Book Review: The Book of Negroes

[Mike Gange]

      

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Review by Mike Gange

The Book of Negroes
Lawrence Hill
Harper Collins, $15.64, 487 pages

I rarely read serious non-fiction. In fact, I had to ask directions to that section of the bookstore when I went looking for The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. This book was recommended to me by the first black man in Canada’s Senate; otherwise I might have missed out on an absolute literary treasure that is gripping and enlightening.

The Book of Negroes is the remarkable story of Aminata Diallo.  At age 11, while outside the walls of her African village with her mother and father, she is suddenly seized by slave traders. In the struggle to escape from capture, she witnesses the killing of both her mother and her father. Then she and many others are chained together, attached to a yoke and forced to walk for three months until they reach Sierra Leone, where they are herded into a fenced compound before being loaded onto a ship set to sail to North America.

Aminata has an in-born facility that helps her understand the languages of differing tribes, and midwifery skills that she learned from her mother before being captured. She is frequently called on to serve as a translator between her white keepers and the blacks in captivity and to help deliver babies, including two delivered in mid-Atlantic on the slave ship.  Upon reaching North America, she is malnourished and sick, and is sold to a farmer in North Carolina, where she is nursed to health by a black woman on that farm. Upon regaining her health, she is forced to labor in hot and difficult work on the farm, and called upon to deliver babies to black women in the area. Her life story takes her to New York City, where she is eventually evacuated to Nova Scotia, along with boatloads of other United Empire Loyalists, who are both blacks and whites. Because Aminata had learned to read and write, she is pressed into serving as the official book keeper for those blacks being transported to Nova Scotia. The records are known as The Book of Negroes.  

The story is told from the point of view of Aminata, first as a pre-teen and later as a wise woman who is unschooled but relatively well educated – she can read and write – and understand a business balance sheet. Inevitably, a comparison has to be made with the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, the eight year old Jean Louise (Scout) Finch. Both narrate their stories from a retrospective viewpoint, but with the unfiltered and non-judgmental innocence of children. Aminata, however, does not come to her story from the position of privilege granted a white child, so when she chronicles the meanness and depravity of her oppressors, it is more shocking and astonishing than the story of racism as witnessed and interpreted by Jean Louise Finch. Aminata dreams of being the chronicler of her village, and as it turns out, she is the symbolic story teller for a whole race.

Author Lawrence Hill has done an exceptional job of researching the troubling times and life conditions of Africans forced into slavery, of the living and working conditions of blacks who are exploited at every turn by arrogant and predatory whites. The Book of Negroes is a historical fiction but the narrative that Lawrence Hill writes is so realistic that its message is deeply disturbing. Alex Haley’s Roots, which was published in 1976 proved to be shocking and revealing. Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes is equally powerful.

Given the mistreatment of one race by another, it is no wonder we need legislation to ensure equality.

Mike Gange is a media studies and journalism teacher in Fredericton.