Do you know, have you heard the story

Always interested in the way people use stories.

In Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, there is much about stories. At one point, a young Asante woman, Esi,  being held captive in 18th century Ghana by slavers. Amidst the brutal conditions of her prison in Cape Coast,  Tansi, a woman she has met in captivity , asks her "'Do you know the story of the kente cloth?'" Esi had "heard it numerous times before, twice from Tansi herself, but she shook her head. Asking if the story had been heard before was a part of the story itself"(30). Thus, the question and response are a ritual. The asker is asking the listener to mind the story again, to take its wisdom to heart, to hear it, or, in this case, pay attention and heed it again.

Stories bear wisdom for coping and navigating life. They also bear history for the characters who often, due to the fact of their enslavement, have a sparse sense of their history. Yet stories of ones past can be a thin gruel for some.  Kojo (whose name is a story that speaks to his being born on a Monday) escaped slavery when his mother and father attempted to flee north in the 1830s. They don't make it but infant Kojo does.