Homegoing
Characters in Homegoing
15 characters, main characters first.Main characters
Effia Otcher
A Fante woman married off to James Collins, the British governor of Cape Coast Castle, becoming the first of the novel's descendants raised in comfort in Ghana.
Esi Assare
Maame's other daughter, captured in a raid on her Asante village and held in the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle before being sold into slavery in America.
Quey Collins
Effia and James Collins's son, raised between the castle's British and Fante worlds and drawn into his father's trade on the Gold Coast.
James Richard Collins
Quey's son, who walks away from an arranged marriage and a life of privilege to farm alongside the woman he actually loves, earning the nickname Unlucky.
Abena Collins
James's daughter, cast out of her village after her lover breaks his promise of marriage, and left to find her own way forward.
Akua Collins
Abena's daughter, raised partly by missionaries in Ghana and haunted by recurring nightmares of fire tied to her family's unspoken history.
Yaw Agyekum
Akua's son, a burn-scarred schoolteacher respected in his Ghanaian town, who works to make peace with his mother's past.
Marjorie Agyekum
Yaw's daughter, who grows up between Ghana and Huntsville, Alabama, navigating identity as an immigrant teenager before studying at Stanford.
Ness Stockham
Esi's daughter, taught her mother's language before being sold away as a child and enslaved on an Alabama plantation.
Kojo Freeman
Ness's son, raised as a free Black man working the harbor's ships in Baltimore, whose family is threatened by the Fugitive Slave Act.
H Black
Kojo's youngest son, imprisoned on a false charge after the Civil War and forced into convict labor in Alabama's coal mines near Birmingham.
Willie Black
H's daughter, an aspiring singer who moves north to Harlem and confronts colorism within the era's music scene.
Carson Clifton
Willie's son, known as Sonny, a Harlem activist in the civil rights era whose life takes a difficult turn afterward.
Marcus Clifton
Sonny's son, a Stanford graduate student researching the history of convict-lease labor, who meets a distant cousin from Ghana.
Supporting characters
Maame
The Asante mother whose two daughters, born to different fathers and separated in childhood, begin the two family lines the novel follows across three centuries.