Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

THE NIGHT EFFIA OTCHER was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her fathers compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.

Effias father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss as a blow to his own family. He knew then that the memory of the fire that burned, then fled, would haunt him, his children, and his childrens children for as long as the line continued. When he came back into Baabas hut to find Effia, the child of the nights fire, shrieking into the air, he looked at his wife and said, We will never again speak of what happened today.

The villagers began to say that the baby was born of the fire, that this was the reason Baaba had no milk. Effia was nursed by Cobbes second wife, who had just given birth to a son three months before. Effia would not latch on, and when she did, her sharp gums would tear at the flesh around the womans nipples until she became afraid to feed the baby. Because of this, Effia grew thinner, skin on small birdlike bones, with a large black hole of a mouth that expelled a hungry cry which could be heard throughout the village, even on the days Baaba did her best to smother it, covering the babys lips with the rough palm of her left hand.

Love her, Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past ones lips. At night, Baaba dreamed of leaving the baby in the dark forest so that the god Nyame could do with her as he pleased.

Effia grew older. The summer after her third birthday, Baaba had her first son. The boys name was Fiifi, and he was so fat that sometimes, when Baaba wasnt looking, Effia would roll him along the ground like a ball. The first day that Baaba let Effia hold him, she accidentally dropped him. The baby bounced on his buttocks, landed on his stomach, and looked up at everyone in the room, confused as to whether or not he should cry. He decided against it, but Baaba, who had been stirring banku, lifted her stirring stick and beat Effia across her bare back. Each time the stick lifted off the girls body, it would leave behind hot, sticky pieces of banku that burned into her flesh. By the time Baaba had finished, Effia was covered with sores, screaming and crying. From the floor, rolling this way and that on his belly, Fiifi looked at Effia with his saucer eyes but made no noise.

Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Effias wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Effia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched its branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.

And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the other toes. For each scar on Effias body, there was a companion scar on Baabas, but that didnt stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.

Matters were only made worse by Effias blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but anothers fishing nets were never empty. Cobbes family feasted off Effias burgeoning womanhood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.

In 1775, Adwoa Aidoo became the first girl of the village to be proposed to by one of the British soldiers. She was light-skinned and sharp-tongued. In the mornings, after she had bathed, she rubbed shea butter all over her body, underneath her breasts and between her legs. Effia didnt know her well, but she had seen her naked one day when Baaba sent her to carry palm oil to the girls hut. Her skin was slick and shiny, her hair regal.

The first time the white man came, Adwoas mother asked Effias parents to show him around the village while Adwoa prepared herself for him.

Can I come? Effia asked, running after her parents as they walked. She heard Baabas no in one ear and Cobbes yes in the other. Her fathers ear won, and soon Effia was standing before the first white man she had ever seen.

He is happy to meet you, the translator said as the white man held his hand out to Effia. She didnt accept it. Instead, she hid behind her fathers leg and watched him.

He wore a coat that had shiny gold buttons down the middle; it strained against his paunch. His face was red, as though his neck were a stump on fire. He was fat all over and sweating huge droplets from his forehead and above his upper lip. Effia started to think of him as a rain cloud: sallow and wet and shapeless.

Please, he would like to see the village, the translator said, and they all began to walk.

They stopped first by Effias own compound. This is where we live, Effia told the white man, and he smiled at her dumbly, his green eyes hidden in fog.

He didnt understand. Even after his translator spoke to him, he didnt understand.

Cobbe held Effias hand as he and Baaba led the white man through the compound. Here, in this village, Cobbe said, each wife has her own hut. This is the hut she shares with her children. When it is her husbands night to be with her, he goes to her in her hut.

The white mans eyes grew clearer as the translation was given, and suddenly Effia realized that he was seeing through new eyes. The mud of her huts walls, the straw of the roof, he could finally see them.

They continued on through the village, showing the white man the town square, the small fishing boats formed from hollowed-out tree trunks that the men carried with them when they walked the few miles down to the coast. Effia forced herself to see things through new eyes, too. She smelled the sea-salt wind as it touched the hairs in her nose, felt the bark of a palm tree as sharp as a scratch, saw the deep, deep red of the clay that was all around them.

Baaba, Effia asked once the men had walked farther ahead of them, why will Adwoa marry this man?

Because her mother says so.

A few weeks later, the white man came back to pay respects to Adwoas mother, and Effia and all of the other villagers gathered around to see what he would offer. There was the bride price of fifteen pounds. There were goods hed brought with him from the Castle, carried on the backs of Asantes. Cobbe made Effia stand behind him as they watched the servants come in with fabric, millet, gold, and iron.