Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

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.

The switch hit Akua on the left shoulder. She watched it drop to the floor, and then, calmly, she walked out. Behind her she could hear the Missionary saying, “He’s not a man of God. He’s not a man of God.” But Akua cared nothing for God. She was sixteen, and the fetish priest had died only a year before.

“I’m too old to go to America now. Too old for revolution, too. 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. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children.

“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.

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.”

For Sonny, the problem with America wasn’t segregation but the fact that you could not, in fact, segregate. Sonny had been trying to get away from white people for as long as he could remember, but, big as this country was, there was nowhere to go. Not even Harlem, where white folks owned just about everything an eye could see or a hand could touch.

Split the Castle open, find me, find you. We, two, felt sand, wind, air. One felt whip. Whipped, once shipped. We, two, black. Me, you. One grew from cocoa’s soil, birthed from nut, skin uncut, still bleeding. We, two, wade. The waters seem different but are same. Our same. Sister skin. Who knew? Not me. Not you.

“This door leads out to the beach, where ships waited to take them away.” Them. Them. Always them. No one called them by name.