68 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
Gyasi’s novel centers on two blazingly interesting, frustratingly opaque women.
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Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” explores the science of the soul.
BY JAMES WOOD
PHOTOGRAPH BY ASHLEY PENA
out a thought for his navigation. The
two lives, already linked by name, town,
and racial system ( John Jones’s sister
Jennie works as a maid in the Judge’s
house), intersect one fateful day, when
John Jones discovers John Henderson
sexually assaulting Jennie in a wood.
Jones kills Henderson, and so leaves
town again, for the North. Du Bois
forces together these two lives in order
to dramatize their bifurcation: “Few
thought of two Johns—for the black
folk thought of one John and he was
black; and the white folk thought of
another John, and he was white. And
neither world thought the other world’s
thought, save with a vague unrest.”
In her first novel, “Homegoing”
(2016), the Ghanaian-American nov-
elist Yaa Gyasi brilliantly renewed
and expanded the fiction of double
lives. While Du Bois treats just two
people, Gyasi follows two branches of
a family tree, across seven generations.
Du Bois confines himself to America,
while Gyasi’s novel makes a double-
chambered form for the hybridity of
African-American history, moving be-
tween Ghana and the United States,
from the late eighteenth century to
the present. Though fiercely eloquent,
Du Bois’s story doesn’t pretend to be
more than a kind of sermon, an al-
legory of perpetually sundered white
and Black fortune. Gyasi’s novelis-
tic enrichment lies in the way she
grounds her tale not in stark differ-
ence but in uneasy similitude. The
two bloodlines she traces descend
from the same Ashanti mother: one
daughter, Effia, marries a British sol-
dier stationed in Ghana, and lives
with him in the Cape Coast Castle;
the other, Esi, is sold into slavery and
shipped to America. The novel’s alter-
nating chapters illuminate the various
fates of the descendants of Effia and
Esi. Different fortunes, even different
races, are seen to exist not on differ-
ent tracks but within one large fam-
ily; and the knowledge that this is
indeed one large family, brutally and
unnaturally cleaved, exerts a pressure
of completion on the novel’s plot, a
happy ending that we feel through-
out to be inevitable. Sure enough, in
the last chapter of “Homegoing,” set
in the present day, Marcus and Mar-
jorie—one a descendant of Esi’s, one
of Effia’s—meet at a party at Stan-
ford. Together they return to Ghana,
and visit the Cape Coast Castle: the
bloodline is finally going home, even
if it is unlikely to stay there.
There is plenty to admire in “Home-
going,” published when Gyasi was
twenty-six, not least the conviction of
its storytelling, which storms sleep-
lessly through the generations. Its am-
bition, if not quite its achievement,
seems commensurate with the scale of
its subject. It is also, alas, something of
a concoction. The rapid chapters, each
pinned to a different character and
time, shallowly inhabit their eras. Plan-
O
ne of the most moving chapters
in W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection
of essays, “The Souls of Black Folk,”
is a fiction, a harrowing hypothesis
titled “Of the Coming of John.” It
tells the story of two young men bound
by the same first name. John Jones,
an African-American full of prom-
ise, leaves the small town of Alta-
maha, Georgia, to get an education.
Years later, he comes home to find
himself alienated by his education and
limited in opportunity. From the same
town, “the other John,” John Hender-
son, the white, entitled son of Judge
Henderson, sails off to Princeton with-
