Old Blog

HOMEGOINGBy Yaa Gyasi305 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.From the floor of the dungeon, I could see a fragment of sky through an air hole near the ceiling, a tree length beyond reach and too small for a human body to squeeze through. Nearly two centuries after humans had been chained in this fortress on the coast of ­Ghana, I stood with a group of African-American ­scholars too numb to speak. The breath and sweat of the doomed seemed brined into the walls. Might our ancestors have lain pressed again …