By Mary Ann Zehr, contributor
A monthly column in 2025 by a local teacher and reader about connecting with books and taking in Harrisonburg’s literary scene.
~ Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016 ~
Today, with the support of a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Art, the Massanutten Regional Library is launching Big Read 2025. It’s a giant book club whose participants will read the same book and connect with other readers as they attend book discussions and activities scheduled through mid-April.
The NEA’s Big Read goals are “to inspire meaningful conversations, celebrate local creativity, elevate a wide variety of voices and perspectives, and build stronger connections in each community.”
When I learned that funding for this community experience came from the federal government, a voice inside me urged, “Seize the day! What’s here today may be gone tomorrow.” Four times the Massanutten Regional Library has hosted a Big Read; the last one was in 2010, according to Library Director Zach Elder.
Drum roll: Homegoing, the 2016 debut novel by Yaa Gyasi, is the selection for Big Read 2025 for the Harrisonburg area. The novel is about the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on two half-sisters born in Ghana and six generations of their descendants in Ghana and the United States. The author of the novel was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama.
Local literary stars–including Sofia Samatar and Gbenga Adesina–will read excerpts from Homegoing at today’s kickoff event from noon to 2 pm at the Explore More Discovery Museum (3rd floor), 150 S. Main Street, in Harrisonburg. Nick Branson will play live music. People who drop by in person can pick up a free copy of Homegoing.
The library director said in an email that Homegoing is for adults; children’s books have been selected and will be given out for free as well. He emphasized that the kickoff is planned for people of all ages. After the kickoff, Big Read books will be available for free at the Central Library and library branches.
Homegoing is a series of fourteen narratives. Each story is told from the perspective of one of the fourteen main characters. The author also weaves enough threads of family stories from the past through the narratives for the novel to tell a collective epic story. Readers are the keepers of that epic story that spans two centuries. Most of the characters experience deep trauma. They also show agency in forming loving relationships and making life-giving choices.
Along with the British living in Cape Coast Castle in the early 1800s, the Fante and Asante people of Ghana in the novel steal and sell human beings. Many people are complicit in a business that lays a foundation for evil acts against humans to persist to the present day. After the slave trade ends in Ghana, the British stay and wield power in the country. After slavery becomes unlawful in the U.S., white people recreate it in other forms, such as convict labor. “Everyone was responsible. We all were . . . we all are,” says the character of James Richard Collins, while speaking of the slave trade to the men of his adopted Asante village in Ghana. Collins–a descendant of the British, Fante, and Asante–makes a life-giving decision to reject the wealth and power that his family attained from the slave trade so that he can marry and form a family with the woman he loves. Collins and his wife, Akosua Mensah, share an ideal to be their own nation.
The novel contains rape, shackling, and beatings of humans, which means it is a hard read emotionally. At the same time, the characters’ acts of love and agency make it a page turner. For example, the character Ness, enslaved as a field worker in the South of the United States, takes under her wing a child Pinky, who has not spoken any words since her mother died. Ness becomes Pinky’s nurturer, Gyasi writes, because “Ness understood loss, and because she understood motherlessness and wanting and even silence.”
In an act of forgiveness, the character Ethe responds to her husband, H, when he sends a letter to her after years of separation. They are a couple living together as free people, and H then betrays Ethe by making a mistake. Then H is captured and forced to work in coal mines as part of a convict crew. This couple fights for their love to survive.
Gyasi portrays the dignity of her characters in the ways they walk and otherwise move, how they go looking for people and find them and sometimes save them, how they tell the right story at the right time to create a bond with other people, or in the way they choose to be silent. “Our family began here in Cape Coast,” Akua tells her granddaughter, Marjorie, who is growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, in the twenty-first century but visits her in Ghana. Akua says, “In my dreams I kept seeing this castle, but I did not know why. One day, I came to these waters [the ocean] and I could feel the spirits of our ancestors calling me. Some were free, and they spoke to me from the sand, but some others were trapped deep, deep, deep in the water so that I had to wade out to hear their voices.” Repeatedly in the novel, characters pursue or support people they love who are captive–physically or psychologically–to amplify their voices.
Book-Related Adventures
When I started this book column in January I hoped that it would motivate me and inspire others to read adventurously. The planners of Big Read 2025 have designed pathways for book-related or creative adventures. Readers of Homegoing can learn more about the historical context of the novel by attending a talk about Ghana by David Owusu-Ansah, a James Madison University history professor (6-7 p.m. this Tuesday, March 4, at the Central Library). They can explore the foundations of genealogy research–after all, Homegoing is about family–in a session led by Kristin Noell Evans, the library system’s head of adult services (6-7 p.m. March 26 at the Central Library). In other Big Read activities, youth are invited to create squares that will comprise a community story quilt. The winner of an artistic competition will paint a mural on the Bruce Street wall of the Central Library illustrating the Massanutten Regional Library’s vision.
I’m quite sure that all of us have a standing invitation to participate in that library vision–regardless of the status of federal funding for a future Big Read in Harrisonburg.
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