“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air like wasn’t never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell ’em; now they just send ’em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can’t be with they kids.”
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a novel that is both sweeping and intimate in its scope and approach. In 300 pages, Gyasi traces the history of the transatlantic slave trade in two branches of a family line; she begins in eighteenth-century Africa and ends in contemporary Ghana. Along the way, her novel encompasses such themes as family separation, tribal warfare, colonial exploitation, the Fugitive Slave Act’s impact on freemen, convict leasing, the Great Migration, passing, and the Jazz Age. Again, all in 300 pages!
But while Gyasi’s scope is ambitious, her approach is intimate. She structures her novel to allow her to focus on each generation of the two branches of the family tree. The book begins in 1785 with two half-sisters who have never met: one manipulated into becoming the Fante wife of a white British slaver, the other captured through tribal warfare and sold into slavery, destined for the ships that transport human cargo to the nascent America. One lives in the castle, the other below in the dungeon. After detailing these stories in the first two chapters, Gyasi uses subsequent chapters to alternate between the generations of each of these women’s descendants. Her powerful vignettes reveal the scars created by patriarchy, capitalism, and racism as the main characters of each chapter grapple with the legacy that they are bound to follow, even as they don’t even have the chance to get to know their parents who have passed on the cultural legacies of slavery.
Homecoming is heartbreaking in many places, as most of these chapters do not have happy endings. Friends and family members die; characters are betrayed; sacrifices are made. But reading the book is never a miserable experience thanks to Gyasi’s vibrant writing and characterization. I don’t want to spoil the last chapter, but the ending is so beautiful and satisfying. The last words of dialogue? “Welcome home.”
