Esi’s descendants in the United States endure the failed promises of Reconstruction, flee Jim Crow as part of the Great Migration, witness the Harlem Renaissance firsthand, and later become enveloped in the heroin epidemic of the 1960s. The novel follows the next seven generations we see Effia’s line live through the Anglo-Asante wars, respond to the advent of cocoa farming on the Gold Coast, and tangle with the reality of African complicity in the slave trade. Esi is one of those enslaved Africans when we first meet her, she is being held in the castle’s underground dungeon.
Effia, married off by her stepmother to a British officer, lives a life of luxury in the Cape Coast Castle, the infamous slave-trading fort that millions of Africans were trafficked through before boarding ships bound for the Americas. It begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with the story of two half sisters, Effia and Esi. That novel is daringly expansive, its structure eschewing the idea that the story of Black people could be contained within a single generation or moment. The moment reads as a guide to Homegoing itself. He’d have to talk about Harlem.” Marcus extrapolates further, until he sees no way to complete the project without also including the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the war on drugs, racial disparities in policing, and the way his very presence in the Stanford University library made others uncomfortable.
“How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story,” he thinks, “without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow?” Further still, “if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He wants to study the convict-leasing system in the United States that essentially re-created the conditions of slavery for many African Americans in the South, including his own grandfather, but he feels the story cannot begin or end there. in sociology at Stanford University, and-as happens-is struggling to decide what to write his dissertation about. Late in Homegoing, the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, a character named Marcus is introduced.
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