She feels the fetid breeze flowing upward through air holes for what her British husband calls 'cargo.' Among captives stacked in the dungeon like kindling is the fifteen-year-old Esi, who in a stinging detail 'could feel the woman on top of her peeing. 'Effia walked around with James in complete awe, running her hands along the fine furniture made from wood the color of her father's skin, the silk hangings so smooth they felt like a kiss.'īeneath Effia's feet lies a different world entirely, hellish and hidden. He spirits her off to live at his slaver's demesne, where Effia finds such luxuries as comfortable apartments, full-to-bursting warehouses, a parade ground, and a chapel. James Collins, the newly appointed governor of Cape Coast Castle, pays an enormous sum as a bride gift to Effia's family. The contrapuntal lives of the African and African-American progeny shape the novel's compelling narrative arc in the end, it is the Ghana-born Gyasi who so artfully accomplishes her own home-going.Īuthor Interviews Slavery Scars A Transatlantic Family Tree In 'Homegoing' Effia's descendents remain in Africa, warring and intermarrying with members of different tribes. The book follows their families, with successive chapters mining stories from each lineage. Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into the Fante and Asante tribes of 18th century Ghana. The structure looms like a curse over Gyasi's sprawling epic of African families exploited by - and at times exploiting - the traffic in human chattel, tracing the 300-year-long repercussions of an original sin. In Homegoing, a first novel that brims with compassion, writer Yaa Gyasi begins where the horrific Middle Passage began for so many, at the 'glowing white' Castle, one of about forty commercial fortresses erected by Europeans on the Gold Coast. Contemporary pilgrims - Barack Obama among them - venture there for sobering lessons on man's inhumanity to man the dungeons where the enslaved lay shackled together, awaiting their fate, to exit via the 'Door of No Return.' Burning white hot would be a singular landmark in west Africa: Cape Coast Castle, a notorious entrepôt for the cross-Atlantic slave trade.

Picture a globe glowing with places of particular misery, pain or evil: Auschwitz, Nanking, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Homegoing Author Yaa Gyasi

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