Publisher's Synopsis
In eighteenth-century Ghana, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages. Effia is eventually married to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to her, Esi is imprisoned beneath in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and then shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. The consequences of the sisters' fates reverberate through the generations that follow. From the Gold Coast to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, this is the story of how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
