Homegoing

“Hell” emerges as a recurring motif among Esi’s descendants, who have endured the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Esi, “Hell was a place of remembering” as she reckons with the loss of her family and home while in the dungeon of Cape Castle (28). She is surrounded by suffering women, human waste, and squalid conditions, but her memories cause her the most pain, knowing what led to her captivity and what happiness she has lost. Like her mother, Ness experiences hell, living on the plantation “she would only ever describe as Hell” (70). Her life as a slave under a cruel master is defined by violence, extreme cruelty, and then heartbreaking loss when her son makes it to freedom but she and Sam are captured and the latter is executed. The persistent injustice of slavery causes this hell for Esi’s descendants. Kojo, in his isolation at the end of the chapter, experiences his own sort of hell after losing Anna to slavery, followed by the estrangement of his once happy family. H, in many ways, lives 10 years in hell, working off an unjust sentence underground in the dark, hot caves of a coal mine. However, H gains his freedom and emerges transformed, able to use his skills to create a new legacy. Finally breaking free of the hell of previous generations, Willie finds her “salvation” in a church, which gives her the fortitude to help her son through his own struggle with the hell of addiction. 

The traditions of the Akan people in Ghana reappear throughout the text in stories on both sides of the family, often emerging in juxtaposition with European Christian practices and empirical thought. In the early chapters, the stories are naturally punctuated by the folk tales families share with their children, such as the creation of the Kente cloth or the trickster spider Anansi, Akan god of storytelling. Effia follows folk magic to get pregnant but is confronted by her husband James, who does not want any “voodoo or black magic” in their home (23).

Effia’s descendants rely on village witches and fetish men for guidance, as they play a vital role in African culture. Akua herself has dreams in which she is visited by her ancestor, Maame, in the form of a firewoman, but Akua’s upbringing in the Christian missionary school complicates her relation to her native traditions. Likewise, the experiences of her distant cousins in America, from Kojo being accused of witchcraft in Baltimore to Willie’s premonitions and Marcus’s vision, all conflict with the traditional views of European empiricism and Christian teachings. Indeed, these inexplicable magics appear in contrast to a largely White culture, personified by James Collins’s skepticism, the Methodist church in Baltimore, and the white missionary in Kumasi, which all try to discourage reliance on other cultural teachings.