Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

I had been meaning to read Homegoing for so long. I should have just bought a copy ages ago. Then a couple weeks ago I was in DC and had finished the book I brought with me on the plane. (Clearly, this was poor planning on my part, as the flight to DC is only ~45 minutes long. In my defense, this was a short work trip and I didn't expect to have much -- if any -- reading time.) The day I arrived in DC, I had a few hours before my meeting and I had planned ahead and finally booked a timed entry to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I've been a member of since before it opened, but had never yet managed to visit. Unfortunately, I was rushed and tired and anxious about my events, so I wasn't able to commit the mental energy I should have to it. (I will make it back one day.) Anyway, on my way out I stopped at the gift shop, which has a small selection of fiction and I saw Homegoing and so finally I got around to it. I started it on the plane home. The next day, I turned around and flew to San Francisco and I finished it there a couple days later. It's as good as everyone says.

A couple weeks before my trip to DC, I was in Detroit for another meeting but I found time one morning to visit the Wright Museum of African American History. Unlike my visit to the NMAAHC, I was well-rested and I think I was the first visitor of the day (it was a weekday and I went right when they opened), so I had entire rooms to myself. I saw two exhibits on my visit the Wright: one about slavery at Monticello and the permanent exhibit called "And Still We Rise," that charts African and African American history from the earliest time until roughly the present. I found myself thinking back to elements both these exhibits while reading Homegoing.

First, the And Still We Rise exhibit. In 1993, I visited Senegal. While there, we went to the House of Slaves, a prison and port on an island off the coast of Dakar from which slave ships left Africa. It's a truly haunting place; one I still remember clearly these 26 years later. In the exhibit at the Wright, they've recreated the holding cells of an African slave port and the "Door of No Return," which, in the museum, leads you onto the upper deck of a slave ship. You can then descend to the lower level where they've tried to capture the conditions below deck. It's quite affecting. In any case, when, a few weeks later, I started Homegoing and the book's events turned up at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this all felt very fresh in my memory -- both my recent visit to the Wright, but also my long ago visit to Senegal.

The exhibit on slavery at Monticello, Paradox of Liberty, does a pretty incredible job of centering the experience of the enslaved people in the history of Monticello. It focuses pretty heavily on the Hemings family, mainly because theirs is the most well-documented, but it actually features the family trees and histories of four enslaved families from Monticello. I took a picture of the Hemings family tree. What struck me was that family trees from the era of slavery are largely matrilineal. Between a culture of rape, the routine break-up of families, and an intentional or benign lack of record-keeping, often only mothers are known. This stands out particularly in the context of the ruling class's patriarchal structure. Homegoing also starts with a family tree that centers the mother. The book follows two branches of a family; one that remains in Africa and one that is enslaved and brought to the U.S. While there is hardship on both sides of the ocean, the family that remained in Ghana can trace their history back through the generations to the mother at the top of the family tree. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, the branch of the family that is enslaved is in a continuous state of disconnection and loss. Through the subsequent generations in the book, unknown or absent parents are a recurring theme. It was sometimes heartbreaking as a reader to know the history of each character, when often they didn't know it themselves.


This disconnect is one of the legacies of slavery, and it's one reason the work of the NMAAHC, the Wright, and similar institutions is so important. The family trees in the exhibit on slavery at Monticello were constructed through oral histories. The artifacts in the exhibit are mostly the result of archaeological excavation, because while the Jefferson family's heirlooms have been meticulously preserved over the generations, the possessions of the enslaved people at Monticello were not thought to be historically significant until recently. One of the wonderful things about the NMAAHC is the several recording booths that are scattered throughout the museum where people can record their own family's history. These institutions are trying to recreate the connections that were forcibly severed. The most powerful thing I saw at the Wright was this statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of a wall that lists all ~600 people he owned. For most, only a first name is known. For a handful, no name is known, but they are still listed. The museum can't tell all their stories, but to say their names is a start.

Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress, and The White, by Deborah Larsen

I've been traveling a bunch and reading a bunch, so I'm three books behind now, but I want to save the book I just finished, Homegoing, for a separate post.

For the past few years, I've read at least a couple sci-fi books each year, but I still feel I'm a newcomer to the genre. I read some sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent books as a kid (Douglas Adams and Madeleine L'Engle, mainly), but for most of my adulthood I didn't think it was for me, so I didn't read any. I'm not sure when exactly that changed. The first sci-fi book I read as an adult might have been Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I had to read for a class I took at Harvard in 2002. I had seen Bladerunner dozens of times, and yet I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Around the same time, I also read his A Scanner Darkly. But I always thought Philip K. Dick was a special case and not like other sci-fi. Aside from Dick, the first sci-fi book I read was The Last Castle by Jack Vance, and my decision to read that can be attributed entirely to this article, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. I'll admit that I thought of reading the Vance as sort of an experiment, a wading into genre, which I felt I read at a remove. I still have this feeling reading some sci-fi. A few months after reading the Vance, I read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and I subsequently went on to read nearly all his other books, starting with the Baroque Cycle. Which is to say, the first of Stephenson's books I read were not so much sci-fi either, but I do think reading Stephenson was probably a significant factor in me changing my mind about whether sci-fi was for me. So, in the intervening decade, I've read a dozen or maybe a bit more sci-fi books, and it's part of my regular rotation, but still sort of new to me and I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I like, so when I come across recommendations, I note them and that is how I ended up reading Probability Moon. I don't actually have anything profound to say about it, but I enjoyed it.

I finished reading Probability Moon on my commute to work one morning last week, and so on my lunch break that day, I did what I do in that situation: I visited the thrift store by my office that sells paperbacks for $1 to find something to start on my way home. (This despite the fact that I also keep about 8 books at the office for precisely this scenario. I said to myself, if I don't find something to read a the thrift store, then I'll read one of my office books.) I picked up The White by Deborah Larsen, which I'd never heard of, as well as All That Is, by James Salter (and two Lidia Bastianich cookbooks!) and almost started the Salter, but then wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, so started The White instead. I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, but I got through more than 40 pages on the subway home and finished the whole book 2 days later (it's very spare). The White is based on the true historical figure Mary Jemison, the daughter of Irish immigrants to the colonies, who was captured by the Shawnee in 1758 and ended up making a life among the Seneca. Toward the end of her life, Mary Jemison narrated her life story to a doctor who recorded it for posterity, but she reportedly said she hadn't told him the half of it, so this book imagines the other half. The book was violent and quite troubling in parts, but of course the times that Mary Jemison lived in were violent and troubling. One of the things that I found troubling about this book, though, is that it focused (very effectively) on the personal struggles of Mary and her families, but the larger historical context feels vague in the book. This may, in fact, be true to Mary's experience, but to tell in the 21st century, a story about a white woman living among Native Americans that spans the period of American independence, knowing what we know is to come seems like leaving a lot out.

Fludd, by Hilary Mantel

My plan to read only women during Women's History Month really brought home to me how many more books I have by men than women. It might be 2:1, and the ratio of men to women authors is probably even worse, because there are a handful of women writers whose books make up large chunks of my collection. I own every or nearly every book written A.S. Byatt, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Kate Atkinson. I suspect Hilary Mantel belongs on this list of women. At present, I have -- and have read -- 3 of her books. I adored Wolf Hall. I went right out and bought Bring Up the Bodies upon finishing it, and then got so mad that the third volume was not yet out. (And this was 2015! Where is The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel?!) I never really looked beyond the Cromwell books but a few months back when I found a copy of Fludd at a thrift store, so I bought it for $1 and shelved it next to Bring Up the Bodies and forgot all about it until I was scanning my shelves for books by women. It's a slim book and doesn't get into the depth of its characters thoughts quite the way Wolf Hall does, but there is a familiar tenderness toward them. The book starts out rather bleakly, but the story was wholly unexpected and delightful.