Baaba hides Effia's menstruation to arrange her marriage to a British officer, giving her a black stone necklace as she departs.

Esi is captured during a raid on her Asante village and marched toward the coast to be sold into slavery.

James Collins discovers Quey and Cudjo in an intimate moment and sends Quey to England for an education.

Ness, Sam, and their infant son Kojo attempt to escape slavery together, but only Kojo reaches freedom.

James Richard Collins meets Akosua Mensah at his grandfather's funeral and resolves to abandon his family to marry her.

Anna Freeman is kidnapped from a Baltimore street and sold into slavery, taking her own life as H is born by cesarian.

James Richard Collins gives his daughter Abena the inherited necklace and reveals the truth of her royal family origins.

H is arrested on a fabricated charge and sentenced to work in the coal mines under the convict leasing system.

Akua kills her two daughters in a fire while sleepwalking, and her son Yaw survives but is scarred for life.

Willie spots Robert across a Manhattan intersection with his blonde wife and child and realizes she has forgiven him.

Yaw and Esther travel to Edweso, where Yaw sees his mother Akua for the first time in decades.

Willie tells Sonny the truth about his father's identity and the sacrifices she made raising him alone in Harlem.

Marjorie reads her poem about the slave trade and its divided family legacies at the school's Black cultural event.

Marcus and Marjorie travel together to Pratt City, Alabama, to research the convict leasing history of Marcus's ancestor H.

Marcus runs through Cape Coast Castle and into the ocean, overcoming his fear of water as Marjorie gives him the necklace.

Homegoing follows two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, whose lives are torn apart by the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 18th-century Ghana. Effia is married to a British officer at Cape Coast Castle while Esi is enslaved and shipped to America from that same building. Across seven generations, Effia's descendants navigate the moral costs of participating in the slave trade, while Esi's descendants endure slavery, unjust imprisonment, and systemic racism in America. Each generation bears the scars of the one before it, from Ness losing her husband to a lynching, to Akua killing her own daughters in a fire, to Sonny's addiction in Harlem. The story closes with Marjorie and Marcus, distant cousins from each family line, reuniting at Cape Coast Castle and healing the wound their shared ancestor Maame's separation created centuries earlier.

The headline events of two family lines across seven generations.

Effia learns from her brother Fiifi, while visiting their dying father, that her true mother was a slave named Maame.

Esi swallows her mother's black stone in the castle courtyard to stop slave traders from taking it from her.

Quey and Cudjo share an almost-kiss after wrestling together, a moment ended when James Collins intervenes and breaks them apart.

Ness assumes a surrogate-mother role for the mute child Pinky after TimTam stages a fake emergency to draw Ness out.

James visits the village apothecary Mampanyin, who tells him his impotence has no physical cause and that he already knows what to do.

The Fugitive Slave Act passes, interrupting Agnes and Timmy's wedding and forcing Black families in Baltimore to fear for their freedom.

Abena travels to Kumasi with Ohene Nyarko and sees the Golden Stool displayed inside the Asantehene's palace.

Ohene Nyarko returns from selling the first cocoa harvest a celebrated success but withdraws from Abena instead of finally proposing marriage.

H shovels double his coal quota in one day to cover for a collapsed White prisoner named Thomas, earning his nickname.

The missionary breaks down and confesses to Akua that he accidentally drowned her mother Abena during a forced baptism.

Willie secretly takes a cleaning job at a jazz club without telling Robert, who would not approve of that kind of life.

Yaw opens the school year by telling students that history is storytelling, then challenges them to ask whose voices are missing.

Sonny encounters Amani Zulema performing at the jazz club and follows her into a relationship that leads to his heroin addiction.

Marjorie meets the newly arrived Graham at the school library and they begin spending time together every day.

Marcus and Marjorie meet for the first time at an Afro-Caribbean dance party in San Francisco, instantly feeling a deep familiarity.

While the broad sweep of Homegoing traces a family divided by slavery, the story is built on intimate moments of revelation, compromise, and quiet devastation. Effia learns her true identity only as her father lies dying, while Esi makes a desperate private act of defiance by swallowing her mother's stone to protect her heritage. The middle generations are defined by similar turning points — a near-kiss between Quey and Cudjo, a missionary's shocking confession, a miner's act of compassion, and a failed harvest proposal that destroys Abena's last hope for marriage. In America, Willie secretly builds a hidden life at a jazz club while Sonny finds both love and addiction in the musician Amani Zulema. By the final chapters, Marcus and Marjorie's unlikely connection begins at a dance party in San Francisco, setting in motion the family's long-awaited reunion in Ghana.

The pivotal scenes and quiet discoveries behind the family saga.

Effia tours Cape Coast Castle with James and realizes that enslaved people are imprisoned in the dungeon directly beneath where she will live.

The enslaved Abronoma tells Esi that their shared ancestor Maame was raped in Fanteland and that Esi has a half-sister she has never met.

Fiifi, badly wounded from a raiding party, orders Quey to marry the Asante princess Nana Yaa and take over leadership of the slave trade.

Ness grabs the tip of Tom Jr.'s switch to protect Pinky from a beating, then must await uncertain punishment from the plantation owner.

Old Effia visits her grandson James Richard Collins and encourages him to be bold enough to make a new way in life.

Kojo Freeman refuses his friends' advice to move his family north, insisting on staying in Baltimore despite clear warnings about the coming slave law.

Abena encounters Christian missionaries building a church in Kumasi for the first time and they invite her to seek them out if she needs help.

H attends his first union meeting and argues that the miners should demand more money rather than simply shorter working hours.

Akua watches helplessly as her village mob burns a White traveler alive, an event that begins her long descent into mental illness.

Willie drops her hymnal in church and steps forward to sing aloud for the first time since losing her voice years earlier.

Akua tells her son Yaw the full story of her firewoman dreams and how the family's generational trauma was passed down through their bloodline.

Sonny quits his job at the NAACP after a discouraged boy tells him he cannot do a single thing to help anyone.

Marjorie tells her teacher she is not African American, and her teacher responds that in America black is black is black.

Akua dies peacefully in her sleep, and Marjorie throws herself onto the grave after realizing she forgot to drop her poem inside.

Marjorie and Marcus share stories about their grandmothers and she shows him the black and gold stone she inherited from Akua.

At the heart of Homegoing are the moments where characters discover a hidden truth, make a fateful choice, or are forced to reckon with an inherited burden. Effia's first glimpse of the enslaved people in the Castle dungeon marks the moment she understands the world she now inhabits, while Abronoma's revelation to Esi about their shared ancestor sets Esi on the path to captivity. Across generations these turning points accumulate — Fiifi coercing Quey into the slave trade, Kojo refusing to flee Baltimore, Akua witnessing a man burned alive, and Willie finally reclaiming her singing voice in church. On both sides of the ocean, the ability or failure to speak one's truth shapes the family's fate, from the missionary's tearful confession to Willie's long-delayed honesty with Sonny about his father. The pool closes with Marjorie showing Marcus the stone necklace and welcoming him into the family history he never knew he had.