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While her grandfather James breaks the family’s complicity in slavery, Akua finds herself tasked with the burden of remembrance. Because the Missionary murders her mother Abena just after Akua’s birth, Akua is cut off from her family’s history, with only Effia’s stone to offer her any clue. Although she rejects the Missionary’s view of sin and evil in favor of living a traditional Asante life, Akua’s dreams of Maame cause her great anguish. Akua is unable to feign normalcy in the face of these ancestral dreams she doesn’t understand, and her terror and confusion lead to others calling her “Crazy Woman.” These dreams are symbolic of the family’s intergenerational trauma and the Ghanaian side’s complicity in slavery, creating more ruptures in more families. Without any way to understand or interpret her visions of Maame, Akua accidentally ends up following in Maame’s footsteps, setting a fire that separates her from both her daughters, this time through their deaths. Only by bringing her stone to the fetish man’s son and understanding her family’s dark legacy is she able to begin to heal.

Akua begins the work of repairing intergenerational trauma. When she shares the truth of Yaw’s scar with him, he’s able to let go of some of his bitterness and build a life with Esther. Akua then moves near the sea, the place where the American and Ghanaian sides of the family were torn asunder, symbolic of reconciliation. When we see her in Marjorie’s chapter, Akua has used Marjorie’s umbilical cord to symbolically tie her to the Gold Coast. Her ritual of showing Marjorie how to come home acknowledges the damage of the forced uprooting and rifts in their family history and passes on a tool to counteract that loss. Without realizing it, Marjorie will pass this ritual, along with Effia’s stone, onto Marcus, welcoming him back to his ancestral home.

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