Kojo Freeman discovers his wife Anna has disappeared from the free city of Baltimore, along with their youngest child, Baby H.
“Everyone had been keeping up with what was becoming known as the ‘Bloodhound Law.’ They’d heard about the dogs, the kidnappings, the trials. They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid? Jo didn’t want to accept what he as already starting to know in his heart. Anna and Baby H were gone.”
Life under the Fugitive Slave Law was terrifying for runaway slaves and freed men and women alike. And this traumatic era of history is one of many that Yaa Gyasi illuminates through profound characters and gut-wrenching detail.
In her 2016 debut “Homegoing,” Gyasi traces the widespread effects of the slave trade on the African people and the diaspora from two sisters, Effia and Esi, in the 18th century to two black graduate students living in America in the 21st century.
She weaves themes of slavery, racism and tribal clashes across generations, her tapestry the soul of a nation remembering captivity. Her powerful storytelling brings forward relevant perspectives that have been masked by history’s more powerful voices.
Gyasi begins the intertwined histories of two peoples with ancestral roots in Ghana 300 years ago with Maame.
Maame, mame, mome, mommy, mother.
It began with Maame, who bore two daughters: Effia to a Fante chief and, after starting a fire to make her escape and abandon her daughter, Esi to an Asante chief. Both daughters had a black stone by which to remember their mother.
But slavery severed the unity Maame’s black stones established. In Gyasi’s novel, it takes three centuries before the search for home — for origins, for belonging — can unite the two family branches.
In each of the 14 chapters, one family member is the focus through which readers catch a glimpse of the family’s struggles, successes, loves, losses as well as the political and social climate in the region.
Gyasi’s own voice stays neutral as she describes the range of emotional and psychological effects of slavery and racism on her characters through the history-telling. She doesn’t portray a perfect victim or a wholly evil oppressor, and she does not take sides. Both sides of the family suffer.
Effia’s people, who condemned Esi’s people to enslavement, seemed cursed. The next five generations living in Ghana survived war with the Asantes, blight, famine, social disgrace, and psychotic dreams of a fire.
Esi’s people, enslaved, survived the Atlantic crossing; cotton plantation beatings; the Great Migration and the Fugitive Slave Law; grueling work deep in an Alabamian coal mines; poverty, racism, and heroin addiction in the Harlem jazz scene.
Gyasi values all her characters and their struggles. She embraces the complexity of family ties and messy histories with an Akan proverb stated in the book that anchors the epic and the reader for what is to come: “The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.” From the outside, the number of characters can be overwhelming. From the inside, each character has a position and a purpose.
This book is historical without being dry and educational without being pretentious because Gyasi writes the lived experience of what readers relegate to merely history.
The book’s ancestral project relies on familiar and foreign history lessons just as the history lessons require the ancestry to illuminate the events. Gyasi creates great depth of character for each new family member that provides the context for events like the Fugitive Slave Law or the union protests in the South.
Gyasi wrote not just about people, but about a family with a long history, lots of problems and lots of faith – like most families.
As a writer, Gyasi seems to take instruction from Anansi, the African folkloric spider who makes occasional appearances. Just as she weaves African and American history into lived experience, she also weaves threads of common experience across the two lineages. Fear of fire passes through Effia’s family and fear of water (and the black bodies on the Atlantic Ocean floor) through Esi’s.
Ness Stockham’s back, warped by scars, embodies the effects of slavery on slaves, while Yaw’s mottled facial scars from a fire represent the psychological effects of the Fante’s involvement in slave trade as middlemen. Threads like this keep the scores of characters and their stories in Gyasi’s control as she bounces across time and space.
Without judgment for their individual sins – abandoning children, slavery, drug abuse – Gyasi illuminates the sorrowful and beautiful history of blacks in Africa and America through the lives of fictitious characters. This book reclaims the histories masked by dominant narratives, telling untold stories that trace a lineage back to its matriarchal origins, to maame.
“Homegoing” was released June 7, 2016 and is available on Amazon.