Asante, and you don’t even know.’” 

In this passage, which employs dramatic irony, Ness is absentmindedly singing a song from her childhood without knowing the story of Abronoma and her role in her mother’s capture. In fact, through her separation from her mother, Ness has lost all sense of identity, unaware that she is Asante. In a reversal of Esi’s captivity, however, these words sung in Twi are like a gateway to freedom for her son Kojo by connecting her to Aku, even if Ness and Sam cannot escape slavery in the end.

“You are a big man now, James. You can’t cry at every little thing that comes your way.” 

James, like his father and grandfather before him, is in line to hold a powerful position in his family. From the age of four, he has been groomed by his family and others to be a “big man” so that he accepts his role in the slave trade with pride, and so that he might stifle any feelings or reservations he might have about facilitating it. Here David uses the nickname, which has served as a way to ensure the men in the family fall in line. 

“The warrior shook his head. He said no over and over and over again, but ultimately he would do it. James knew he would do it. And when he did, it would be the last time James would ever use his power to make another do his bidding.” 

In this moment, James finally breaks free from his family’s dependence on power and cruelty. He sees the ethical problem of forcing others to do his bidding and the damage that force can cause to the family as well as the country. This conscious choice allows him to start anew with Akosua, but it is a sacrifice of power, for the rest of his life will be a struggle to survive by honorable means.

“Every time Jo saw a slave in Baltimore, he saw himself, saw what his life would have been like had Ma Aku not taken him to freedom. His free papers named him Kojo Freeman. Free man. Half the ex-slaves in Baltimore had the name. Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth.” 

Kojo’s reflections speak to the importance of a name and the image it projects. In this case his name indicates his supposed freedom, which he hopes will remain true, for while Kojo is ostensibly free and has never truly known the life of a slave, he is still technically the property of another under the existing laws. In an era in which a liberated or free-born Black person’s freedom was still tenuous at best and subject to changing laws, all Kojo can do is cling to a story and hope it stays true.

“A free man didn’t have to be a servant or a coach driver. He could make something with his own hands. He could fix something, sell something. He could build something up from the ground, then send it out to sea.” 

Kojo considers the meaning of freedom for a Black man in Baltimore in 1850. For him, it is the ability to create, for himself, and to build something from scratch. Skilled labor, being able to use the body and mind in a skilled practice, is key to a man’s freedom, along with an element of creativity that he would otherwise be unable to exercise. Likewise, being able to sell that creation and keep the profits. Freedom is more than not simply being owned; it is choosing what one does with their life as well. 

“‘If he is a royal, then you are a royal too,’ he said, laughing boisterously.” 

Ohene Nyarko’s sarcastic joke comes after he and Abena encounter an old man at the Asantehene’s palace. The old man is probably Kwame, the only relative of James’s who would likely remember him. The moment is filled with dramatic irony, for the reader knows this to be true: Abena is the direct descendant of Asante royals. Abena and Ohene Nyarko are both unaware of her heritage—while Ohene Nyarko never agrees to marry her, being an Asante royal, Abena is in fact far out of Ohene Nyarko’s league.

“I see how these townspeople call me Unlucky, but every season I feel lucky to have this land, to do this honorable work, not the shameful work of my family. When the villagers here gave me this small bit of land, I was so happy that I buried this stone here to give thanks.” 

In James’s confession to his daughter, Abena, at the end of his life and the beginning of her independence, he finally sheds light on his origins, giving her the gift of the necklace and some insight into their family history. Abena finally understands why her father continues to farm through failure year after year, and she can see him with pride rather than humiliation. This moment also shows the importance of sharing that history across generations, for it heals their relationship, as she hugs both parents before leaving. 

“‘Mm-hmm. See, that’s what I thought. You was young. Slavery ain’t nothin’ but a dot in your eye, huh? If nobody tell you, I’ma tell you. War may be over but it ain’t ended.” 

The words of H’s cellmate are foreboding as H begins to realize the magnitude of his arrest and incarceration. Until this point, he believed himself free, powerful, and invincible, as if emancipation was the end of his oppression. His cellmate tries to help him see that slavery may be illegal but the war to control the lives and bodies of Black people will continue in America for decades to come. 

“H wanted to throw the man down, down to meet the city underneath the earth, but he stopped himself. He was not the con they had told him he was.” 

In this pivotal moment, He comes to the realization that he is not a criminal, even if he has been judged as one for a good part of his life. This message is central to the text, going back to the importance of telling one’s own story to correct the record, which often only remembers the voices of the powerful. H is not what the White men accused him of being. He has mercy on the White man, and eventually the striking miners win their demands through lawful means.

“You can only decide a wicked man by what he does, Akua. The white man has earned his name here. Remember that.”

Akua asks the fetish man why the white man is called “Obroni” and learns that it is a variation on “Abro ni”—wicked man. While she may have no memory of the slave trade and the wars with England, he assures her the name is well merited, and her mind wanders to the burning of the white traveler in her village. The moment of that burning is pivotal for her mental health, for while she feels justified in not intervening to save an “Obroni,” her firewoman dreams are sparked by these conflicting feelings and the gruesome murder of an innocent man. 

