Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

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?”

“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. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories.

“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.

The practice of segregation meant that he had to feel his separateness as inequality, and that was what he could not take.

And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem

And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.”

And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had ...

why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gon...

every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would...

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.