The Book of Negroes

Hello there! If you are new here, Please subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone—passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America—is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.

Lawrence Hill is a master at transforming the neglected corners of history into brilliant imaginings, as engaging and revealing as only the best historical fiction can be. A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex.

And now I am old - London, 1802

productimageaspx I seem to have trouble dying. By all rights, I should not have lived this long. But I still can smell trouble riding on any wind, just as surely as I could tell you whether it is a stew of chicken necks or pigs’ feet bubbling in the iron pot on the fire. And my ears still work just as good as a hound dog’s. People assume that just because you don’t stand as straight as a sapling, you’re deaf. Or that your mind is like pumpkin mush. The other day, when I was being led into a meeting with a bishop, one of the society ladies told another, “We must get this woman into Parliament soon. Who knows how much longer she’ll be with us?” Half bent though I was, I dug my fingers into her ribs. She let out a shriek and spun around to face me. “Careful,” I told her, “I may outlast you!”

There must be a reason why I have lived in all these lands, survived all those water crossings, while others fell from bullets or shut their eyes and simply willed their lives to end. In the earliest days, when I was free and knew nothing other, I used to sneak outside our walled compound, climb straight up the acacia tree while balancing Father’s Qur’an on my head, sit way out on a branch and wonder how I might one day unlock all the mysteries contained in the book. Feet swinging beneath me, I would put down the book — the only one I had ever seen in Bayo — and look out at the patchwork of mud walls and thatched coverings. People were always on the move. Women carrying water from the river, men working iron in the fires, boys returning triumphant from the forest with snared porcupines. It’s a lot of work, extracting meat from a porcupine, but if they had no other pressing chores, they would do it anyway, removing the quills, skinning the animal, slicing out the innards, practising with their sharp knives on the pathetic little carcass. In those days, I felt free and happy, and the very idea of safety never intruded on my thoughts.

I have escaped violent endings even as they have surrounded me. But I never had the privilege of holding onto my children, living with them, raising them the way my own parents raised me for ten or eleven years, until all of our lives were torn asunder. I never managed to keep my own children long, which explains why they are not here with me now, making my meals, adding straw to my bedding, bringing me a cape to hold off the cold, sitting with me by the fire with the knowledge that they emerged from my loins and that our shared moments had grown like corn stalks in damp soil. Others take care of me now. And that’s a fine thing. But it’s not the same as having one’s own flesh and blood to cradle one toward the grave. I long to hold my own children, and their children if they exist, and I miss them the way I’d miss limbs from my own body.

They have me exceedingly busy here in London. They say I am to meet King George. About me, I have a clutch of abolitionists — big-whiskered, wide-bellied, bald-headed men boycotting sugar but smelling of tobacco and burning candle after candle as they plot deep into the night. The abolitionists say they have brought me to England to help them change the course of history. Well. We shall see about that. But if I have lived this long, it must be for a reason.

Fa means father in my language. Ba means river. It also means mother. In my early childhood, my ba was like a river, flowing on and on and on with me through the days, and keeping me safe at night. Most of my lifetime has come and gone, but I still think of them as my parents, older and wiser than I, and still hear their voices, sometimes deep-chested, at other moments floating like musical notes. I imagine their hands steering me from trouble, guiding me around cooking fires and leading me to the mat in the cool shade of our home. I can still picture my father with a sharp stick over hard earth, scratching out Arabic in flowing lines and speaking of the distant Timbuktu

In private moments, when the abolitionists are not swirling about like tornadoes, seeking my presence in this deputation or my signature atop that petition, I wish my parents were still here to care for me. Isn’t that strange? Here I am, a broken-down old black woman who has crossed more water than I care to remember, and walked more leagues than a work horse, and the only things I dream of are the things I can’t have — children and grandchildren to love, and parents to care for me.

The other day, they took me into a London school and they had me talk to the children. One girl asked if it was true that I was the famous Meena Dee, the one mentioned in all the newspapers. Her parents, she said, did not believe that I could have lived in so many places. I acknowledged that I was Meena Dee, but that she could call me Aminata Diallo if she wanted, which was my childhood name. We worked on my first name for a while. After three tries, she got it. Aminata. Four syllables. It’s really not that hard. Ah–ME–naw–tah, I told her. She said she wished I could meet her parents. And her grandparents. I replied that it amazed me that she still had grandparents in her life. Love them good, I told her, and love them big. Love them every day. She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied. I can see that you must have been quite pretty, even though you are so very dark, she said.

