Though fiercely eloquent, Du Bois’s story doesn’t pretend to be more than a kind of sermon, an allegory of perpetually sundered white and Black fortune.
Du Bois confines himself to America, while Gyasi’s novel makes a double-chambered form for the hybridity of African-American history, moving between Ghana and the United States, from the late eighteenth century to the present. While Du Bois treats just two people, Gyasi follows two branches of a family tree, across seven generations. In her first novel, “ Homegoing” (2016), the Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi brilliantly renewed and expanded the fiction of double lives. And neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague unrest.” Du Bois forces together these two lives in order to dramatize their bifurcation: “Few thought of two Johns-for the black folk thought of one John and he was black and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. Jones kills Henderson, and so leaves town again, for the North. The two lives, already linked by name, town, and racial system (John Jones’s sister Jennie works as a maid in the Judge’s house), intersect one fateful day, when John Jones discovers John Henderson sexually assaulting Jennie in a wood. From the same town, “the other John,” John Henderson, the white, entitled son of Judge Henderson, sails off to Princeton without a thought for his navigation. Years later, he comes home to find himself alienated by his education and limited in opportunity. John Jones, an African-American full of promise, leaves the small town of Altamaha, Georgia, to get an education. One of the most moving chapters in W. E. B. Du Bois’s collection of essays, “ The Souls of Black Folk,” is a fiction, a harrowing hypothesis titled “Of the Coming of John.” It tells the story of two young men bound by the same first name.
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