I'd like to welcome this week's Guest Reviewer, Esme!
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Canadian Author Lawrence Hill is the author of this epic historical novel about the slave trade. In Canada the book was published under the title The Book of Negro. In the United States and elsewhere the book was renamed Someone Knows my Name-due to concerns about book sales and controversy.
No matter what title you choose to read the book under, it is a phenomenal piece of writing. You are introduced to Aminata as an old lady, reflecting on the life she led. The book is told by Aminata, a young twelve year old girl who is kidnapped from her idyllic life in her village along with other villagers. Aminata's childhood is showered with love and education. Her mother has her assist her with her midwifery, her father teaches her from the Quran. When a group of bandits raid and burn her village, this life comes to an end. Having witnessed her mother being brutally murdered, Aminata is forced to walk across Africa to the Atlantic Ocean where she is branded before boarding a slave ship.
Aminata's voyage across the Atlantic proves to be more arduous than her march across Africa. Her wit allows her to make herself helpful on the ship and gain extra food and living conditions while she watches her fellow Africans die of disease and despair.
Aminata is taught how to read by one of the other slaves on the plantation. When she is sold to a Jewish merchant, he continues her education, encouraging her to speak the Queen's English, improve her reading and learn how to how to handle money and the books. Aminata is helped by a free slave during a visit to New York with the merchant. As tensions rise between the British and the Americans Aminata is asked to assist the British compile The Book of Negroes- — a record of Black British loyalists promised freedom and passage to British North America.
The Book of Negroes is a little unknown part of Canadian history. This book's records descriptions and information on African American slaves who fought for the British Crown in the American Revolution. These free slaves were then relocated to Nova Scotia, becoming the first Black community in Canada. Others moved on, via the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company, to Sierra Leone, where they formed the original settlers of Freetown and founded the Krio people. As a Canadian, born and educated in Canada, I was completely unaware of this piece of history until I read the book.
Life in Nova Scotia was encountered with many of same racist attitudes these former slaves had faced in the United States.
Aminata returns to Africa even though the risk of enslavement still exists. Here she meets British abolitionists, who use her as the mouthpiece to end slavery.
This story is truly an amazing combination of history and emotion. Hill tells a memorable story that captures Aminata's desire and dream to return to her homeland. This was one of my favorite reads of 2009. It amazed me that I had never heard of the Book of Negroes or the first Black community in Canada. I was fascinated that a book actually exists recording free slaves that were loyal to the Loyalists. Quite simply I was enthralled by the story of Aminata, and her desire and will to escape slavery.
Born in Toronto in 1957, Hill is the son of a black man and a white woman, civil rights activists Daniel and Donna Hill. His African Canadian heritage and mixed race identity frequently inform his writing. The Book of Negroes is his third novel, following Some Great Thing (1992) and Any Known Blood (1997).
Hill came upon the idea for The Book of Negroes in a book he borrowed from his parents about 20 years ago. The Black Loyalists, written by historian James Walker and published in 1980, tells how black Americans settled in Nova Scotia after serving the British in the Revolutionary War. Walker described how many of these men and women later abandoned harsh racism in Nova Scotia for life in Sierra Leone. Canada, Hill learned, was home to the world’s first “back to Africa” movement. What most captured his imagination, however, was this single, astonishing fact: A number of the blacks traveling to Sierra Leone had originally been born in Africa.
“Wow! What a story,” Hill recalls thinking at the time. “What kind of person – what kind of woman – might have lived in such a way as to be born in Africa, shipped into slavery in the United States, made it up to Canada, and then chose voluntarily to go back to Africa? I was very impressed by the idea.”
In Canada, you can purchase an illustrated version of this book. I saw the book when I was home at Christmas. It is gorgeous with it's illustrations of the lives of black in the 1700's. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a great novel or historical fiction. Author Hill has brought to life a little unknown piece of history.
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Thank you Esme for such a wonderful review! I've never heard of his book — I'm definitely intrigued. Please visit Esme at Chocolate and Croissants!