“Homegoing”-the title is taken from an old African-American belief that death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa-is rooted, like the Bible, in original sin. If the girl could not shake his hand, then, surely, she could never touch her own.”
The Fante had protection from trading them. “The Asante had power from capturing slaves. “James had spent his whole life listening to his parents argue about who was better, Asante or Fante, but the matter could never come down to slaves,” Gyasi writes. Both of them are West Africans, members of the Akan people, although she is Asante, from the interior of what we now call Ghana, and he is Fante, from the coast. “Respectfully, I will not shake the hand of a slaver,” she says, withholding the customary gesture of condolence. In Yaa Gyasi’s début novel, “Homegoing” (Knopf), a boy greeting the line of mourners at his grandfather’s funeral encounters a beautiful girl.
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