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1-Page Summary of Homegoing

Overall Summary

Homegoing is a novel about an African family that was split apart by the slave trade. It follows the descendants of this family as they live their lives, and eventually reunite in Ghana after two centuries. The book covers seven generations of one family and also tells the story of another tribe in Africa, which has been affected by slavery for hundreds of years.

The story is told in the third person by a narrator who shifts between different characters. The author uses flashbacks to reveal details about each character’s life, and she shows that there are few absolutes in life. In addition, the ability to tell one’s own story emerges as an important theme throughout the novel.

The story begins with a girl named Maame who is enslaved. She escapes and burns down the village, which was where she had been held captive. She then marries and has two daughters: Effia and Esi. They each inherit a gold stone necklace from their mother, but Esi loses hers in the dungeon of Cape Castle before being shipped away to America as a slave. Effia’s husband is an English governor at Cape Castle, which is where slaves are taken to be sold in America; that castle also happens to be her father-in-law’s home.

A woman named Effia was a slave in Ghana. Her son, Quey, is forced to do the work of capturing and trading slaves for money. He would have rather lived an honest life with his friend Cudjo. In America, Esi’s daughter Ness is enslaved since birth. She tries to escape slavery with her husband Sam and their baby Kojo, but they are caught by the police and brought back into captivity. Meanwhile, Quey’s son James becomes royalty in Africa due to his father’s position as a slave trader; however he decides that this isn’t right so he leaves everything behind him and starts anew in Baltimore where he falls in love with another woman who has seven children from a previous marriage called Anna Freeman (Kojo Freeman).

James’s daughter Abena is hoping for her childhood friend, Ohene Nyarko to marry her. She becomes pregnant from an affair with him, but she leaves the village to join a Christian school in Kumasi where she has Akua. In America H is arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison leasing system for a crime he didn’t commit. He works off his sentence gaining skills that allow him to establish a family and home as a free man. Akua is troubled after her mother was murdered by missionaries at the Christian school she attended as a child. Her two daughters were killed when their house caught on fire; only son Yaw survives but suffers permanent scarring from burns. H’s daughter Willie moves to Harlem during the Great Migration with husband Robert who leaves her alone after passing himself off as White in Manhattan so he can pursue his career ambitions there instead of being stuck behind racial barriers back home like most Black people of that time period had been forced into doing due to racism and segregation laws such as Jim Crow Laws. Willie raises Sonny on her own since Robert abandoned them both once they moved north.

Yaw grows up to be a teacher in Africa. He is estranged from his mother, Akua, but once he falls in love with his housemaid, Esther, she helps him return to his mother. Sonny becomes addicted to heroin and Willie helps him on the path of sobriety. Sonny becomes a steady father figure to Marcus when they meet at Stanford University while Marjorie struggles with cultural differences due to her family’s history of trauma and separation.

Chapter 1: “Effia”

In the early 1760s in Ghana, Effia Otcher is born on a night when fire rages outside her father’s compound. The fire spreads to an Asante village and destroys seven yams, which devastates Cobbe Otcher. He leaves his daughter with his first wife while he assesses the damage done by the fire. Afterward, he commands Baaba to love their child despite what others may believe about her birth.