Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

The need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black,” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.

Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.

Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

how white men smiling just meant more evil was coming with the next wave.

The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended, and his father did not seem to think that it would end. They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.

There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”

“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. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

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 hurt them in the present.

Not the being lost, but the being found. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw Marjorie. Like she had, somehow, found him.

It was the way most people lived their lives, on upper levels, not stopping to peer underneath.