Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

“Love her,” Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past one’s lips.

joining of a man and a woman was also the joining of two families. Ancestors, whole histories, came with the act, but so did sins and curses. The children were the embodiment of that unity, and they bore the brunt of it all.

Since moving to the Castle, she’d discovered that only the white men talked of “black magic.” As though magic had a color.

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.

“Weak, eh?” Maame said. She glared at her daughter with malice that Esi had never before seen. “Yes,” Esi whispered. “That I should live to hear my own daughter speak like this. You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

Before Esi left, the one called Governor looked at her and smiled. It was a kind smile, pitying, yet true. But for the rest of her life Esi would see a smile on a white face and remember the one the soldier gave her before taking her to his quarters, how white men smiling just meant more evil was coming with the next wave.

“Evil is like a shadow. It follows you.”

Ness’s skin was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder.

There’s more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It’s a question of who will own the land, the people, the power. You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, Now I will remove my knife slowly, so let things be easy and clean, let there be no mess. There will always be blood.”

James had heard this speech or something like it many times before. 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.

They shook his hand and murmured their sorries, and James accepted, even though he had never lived in Asanteland and had known his grandfather only as a person knows his shadow, as a figure that is there, visible but untouchable, unknowable.

“Aunty, they say that you make impossible things possible.” She laughed again. “Eh, but they say that about Anansi, about Nyame, about the white man. I can only make the possible attainable. Do you see the difference?”

“I want to be my own nation.” He knew she wouldn’t be able to understand what he said, and yet it seemed that she had heard him. Even though he spoke in a whisper, she heard him. His grandmother didn’t speak at first, just watched him. “We are all weak most of the time,” she said finally. “Look at the baby. Born to his mother, he learns how to eat from her, how to walk, talk, hunt, run. He does not invent new ways. He just continues with the old. This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.” She smiled at him. “But if we do not like the person we have learned to be, should we just sit in front of our fufu, doing nothing? I think, James, that maybe it is possible to make a new way.”

“The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man.