Homegoing by Gyasi
Ref: Yaa Gyasi (2016). Homegoing. New York.
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Summary
A fictional account of a family in Western Africa prior to the African Slave Trade and the multi-generational effect on their lives centuries later in the United States in the 2000s.
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Misc Quotes
My husband looked at me like I was water and he was fire, and every night he had to be put out.”
Now white people could be fined for giving a Negro a meal, or a job, or a place to stay, if the law said that Negro was a runaway. And how were they to know who was a runaway and who was not? It had created an impossible situation, and those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.
Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.
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