“Willie wasn’t coal black. She’d seen enough coal in her lifetime to know that for sure. But the day Robert Clifton came with his father to the union meeting to hear Willie sing, all she could think was that he was the whitest black boy she had ever seen, and because she thought that, her own skin had started to look to her more and more like the thing her father brought home from the mines, under his fingernails and dusting his clothes, every single day.” 

Willie’s perspective is often focused on the different skin tones around her, and in her first encounter with Robert she is suddenly hyper-aware of her own color, seeing it as darker. Robert’s white skin makes her think of her own color as dark and dirty, like the coal dust that clings to her father—under his nails, on his clothes—difficult to remove. While Robert is able to easily abandon his Blackness by the end of the chapter, Willie’s is unavoidable, and this first meeting frames those difficulties to come.

“She liked to be the star of the show. It was what she wanted now too, now that she was still thinking about Robert. How she could put his skin to good use, be less cautious if she were him. If she could, she would put her voice in his body, in his skin.” 

Willie’s reflections show the limit of her freedom as a Black woman in the early 20th century. Since her husband looks White, things come to him easily despite his lack of ambition and adventure. Willie, on the other hand, knows how successful she would be if she had just been born in another body. This moment shows how limited her life is, despite her natural talent and ambition, simply due to her skin color. 

“‘Whose story do we believe then?’

The boys were silent. They stared at him, waiting.

‘We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing?’” 

Yaw’s speech to his students is at the core of his teachings and is likewise a major theme of Homegoing. It emphasizes the role of multiple voices in history and the need to listen to all stories to get a complete picture. The moment is underlined with irony: Yaw himself cannot tell the story of his own scar. This is in part because he has refused his own mother’s attempts to connect with him and tell her story for decades, believing the more powerful voices of the villagers instead. 

“And when she touched him, when she took his hands into her own, her scarred and ruined hands, when she rubbed the backs of his hands with her crooked thumbs, he felt how soft her own burns were, how very, very soft.” 

Yaw has finally visited his mother after around 40 years of estrangement. He has vilified her in his mind, and he has hardened himself to their shared trauma, and yet when he finally meets her again, he is surprised by how “very, very soft” his mother’s burn scars are. In this moment he realizes how human she is, soft and vulnerable. When she touches his scars in turn, she allows his softness to show as well as they weep together, releasing years of anger. Once they are reconciled, Akua can finally share the story of his scar with him. 

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.” 

In this moment, Akua speaks to the evil in their family line, the karmic debt their family carries from its involvement in the slave trade. She addresses the need for individuals to reconcile themselves to their families’ pasts, in particular for those who have benefitted from systems of violence and oppression, even if those systems have changed or disappeared. The stain of that involvement follows each generation, and Akua herself begins to heal once she agrees to face the firewoman’s truths. 

“You can’t do a single thing, can you?”

Sonny is gradually undone by this question, spoken by a malnourished, adolescent boy in Harlem. While Sonny is doing everything he can to improve living conditions for Black people in Harlem, the boy’s question haunts him as a bleak reminder of his powerlessness. Sonny decides the fight is useless and finally gives in, finding a job in a night club that eventually leads to a lifelong struggle with heroin addiction. 

“It makes me sad to see my son a junkie after all the marchin’ I done, but makes me sadder to see you thinkin’ you can leave like your daddy did. You keep doin’ what you doin’ and the white man don’t got to do it no more. He ain’t got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He’ll own you just as is, and he’ll say you the one who did it. He’ll say it’s your fault.” 

Willie’s speech to Sonny carries the power to finally help him see the destructive power of his addiction. She helps him to realize that his heroin addiction is just another form of slavery, one for which he can be blamed by the White men who profit from his addiction. Similarly, she helps him see that his abdication of fatherhood plays a role in perpetuating this inequality, weakening his family and the inheritance of love from parent to child.

“Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here ‘white’ could be the way a person talked; ‘black,’ the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.” 

Marjorie struggles with feeling like an outsider in her school, for she does not fit in with the White students, and she is seen a different than the Black students as well. In Ghana, these subtle cultural differences do not exist, but she is seen as different there as well, as seen in her encounter with the street urchin at the beginning of the chapter. Like Quey generations before her, Marjorie straddles two worlds but belongs to neither. 

“She had thought Graham was like her, a reader, a loner, but watching him walk away with the girl, she knew he was different. She saw how easy it was for him to slip in unnoticed, as though he had always belonged there.” 

In contrast to Marjorie’s difficulty in fitting in with her peer group, Graham, though an outsider, too, effortlessly slips into a new social group. Like Robert easily passing as White and quickly finding a new life in Manhattan, Graham easily leaves behind the relationship he had with Marjorie to transition to another group. 

“There was something about the smell of the ocean that nauseated him. That wet salt stink clung to his nose and made him feel as though he were already drowning. He could feel it thick in his throat, like brine, clinging to that place where his uvula hung so that he couldn’t breathe right.”

Part of Gyasi’s introduction to Marcus frames him by his fear of water, rooted in his ancestors’ voyages across the Atlantic on a slave ship centuries before. It sets up a juxtaposition with Marjorie’s fear of fire that symbolizes the struggles on both sides of their family. It also recalls Esi’s walk across the beach to the slave ship, down to the exact same sensations: “The scent of ocean water hit her nose. The taste of salt clung to her throat” (49). Echoes of that trauma arise in Marcus, who, like Akua, has a gift for seeing his family’s past.