Told over the course of eight generations, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing follows the descendants of two half-sisters—Effia and Esi—who are born in 18th-century Ghana. While Effia marries an Englishman and leads a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, Esi is captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery in America. From there, three centuries unfold. In Gyasi’s deft hands, time is elastic: 20 years pass in a sentence, a single moment stretches across pages, the past folds into the present. “Our history…informs the way that we treat people in the present,” Gyasi said in an interview with TIME. “Every moment has a precedent and comes from this other moment, that comes from this other moment, that comes from this other moment.”
Effia and Esi’s descendants disperse and converge throughout the novel. In Cape Coast, a reluctant son takes on his father’s mantle as a British slave trader, navigating relationships between British companies, the Fante tribes of the coast, and the Asante villages of the inland. As the British end their participation in the slave trade and turn their attention to colonization in West Africa, a young man escapes his family’s shadow for the anonymity of a “small-small” (p. 104) life with the woman he loves. At the height of Asante resistance to British colonization, a young woman searches for her ancestors in the Asante capital city of Kumasi; and in a village empty of its warriors, a mother is haunted by visions of a woman made of fire. Years later, a Catholic school instructor in Takoradi, Ghana, comes to terms with the fires of his own past. In the last chapters of the book, three centuries after Effia first moves into Cape Coast Castle, a young woman from Huntsville, Alabama, returns to Cape Coast to walk in her ancestors’ footsteps.
An ocean away from Cape Coast, a desperate mother risks her life to give her son a chance at freedom in the antebellum South. As the Fugitive Slave Act is voted into law, that son—now a Black dockworker in Baltimore—holds tightly to all that is left of his family. In Pratt City, Alabama, at the turn of the 20th century, a former convict miner joins a nascent labor movement to fight for fair wages and protections for workers. Set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, his daughter dreams of a spotlight on a New York City jazz club stage. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a housing worker at the NAACP finds “Harlem and heroin” (p. 257), struggling to find a path for a lifetime of anger. Years later, a Stanford PhD student chases echoes of his family through America’s history, trying to understand the “accumulation of…times” (p. 296) that have shaped his own.
Through the parallel paths of Effia and Esi—and the generations that follow—Homegoing illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy, both for those who were taken and those who stayed. In doing so, the novel interrogates the stories we tell about freedom and captivity and the soul of our nation; stories that have been told, retold, and reified through their retelling. “Whose story do we believe,” asks one of Effia’s descendants late in the novel. “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?” (p. 226).