Homegoing Yaa Gyasi

Effia's line

Effia is raised by her mother, Baaba, who is cruel to her. Nevertheless, she works hard to please her mother. Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but when her mother tells her to hide her menstrual cycle, rumours spread that she is barren. As a result, she is married to a British merchant, James Collins, the governor of Cape Coast Castle. He and Effia have a happy marriage. She returns to her family village one time, when her father dies, where her brother tells her that Baaba is not Effia's mother and that Effia is the daughter of an unknown slave.

Effia and James have a son called Quey who is raised in the Cape Coast Castle. His parents, worrying that he is friendless, eventually have him befriend a local boy named Cudjo. When they are teenagers Quey and Cudjo realize that they are attracted to one another. In fear of their relationship James sends Quey to England for a while. When he returns, Quey is assigned to help to strengthen the ties between his familial village and the British merchants at the Cape Coast Castle. He is frustrated by his uncle Fiifi, who seems evasive about trade relations. Eventually, Fiifi, along with Cudjo, raid the village of the Asante people and bring back the daughter of an Asante chief. Realizing that to marry her would join his people, the Fantes, with the Asantes, Quey resolves to forget Cudjo and marry the Asante girl.

Quey's son, James, learns that his Asante grandfather died and returns to Asante land where he meets a farmer woman, Akosua Mensah. Growing up with his parents' dysfunctional political marriage, and promised since childhood to the daughter of the Fante chief, Amma, James longs to run away and marry Akosua. With help from Effia, James runs away from Amma and lives among the Efutu people until they are raided and killed by the Asantes. He is saved by a man who recognizes him though James makes him promise to tell everyone he has died. He then travels to reunite with Akosua.

James's daughter Abena only knows her father as a rural farmer called Unlucky for his inability to grow crops. By the time she is twenty-five she is still unmarried. Her childhood best friend, Ohene, promises to marry her after his next successful season and the two renew an affair which coincides with the start of a famine. The village elders, discovering the affair, tell them that if Abena conceives a child or the famine lasts more than seven years Abena will be cast out. In the sixth year Ohene successfully pioneers the introduction of cocoa plants. Rather than marry Abena he reveals that he promised to marry the daughter of the farmer who gave him the seeds. Abena, now pregnant, decides to leave her village rather than wait for Ohene to marry her.

Akua grows up among white missionaries after her mother dies early in her childhood. When an Asante man proposes, she accepts and marries him and the couple have several children. She is traumatized to learn that her mother died while being baptized, and by seeing her fellow villagers burn a white traveler alive. Before the birth of her third child Akua begins to have nightmares about a woman on fire with burning children. Her nightmares cause her to avoid sleep and enter a trance-like state while awake, and as a result her mother-in-law locks her in the hut to prevent other village people seeing her in her strange state. At the same time the British provoke a third war against them and her husband goes to fight. He, returns missing one leg, in time for the birth of their son, Yaw. The nightmares continue to haunt Akua and, while sleepwalking during a trance at night, she kills her daughters by setting a fire that consumes them. Her husband is able to save Yaw and successfully prevent Akua from being burned herself by the townspeople.

Yaw grows up to be a schoolteacher who is highly educated but angry about his facial burn scars. His friends encourage him to marry even though he is near the age of fifty, as his self-consciousness has kept him alone until that point. After his friends go through a difficult pregnancy he decides to take on a house girl, Esther. The two of them speak Twi together; Esther is unfazed by Yaw's anger and asks him constant questions about his way of life, and he realizes he loves her. To please Esther he goes to see his mother, now known as the Crazy Woman, for the first time in over forty years in Edweso where they reconcile, and she tells him that there is evil in their line and that she regrets causing the fire that burned him.

Marjorie grows up in Alabama, which she hates, and spends summers in Ghana visiting her grandmother, who has moved from Edweso to the Gold Coast. In her mostly-white high school she struggles to fit in as the black students mock her for acting white and the white students don't want to have anything to do with her. She feels left out as although she is black, she doesn't identify with the African American stereotype that all blacks in America are lumped into. While reading in the library she meets a German-born army brat, Graham, and develops a crush on him hoping he will ask her to prom. Instead his father and the school ban them from attending together and he instead goes with a white girl. She reads a poem about her Ghanaian origin and ancestors during an African American cultural day at her high school, which her father attends. Her grandmother dies shortly after, before Marjorie is able to make it back to Ghana.

Esi's line

Esi is the beloved and beautiful daughter of a Big Man and his wife, Maame. Her father is a renowned and successful warrior and he eventually captures a slave who asks Esi to send a message to her father about where she is. Esi complies out of pity as her mother was formerly enslaved. As a result her village is raided and her father and mother are killed. Before she leaves Esi learns that her mother, while she was enslaved, had a child before her, then set a fire and left the baby with Babaa. Esi is then captured and imprisoned in the dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle where she is raped by a drunken merchant before being sent to North America. She is unable to retrieve the stone she buried for safety in the depths of the dungeon.

Esi's daughter, Ness, is raised in the American South. Her mother teaches her some Twi but she and her mother are eventually beaten for it and separated. In her new, more lenient plantation, Ness is forbidden from becoming a house slave because of the deep scars on her back. Before arriving at the plantation Ness was forcibly married by her master to Sam, a Yoruba man and fellow slave on the same plantation. Although he spoke no English, they eventually came to love one another and have a child, whom she named Kojo. After a woman heard her speaking Twi, Ness was offered the opportunity to escape north. Ness, the woman, Sam, and Kojo escaped but in an effort to protect her son, she and her husband allowed themselves to be caught and then claimed their child died, allowing the woman to escape with Kojo. Ness was severely whipped, causing her brutal scars, and forced to watch as Sam is hanged.

Kojo is raised in Baltimore where he goes by the name Jo Freeman and marries a freeborn black woman Anna. Kojo works on the ships in the Baltimore Harbor while Anna cleans for a white family, and the entire family lives with Ma, the woman who helped Kojo escape when he was a baby. When Anna is pregnant with their eighth child, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed. Jo is warned that he should go further North but he decides to stay. The white family Anna works for helps Kojo and Ma forge papers saying they were born free, but Kojo still worries he or his family will be kidnapped. His oldest daughter marries the pastor's son, and soon after, Anna disappears while pregnant. Kojo looks for her for weeks but is unable to find her, only hearing that a white man asked her to enter a carriage with him at the last sighting. The kidnapping destroys Jo's family.

H, the last son born to Anna and Kojo, is freed during the Reconstruction era, and has never known his parents, with Anna dying shortly after childbirth. Sometime after, as an adult man, he is arrested and wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman. Unable to pay the ten-dollar fine he is sentenced to work in a coal mine for ten years. One day a white convict is assigned as his partner and he is unable to shovel any coal, so H shovels the twelve-ton daily quota for the both of them with two hands simultaneously, earning him the nickname "Two-Shovel H". When H is released from his sentence he settles in Pratt City in Birmingham, Alabama, made up of other ex-convicts both black and white, and works in the coal mine as a free agent. Unable to read or write, he asks a friend's son to write a letter to his ex-girlfriend Ethe, whom he cheated on shortly before being arrested. She eventually comes to join him.

H's daughter Willie marries Robert, her childhood sweetheart who is light-skinned with light eyes, and they have a son named Carson. After her parents die Robert suggests they move away and Willie asks that they go to Harlem as she wants to start a career as a singer. As they look for work Willie realizes that her too dark skin will prevent her from being a professional singer while Robert is able to pass for white. The two grow farther apart as Robert finds a job in white Manhattan while Willie cleans bars in Harlem. They begin keeping secrets from one another, and Robert returns home less and less. One night, Willie sees Robert vomiting in the men's bathroom during her job at a bar, and Robert's white co-workers find out their relationship. One of the co-workers have the two of them touch each other as he sexually pleasures himself, and then fires Robert. That night, Robert leaves her. Willie eventually begins a new relationship with Eli and has a daughter, Josephine. One day, when Carson is ten, Willie sees Robert in Manhattan with a white wife and their white child. The two make eye contact, and Willie suddenly realizes that she forgives Robert. Her anger, sadness, confusion and loss subside, and she finds her voice again.

Carson, who as an adult goes by the name Sonny, tries to find meaning in marching for civil rights and working for the NAACP but instead becomes demoralized by his work. Like his own father he becomes an absentee parent to three children by three different women, often dodging their requests for alimony. He meets a young singer named Amani and after she introduces him to drugs he becomes addicted to heroin as well. He spends all of his money on drugs and realizes he never loved Amani, but only wanted her. When Willie finally reveals details about his father and offers him a choice between her money or getting clean he chooses to stay with his mother and get clean.

Sonny and Amani's son Marcus goes on to become an academic at Stanford University. At a party near campus, he meets Marjorie, also a graduate student at Stanford, and the two form an intimate bond. The two of them go to Pratt City so Marcus can research his African American history thesis, and Marcus realizes there is nothing there for him; Marjorie's parents have also both passed away. Marjorie suggests that they go to Ghana and while they are there visiting the villages of Marjorie's grandmother, they go to the Cape Coast Castle which Marjorie has never visited. While seeing the "Door of No Return" in the slave dungeon, Marcus has a panic attack and flees through the door to the beach. He and Marjorie swim in the water where she gives him Effia's stone, which has been passed to her through the generations, and which, unbeknownst to both of them, was given to Effia by their mutual ancestor, Maame. Esi's stone remains unrecovered, buried in the dungeons of the Castle.

Descendants of Maame