Homegoing: A novel by Yaa Gyasi

Author:Yaa Gyasi [Gyasi, Yaa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101947135
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

H

IT TOOK THREE POLICEMEN to knock H down, four to put him in chains.

“I ain’t done nothing!” he shouted once they got him to the jail cell, but he was speaking only to the air they had left behind. He’d never seen people walk away so quickly, and he knew he had scared them.

H rattled the bars, certain that he could bend or break them if only he tried.

“Stop that ’fore they kill you,” his cellmate said.

H recognized the man from around town. Maybe he’d even sharecropped with him once on one of the county farms.

“Can’t nobody kill me,” H said. He was still pressing on the bars, and he could hear the metal start to give between his fingers. Then he could feel his cellmate’s hands on his shoulder. H turned around so quick, the other man didn’t have time to move or think before H had him lifted by the throat. H was over six feet tall, and he had the man so high up, his head brushed the top of the ceiling. If H lifted him any higher, he would have broken through. “Don’t you touch me again,” H said.

“You think dem white folks won’t kill you?” the man said, his words coming out small and slow.

“What I done?” H said. He lowered the man to the ground, and he fell to his knees, gasping up long sips of breath.

“Say you was studyin’ a white woman.”

“Who say?”

“The police. Heard ’em talkin’ ’bout what to say ’fore they went out to get you.”

H sat down next to the man. “Who they say I was talkin’ to?”

“Cora Hobbs.”

“I wasn’t studyin’ no Hobbs girl,” H said, his rage lit anew. If there were rumors about him and a white woman, he would have hoped it would be someone prettier than his old sharecropping boss’s daughter.

“Boy, look atcha,” his cellmate said, his gaze so spiteful now that H grew suddenly, inexplicably afraid of the smaller, older man. “Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta do is say you was. That’s all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round free as can be. Don’t nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin’ proud as a peacock. Like you ain’t got a lick of fear in you.” He rested his head against the cell wall and closed his eyes for a second. “How old you was when the war ended?”

H tried to count back, but he’d never been very good at numbers, and the Civil War was so long ago that the numbers climbed higher than H could reach. “Not sure. ’Bout thirteen, I reckon,” he said.

“Mm-hmm. See, that’s what I thought. You was young. Slavery ain’t nothin’ but a dot in your eye, huh? If nobody tell you, I’ma tell you. War may be over but it ain’t ended.”

The man closed his eyes again. He let his head roll against the wall, this way, then that.

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