Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

She could not tell him the fables of Anansi the spider or stories that the old people from her village used to tell her without his growing wary.

“Do you know the story of the kente cloth?” Tansi asked. Esi had heard it numerous times before, twice from Tansi herself, but she shook her head. Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself.

she was just on the right side of spoiled, still sweet.

There were rallies and protests throughout the North, and not just among the Negroes. White people were joining in like Jo had never seen them join in about anything before. The South had brought this fight to the Northern welcome mat, when many of them had wanted nothing to do with it. Now white people could be fined for giving a Negro a meal, or a job, or a place to stay, if the law said that Negro was a runaway. And how were they to know who was a runaway and who was not? It had created an impossible situation, and those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.

Big questions like, if God was so big, so powerful, why did he need the white man to bring him to them? Why could he not tell them himself, make his presence known as he had in the days written about in the Book, with bush fires and dead men walking?

Besides, if we go to the white man for school, we will just learn the way the white man wants us to learn.

We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.”

“This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.

“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? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too.

trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs.

Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future.

And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to...

You keep doin’ what you doin’ and the white man don’t got to do it no more.

He ain’t got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He’ll own you just as is, and he’ll say you the one who did it. He’ll say it’s your fault.”

Just because somebody sees or hears or feels something other folks can’t, doesn’t mean they’re crazy. My grandma used to say, ‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’ ”