Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

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

She has spent the night hidden in the left corner of the room, watching this man she’s been told is her husband become the animal he’s been told that he is.

The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.

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?”

and it seemed to Sonny then that his mother didn’t have to wait for Heaven for her reward. He could see it; she was already wearing her crown.

The whole landscape of the woman’s body had transformed into a ruin; the young woman had been toppled, leaving this.

Marcus had been craning his neck in order to see her, and she’d rewarded his efforts with a little wave.

Not by the fear he’d felt throughout the day, when the woman who was no more than a stranger to him had dragged him farther and farther from home, but by the fullness of love and protection he’d felt later, when his family had finally found him. 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.

‘A blind man don’t call us crazy for seeing.’ ”