Sonny, grows up in and out of a bad school system, and eventually comes to believe that he can’t make something of himself. Willie is left with very few job prospects as a black woman, and she eventually takes to cleaning houses. Willie’s first husband, Robert, is only able to get a job because he is light-skinned, but he eventually leaves her for a white woman. His daughter, Willie, and her son, Sonny, also bear the brunt of racist systems, even after they travel north to live in Harlem. H is imprisoned for nine years for “studyin’ a white woman” and is leased to work in a coal mine while carrying out his sentence, where he faces a constant fear of death or brutal beatings. Their son, known only as H, also endures a version of modified slavery known as the convict-lease system. But before Kojo and his family can leave, his pregnant wife, Anna, is kidnapped.

The Great Migration begins, as people feel so unsafe as to need to move north in order to continue to feel free. Kojo, Ness’s son, escapes slavery, but still lives in constant fear that he and his children will be recaptured and re-enslaved as the Civil War brews in America and the Fugitive Slave Act passes. White plantation owners view their slaves as disposable, a view based solely on skin color.Įven after slavery, racism infiltrates other American institutions, which allows the oppression of African-Americans to continue. When she and Sam are caught trying to escape this brutal treatment, she is whipped until she cannot move and forced to watch as Sam is hanged.

She is beaten and forced to “marry” another slave named Sam, being treated almost like an animal. There, Esi and the other women are treated as subhuman because of their race: she describes how a soldier who rapes her looks at her in disgust afterward as if “her body was his shame.” This disgust is amplified in America: Esi’s daughter, Ness, and the other slaves at the Stockham family’s plantation are treated like objects rather than people. Esi is captured on the heels of a battle between her village and another village that is working with the British, and she is placed in a woman’s prison. The chapters involving Esi and her daughter, Ness, demonstrate how racism is used to justify brutal acts of violence and enslavement. One of the main goals of the novel is to illustrate the brutal lineage of American racism, and how it becomes codified in both political and social structures like job access and the prison system. At the beginning of the novel, racism serves as the backbone of (and one of the many justifications for) slavery in America, but when slavery is abolished, racism continues to fester. Racism plays a major role in Homegoing for both sides of the book’s family tree, but it most strongly affects Esi’s descendants as they are subjected to a series of racist institutions in America.

Homegoing novel