Homegoing

Homegoing is a historical fiction novel by Yaa Gyasi, a Ghanaian-American novelist born in 1989. Homegoing was published in 2016 and was awarded the 2017 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the 2016 John Leonard Prize for outstanding debut novel, and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award in 2016. Written in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), Gyasi tells the story of one 18th-century Akan family, tracking it across seven generations after it is split into two by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Homegoing follows the descendants over two centuries until the two sides of the family reunite by way of two distant cousins who complete a “homegoing” to each other and Africa. As such, Homegoing is a modern retelling of slaves’ histories and the Black American experience, but it is also the story of two Ghanaian tribes and the violent legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic.

Told in the third person, Gyasi’s narrative shifts from Africa to America and back again. Her storytelling style relies on flashbacks, often jumping between the past and present to reveal details of each descendant’s life. With so many voices, a recurring message inherent in Gyasi’s storytelling is that there are few absolutes in life. The ability to tell one’s own story emerges as an important theme as these characters each share their experience of slavery and its long aftermath.

Plot Summary

Homegoing begins with a fire set by Maame as she flees the Fante village where she was a captive slave. She was raped by Cobbe Otcher and gave birth to Effia before fleeing deep into Asante territory, where she marries and gives birth to Esi. These two half-sisters grow up unaware of each other, finding out about one another’s existence only when they inherit a gold and black stone from Maame. Effia is married to an Englishman who is the governor in Cape Castle, the source of the slave trade in Ghana, while Esi is captured and shipped to America from that same castle. Effia wears her stone on a necklace, and Esi loses hers in the Castle dungeon before being shipped away.

Effia’s son Quey is coerced into taking over a position of authority in procuring and trading captives, though he would prefer to live a different life with his childhood friend Cudjo. In the American South, Esi’s daughter Ness has been enslaved since birth. Ness, her husband Sam, and their infant son, Kojo, attempt to escape slavery, but while Kojo escapes, Ness and Sam are caught. Ness is sold to another master, while Sam is hanged. Quey’s son James is Asante royalty and in line to take over the slave trade. However, James’s moral reservations lead him to abandon his family and start a new life with a peasant girl he loves. Meanwhile, Kojo Freeman is living as a free Black man in Baltimore in 1850 with his pregnant wife, Anna, and their seven children. Anna is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and she commits suicide as her son H is born into slavery by cesarian.

James’s daughter Abena is continually waiting for her childhood friend Ohene Nyarko to honor her in marriage. She gets pregnant from an affair with him, but she leaves the village to join a Christian school in Kumasi, where she has Akua. In America, H is arrested and sentenced to 10 years in the prison leasing system for a crime he did not commit. He works off his sentence, gaining skills that allow him to establish a family and home as a free man. Akua is a troubled young woman who grew up in the Christian school after her mother, Abena, was murdered by a missionary. She unintentionally kills her two daughters in a fire; her son Yaw survives but is scarred for life. H’s daughter Willie moves to Harlem as part of the Great Migration with her husband Robert, who leaves her to pass as White in Manhattan. Willie is left to raise her son, Sonny, on her own.

Yaw grows up to be a teacher in Africa. He is estranged from his mother, Akua, but once he falls in love with his housemaid, Esther, she helps him return to his mother. Sonny, a young man at the beginning of the civil rights movement, becomes addicted to heroin. Willie helps Sonny on his path to sobriety, and Sonny becomes a steady father figure to his son Marcus. Marjorie is the daughter of Yaw and Esther, born in Africa but attending school in Alabama, where she struggles with cultural differences. Her grandmother, Akua, shares their family history with Marjorie each summer. Marjorie and Marcus meet in San Francisco while he is in a graduate program at Stanford. The two instantly connect and eventually return to Cape Coast, where they heal their family’s long separation and legacy of trauma.