The History Behind the New Novel

Lawrence Hill’s novel is inspired by a fascinating but little known historical document called the Book of Negroes, copies of which can be found in the USA at the New York Public Library, the Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia) and the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C. In Canada, copies of the same historical document can be found in the Nova Scotia Public Archives and in the National Archives of Canada. Lawrence Hill wrote a feature article called “Freedom Bound” about the historical document The Book of Negroes in the February/March 2007 edition of The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine.

Lawrence Hill spoke with CBC Arts Online about the history and his novel. You can read the interview at http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/book_of_negroes.html.

Reviews from Australia

“…a superb saga to get lost in…a deeply moving book of great finesse and nuance, impossible to put down…”
The Sunday Telegraph

“…the great African-American writer James Baldwin…was at the forefront of a movement to make public the voices of a new generation of black women and men. The supreme achievement of Lawrence Hill’s new novel…is to give a similar voice to an even more distant generation.”
The Weekend Australian

“Lawrence Hill has expertly mastered [Aminata’s] unique and compelling voice…Hill draws such a fascinating and wonderfully realized character that accompanying her on her life journey is not only a pleasure but a privilege.”
The Sunday Mail

Reviews from the U.S.A.

“Lawrence Hill’s hugely impressive historical work is completely engrossing and deserves a wide, international readership.”
Washington Post

“[A] wonderfully written fictional slave narrative…populated by vivid characters and rendered in fascinating detail.”
The New York Times

“Astonishing in scope, humanity and beauty, this is one of those very rare novels in which the deep joy of reading transcends its time and place…Someone Knows My Namelets readers experience a life, one footstep at a time, beside an unforgettable protagonist.”
Editors’ Choice, Historical Novels Review

“Hill’s elegant voice will leave you … spellbound.”
Essence (November Book Club pick)

“Stunning, wrenching and inspiring…Hill’s book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Hill makes Aminata such a terrific character … through her curious eyes, a terrifying patch of history comes to vivid life.”
Entertainment Weekly

“Hill’s third novel, a Canadian bestseller, is a masterful example of historical storytelling, one both heartbreaking and hopeful … An unforgettable epic, seen through the eyes of a sharply realized, indomitable heroine.”
Booklist

Reviews from Canada

“The Book of Negroes is a masterpiece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history.”
The Globe and Mail

“Aminata is a heroic figure, a little larger than life, residing within and outside of history. You can never forget this character. She embeds herself in your heart.”
The Toronto Star

“Anna Karenina. Hagar Shipley. Aminata Diallo….the exclusive club that includes literature’s most memorable characters now has a remarkable new member.”
The Calgary Herald

“In Aminata Diallo, who evolves from stolen village child to the conscience of abolition, writer Lawrence Hill has crafted one of the most memorable female characters in Canadian fiction…. And here’s how readers will come to know this — Aminata tends to linger long after the book’s been finished and put aside….The Book of Negroes is thoughtful, stirring, saddening, resplendent and joyful. It’s an evocative tome, and among the best in our fiction.”
The Hamilton Spectator

“Hill’s engaging narrator and the scope of her trajectory make this novel a truly compelling read. It is, however, Hill’s ability to observe the multi-faceted issue of race with sensitivity, compassion and a keen sense of justice, that makes The Book of Negroesnot just a good book, but a great one — worthy of every honour it is sure to receive.”
The Montreal Gazette

“Hill’s gift to readers, in the present and the future, is that he not only creates one of the most extraordinary female characters ever to live in a novel, he also makes visible — and vivid — the reality of historical events in an individual life.”
The Chronicle Herald

“Somewhere around page 389 of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, I realized I had become so completely engrossed in his masterful telling of the hard life and crueler times of Aminata Diallo that I had forgotten I was reading a novel. But I was. And it is a brilliant one…Aminata is an amazing literary creation.”
Literary Review of Canada