At the end of the novel, Marjorie (Akua’s granddaughter) is also afraid of fire, but overcomes this fear with Marcus’s help, while she in turn helps him overcome his fear of water. In her madness, Akua sets fire to her own hut, killing two of her children and permanently scarring her son, Yaw. This dream ties back to Maame and her two daughters, representing how the slave trade destroyed one line of the family tree and cursed the other line. Later in the novel, spurred by watching a white man tied to a tree and burned, Akua dreams of a woman made of fire holding two children. For example, Maame abandons her daughter Effia in the Fante village on the night she is born because of a raging fire, catalyzing a series of events that allows Effia to remain on the Gold Coast and eventually participate in the slave trade, while her sister, Esi, is eventually sold into slavery. Many of the characters are afraid of fire or are haunted by it. Fire represents the pain that plagues the characters on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) due to their family’s participation in the slave trade.
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