- Effia – forced into a marriage with a slave trader who treats her horribly, criticizing and mocking her culture and customs.
- Esi – enslaved, kept confined to a dungeon and raped by her oppressors.
- Ness – husband is murdered by slave-owner as they attempt to escape with their son Kojo.
- Kojo – life of contentment is ruined when his wife and children are wrenched away and sold back into slavery.
- H – forced to complete backbreaking labor after ‘looking at a white woman suggestively.’
- Quey – struggled with sexual identity and with being the son of an Englishman and an African woman.
- James – faced an ethical dilemma in deciding whether or not to follow in his father’s footsteps in the slave trade.
- Willie – criticized for her relationship with her husband who has a lighter skin tone, her singing voice symbolizes her fight against racial injustice and bigotry.
- Yaw – haunted by his traumatic past at the hands of his mother, he struggles to make peace with her and to prepare his students to be responsible citizens of the newly independent Ghana.
- Sonny – a jazz musician who had problems with the law and drug use, and whose mother (Willie) helps to save him from himself.
- Willie – criticized for her relationship with her husband who has a lighter skin tone, her singing voice symbolizes her fight against racial injustice and bigotry.
- Marjorie – Yaw's daughter, who faced obstacles as an African immigrant in the contemporary South.
- Marcus – A PhD student and Sonny's son, who researched his family’s turbulent and violent past while also overcoming his fear of water/drowning.
- The Power of Storytelling –
The power of storytelling is an important part of history. In Homegoing this theme is primarily exemplified on the Ghanaian side of the family.
“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.” (226-227). -Yaw
Symbol: The black stone necklace makes its way through Effia’s lineage and leads to the characters telling stories and recalling the history of their family. When we reach Marjorie’s chapter, they story of the stone and her family is told: “It [the stone] had belonged to Old Lady and to Abena before her, and to James, and Quey, and Effia the Beauty before that. It had begun with Maame, the woman who had set a great fire…” (267).
- The Meaning of Freedom –
The theme of what true freedom is as an American is something that is not only a focus throughout history, but is also focused a concern in the present. In Homegoing this theme is prominent on the American side of the family’s lineage.
On Kojo’s experience of freedom:
“They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid?” (126).
A more modern story of African American “freedom” is exemplified through H’s Chapter:
“Mm-hmm. See, that’s what I thought. You was young. Slavery ain’t nothing but a dot in your eye, huh? If nobody tell you, I’ma tell you. War may be over but it ain’t ended.” (158). -H’s Cellmate
Yaw:
“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.” ― Homegoing, pp. 226-27
Abby Christopher ’18