Homegoing: Full Book Summary

Previous Next

On the night that a fire rages between the woods of Fanteland and Asanteland, Effia is born. Throughout her childhood, her mother, Baaba, is extremely cruel. As Effia grows, Baaba tells her to keep the fact that she has begun menstruating a secret so that she cannot marry their village’s new chief. Instead, Effia is sent to marry the British governor of Cape Coast Castle, James Collins. While pregnant, Effia returns to her village as her father is dying. There, she learns from her brother Fiifi that Baaba was not her real mother. Her mother was an enslaved girl named Maame who ran away into the fire the night Effia was born. Though Effia doesn’t know this, Maame married a Big Man in an Asante village and gave birth to another girl, Esi. Esi has a privileged childhood but is captured at fifteen and taken to the dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle. There, she is raped and then put on a slave ship to America.

Effia’s son Quey has a lonely childhood at the castle, though he makes friends with a boy named Cudjo. However, after Quey’s father witnesses a tender moment between the two boys, he sends Quey to live in London. Quey later goes to his mother’s village to help his uncle, Fiifi, with his work in the slave trade. Though this is not the life Quey wants, he marries the daughter of an Asante king, Nana Yaa, whom Fiifi kidnapped. Meanwhile, Esi’s daughter Ness is enslaved on a plantation in Alabama. At a previous plantation, she was forced to marry another slave, Sam, and they had a child named Kojo. One day, Ness, Sam, and Kojo attempt to escape with the help of a woman named Aku, but Ness and Sam are caught. Back at the plantation, Ness is whipped and Sam is lynched.

When Quey and Nana Yaa’s son, James, travels with them to Nana Yaa’s father’s funeral, he becomes enamored with a girl named Akosua, who chastises his family’s involvement in the slave trade. Though James is promised to marry another woman, he’s determined to marry Akosua. Eventually, James fakes his own death and finds Akosua. On Esi’s side, Aku and Kojo escape to Maryland, where Kojo, or “Jo,” works as a deckhand. Jo and his wife Anna worry about their family’s safety after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. One day, Anna doesn’t return home from work. After a few weeks, Jo learns that Anna was taken by a white man. Once his children are grown, a broken Jo moves to New York.

Quey and Akosua’s daughter, Abena, is unmarried at the age of twenty-five, though she is waiting for her childhood friend Ohene Nyarko to take her as his second wife. Abena and Ohene begin sleeping together, but he cannot promise to marry her until he has a good harvest. For years, the harvest is bad, and the village blames Abena. Eventually, Ohene is able to grow cocoa but promised to marry the daughter of the man who sold the plants to him. Now pregnant, Abena leaves the village for a missionary church.

In America, Jo and Anna’s son H is born on a plantation just after Anna has killed herself. H works as a sharecropper after the Civil War. After being arrested for looking at a white woman, H works in the mines as a convict. When his sentence is up, H moves to Pratt City, where he continues to work in mines but joins a union to fight for better pay and working conditions. Though his wife, Ethe, left him years earlier, he writes to her, and she returns to him.

Abena’s daughter, Akua, grows up in the missionary where her mother Abena lived after leaving the village. Akua leaves the church after the missionary tells her he drowned Abena while attempting to baptize her. Akua marries and has two daughters and a son, though she is plagued by dreams of a woman made of fire. One night, in her sleep, Akua burns her family’s hut. Only Akua, her husband, and her son, Yaw, survive. Meanwhile, H and Ethe’s daughter, Willie, moves to Harlem with her husband, Robert, and their son, Carson. Robert is light-skinned and passes as white in Harlem, which allows him to easily find work. One night, while cleaning a jazz club, Willie runs into Robert in the bathroom, and Robert’s white colleagues force him to assault her. Robert then leaves Willie. A few years later, Willie sees Robert with a white wife and son.

Yaw grows up to be a history teacher, though he has trouble finding a wife due to the scars on his face from the fire his mother set. He eventually falls in love with his house girl, Esther. She encourages Yaw to make peace with Akua, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a baby. Yaw and Esther visit Akua, who explains that she set the fire because she was haunted by the evil in their lineage. Yaw forgives his mother.

Willie’s son Carson, who now goes by the name Sonny, works for the NAACP and is involved in the Civil Rights Movement, though he feels frustrated with the lack of progress. Sonny becomes addicted to heroin after a woman, Amani, introduces him to the drug. One day, Willie explains to Sonny what happened to his father. With this knowledge, Sonny decides to finally get clean.

Yaw and Esther move to Alabama with their daughter, Marjorie. Marjorie feels a deep connection to her grandmother and to Ghana and does not fit in with either the Black or white kids in Alabama. Marjorie develops feelings for her friend Graham, a white boy, though he feels they cannot be together due to their different races. Marjorie later meets Marcus, Sonny and Amani’s son, while they are both graduate students at Stanford. Marcus and Marjorie travel together to Ghana, where Marcus is overwhelmed with emotions on visiting the Cape Coast Castle. They swim together in the water, and Marjorie welcomes Marcus home.

Previous section Marcus Next section Full Book Analysis