Slavery is not something I think about a lot. I know it is terrible, I know it is immoral and so, so wrong. I know that the African people brought to the US were treated as animals (and worse than animals) and the inhumanity of it makes my heart hurt. But I'm not from a country that has any ties to it, it is not a part of my history and I thus have the privilege to simply not think of it. And then this book made me think about it, made me tear up. The first chapters are the most harrowing ones and I had to read it over several days instead of my usual one-day binge. Another amazing book on the subject that shook me to my core is Octavia E. Butler's "Kindred" which I read back in college.

    This is a story at once universal and deeply personal. It's a story of the tragedy and atrocity of slavery that forces you to see the individual pain of these persons, not just the generalized black people that have been brought to American soil to work the plantations of rich whites. And it also reveals the shackles that the people that remained in Africa wore, though they were technically free - the chains of cultural and economic oppression that sought to destroy everything that made them unique. Anything different than what the English gentlemen were used to was deemed savage and unworthy and so they sent teachers and missionaries to instill their language and their religion among the tribes.

    The novel follows two branches of a bloodline. A family tree is presented on the first page so you can easily reference it to make sure of the generation or relation between the characters. It all starts with Maame who is a slave in Africa and has two daughters - one with a Fante Big Man (Effia) and another with an Asante Big Man (Esi). When Effia was born, Maame started a fire and ran away and so the baby was left with Cobbe's wife, Baaba, to raise. Baaba hated Effia, beat her for every little thing while she was growing up, and arranged for her to marry a white man when she came of age - James Collins, a British officer at the Cape Coast Castle, just so she wouldn't have to look at her again. On the other hand, Esi grew up with her birth mother who loved and pampered her, feeling secure and at home. She is betrayed by a house girl and ends up a slave in the Cape Coast Castle. It is in this terrible, horrible place that the two sisters are in the closest proximity to each other they will ever be - yet in such different circumstances and completely unaware of each other.

    As time goes on, Effia has a son, Quey, who is educated in England, and Esi a daughter, Ness, who is a product of rape by an officer and is raised on a plantation. Quey goes back to the Fante village where his uncle makes him a Big Man and arranges a marriage for him, while Ness is married to Sam and suffers terrible pain at the hands of her master. After that, Quey's son James decides to follow his heart, wash his hands off slave trade and marry for love, while Kojo, Ness's son, lives in Baltimore with his big family and works on ships. The next generations follows Abena - James the Unlucky's daughter - as she is shunned from the village and gives birth to a daughter; as well as H - Kojo's son who grew up as a slave on a plantation and is trying to make a better life for himself in the wake of abolition of slavery. Abena's daughter Akua seems to be cursed as she keeps dreaming of a firewoman who is looking for her two children, she brings great tragedy to her family and is shunned as H's daughter Willie lives in Harlem in pursuit of being a singer and is married to a white-passing man. Yaw teaches history and lives a lonely existence due to a facial scar his mother inflicted upon him while on the other side of the Atlantic, Sonny falls prey to the call of drugs and becomes an absent father. And the last strand of the bloodline are Marcus, Sonny's son, who is at Stamford getting his Ph.D in Sociology, trying to trace back his lineage as all knowledge of their ancestry has been lost and Marjorie, Yaw's daughter who grew up in Alabama but loves Ghana fiercely and visits her grandmother every summer, listening to her stories.

    Each of the characters get a chapter to tell their stories and then we also find out some things about what happened after their chapter ended from the stories of their children. I found it most fascinating how different the lives of the contemporaries were just based on where they were living, how much different America and Africa are. That's not to say that either of the strands had an easy life. All of the characters suffered - the Americans went through slavery, Jim Crow laws, incarceration, racism, segregation, the drug epidemic; as the Africans battled with the guilt over being involved with slavery, old superstitions, shunnings, supernatural dreams...

    It was a tough book to get through, I won't lie. I took my time but there were still parts of it that made me tear up, made my blood boil, made me want to scream, made me wonder just how cruel and heartless one can be. The idea of someone thinking themselves superior simply based on the color of their skin and the customs of their country is so baffling to me. It's unfathomable that a human being would sell another human like an animal, like a thing and think it's ok. I've struggled with these thoughts since I learned of racism and how it was that the black people originally came to America. Reading something like this just makes me sadder and angrier, makes me think of the lives and potentials lost and, honestly, makes me hate white people, even though I'm one of them. And to think it's still going on, so many years later in a society we call "modern", "civilized" and "democratic". I have too many thoughts on this subject, and not enough adequate words to express them, so I'll stop here.

    Just promise me that you'll read this book.