Homegoing: Foil 4 key examples

If Quey makes himself a model of deference, his son takes an equally dramatic pivot away from him. The father’s life unfurls as a running record of repressed and forsaken desires—aspirations deferred, longings denied. Quey submits to his elders’ wishes, even if it means surrendering his own sense of agency. He follows his father’s command to return to Africa as an emissary for the British slave traders, even if “inside he resisted.” Upon Fiifi’s instruction, he even gives up his love for Cudjo. “He would not be weak,” Quey decides when his uncle brings in a captive Nana Yaa from their Asante allies. “He was in the business of slavery, and sacrifices had to be made.” Quey trades his personal desires for filial obedience and social power, taking sides with the British.

James’s narrative radically compensates against his father’s personal decisions. Quey’s son follows his heart precisely where his father had ignored it, returning to the Asantes as he pursues Akosua’s hand. His own decisions are as extravagant as Quey’s were forgettable. The son escapes from home, nearly dies in the British-Asante fighting, and buries his past. Quey’s political marriage consolidates power from two major tribes, and James’s fulfillment of love gives it all up. He takes up a new life as a tragically unlucky farmer but, in his continued contentment, advocates for an alternate conception of life. “If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?” James comforts Abena in a sentence that sums up his life. The father submits, but the son seeks.

As the family slave reveals her own ties to a “Big Man,” Homegoing begins to turn the tables. “Everything is equal,” Abronoma tells Esi when she agrees to relay the message to her father, a figure of speech that takes on literal truth just pages later. Abronoma’s village retaliates by laying waste to Esi’s, and the fighting leaves Esi chained in the dungeon. Esi may have reveled in Abronoma’s whipping, but Abronoma gets the last laugh. In this sequence of events, the novel shows the startling speed with which the enslaver becomes the enslaved.

Abronoma and Esi’s initial equivalence—both are daughters of powerful leaders—and their see-saw reversals critique slavery as an institution. It is always easier to oversee than to carry the water or to pick the cotton. It is one thing to own slaves, and it is another to become one. Through their swiftly exchanged fortunes, Abronoma and Esi demonstrate how quickly—and drastically—enslavement changes lives.

The range of the characters’ experiences begins with the matriarchs’ own lives—the arrival of the British slave traders leads Effia and Esi to chart starkly different fates. However unwillingly, Effia finds herself allying herself with the forces of conquest and power. After Baaba’s schemes send her to James Collins, Effia ends up in the shelter of the Castle. She raises a child with the colonizer, violated yet spared from joining the untold numbers who waste away in the dungeons below. Effia suffers but also benefits from “[being] one side of his meanness and not another.”

The violence and trauma that visits Esi is of a different kind. Her half-sister struggles in the castle above, but she wastes away in the dungeons below. Esi’s narrative reveals a more visceral, gruesome underbelly of exploitation: she gets raped by the slave traders and then shipped to a southern plantation. Where Effia’s blood mingles with those of her oppressors, Esi’s spills out through whippings by her master. One character’s son joins the brutal institution that enslaves his own people. The other’s daughter bears those consequences. Quey becomes an agent of British imperialism; Ness is little more than a tool for Allan Stockham.

These sisters create divergent lineages that explore the complexity of the Black experience. One half of the family lives through the racial struggles in America while the other experiences the trials of Ghanaian independence. Seven generations later, Marjorie and Marcus hail from backgrounds that are arguably as different as their personal fears of fire and water. Effia and Esi’s experiences form two sides of history’s coin, “like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.”

In New York, the couple’s trajectories are as different as their skin colors. The humiliating episode at the ice cream store—in which the store clerk denies Rob the position for being Willie’s husband—throws their physical differences in painful contrast. It also splits them apart. Rob “[walks] a little ahead” of Willie, half-ashamed of associating with her. Willie’s husband leaves for nights on end, ascending New York’s social ladder while she cleans and cooks at the Morrises'. Rejected by one jazz club after another, she struggles as much as Rob manages to assimilate. The two trace parallel narratives, in which one watches her hopes slowly diminish and the other climbs the ranks of New York society. Just years after their move to the city, the separation is complete: Willie shuffles between homes with Sonny while Rob kisses a blonde wife at the edge of Harlem.

The couple’s fraying relationship exposes the way in which the American Dream splits itself down racial lines. Willie is denied the opportunities that Rob is afforded, for nothing other than her skin color. “If she could, she would put her voice in [Rob’s] body, in his skin,” Willie thinks to herself after her rejection at the Jazzing—a wish that hits upon a saddening truth on the performance floor and even far beyond it.