Yaa Gyasi uses H’s chapter to explore how the American justice system is used to convict and exploit black people for labor. H’s chapter of Homegoing demonstrates the deliberate use of convict leasing as a legal form of slavery, which was not only present in the book, but in the residual population of the U.S. prison system.
“Killed a man, huh? You know what they got my friend Joecy over there for? He ain’t cross the street when a white woman walk by, For that they have him nine years. For killin’ a man, they give you the same, We ain’t cons like you” (172). When H had started speaking out at the meetings, he had questioned why the white bosses would bother to listen to them or acknowledge their demands. One of the white workers had insisted that they had to listen to their demands. H had scoffed, and asked the worker when a white man had ever listened to the demands of a black man (172). He knew black men were being unjustly imprisoned and forced to work the mines; though slavery had been abolished and H was free, as many of the
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Although he hadn’t done so, there was no grant for leniency or release in his imprisonment; as his cellmate told him, “‘Don’t matter if you was or was’t All they gotta do is say you was’” (158). With the way this is mentioned in the book, the problem that most readily comes to mind is in regards to innocence. H had been jailed with no proof and no chance of discharge (bar a ten-dollar fine he was incapable of producing), worsened still by the fact that he was completely innocent of the crime he was accused of in the first place. It prompts the question of how frequently the convicted were innocent, or unfairly, disproportionately tried, but the greater issue lies in the use of the criminal justice system as a means to disproportionately target black people, both innocent and guilty, as a form of legal slave labor after slavery had been