Janefairfax

“She tried to smile, but she had been born during the years of Esi's unsmiling, and she had never learned how to do it quite right. The corners of her lips always seemed to twitch upward, unwillingly, then fall within milliseconds, as though attached to that sadness that had once anchored her own mother's heart.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Once the woman decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free... The older Jo =got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“She was missing all but her four front teeth, evenly spaced, as though they had chased all of the other teeth out of her mouth and then joined together in the middle, triumphant.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing