The Book of Negroes

The Book of Negroes

Author	Lawrence Hill
Country	Canada
Language	English
Genre	Historical novel
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	January 18, 2007
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	511
ISBN	978-0-00-225507-3
OCLC	70507153

The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.

Title

Slavery
Contemporary Child labour Conscription Debt Forced marriage Bride-buying Wife selling Forced prostitution Human trafficking Peonage Penal labour Sexual slavery
Historical Antiquity Ancient Rome Babylonia Ancient Greece Topics and practices Atlantic slave trade Middle Passage Arab slave trade Ghilman Mamluk Saqaliba Aztec Blackbirding Byzantine Empire Coolie Corvée labor Field slaves in the United States House slaves Kholop Medieval Europe Panyarring Thrall Serfs History Russia Slave raiding Naval Galley slave Impressment Pirates Shanghaiing Slave ship
By country or region Africa Contemporary Africa Slavery on the Barbary Coast Barbary slave trade Slave Coast Angola Chad Ethiopia Mali Mauritania Niger Somalia South Africa Sudan Seychelles Americas Americas indigenous U.S. Natives Brazil Lei Áurea Canada Caribbean Barbados Code Noir Cuba Haiti revolt Restavec Latin America Puerto Rico Trinidad United States colonial maps female partus penal labor Slave codes interregional Human Trafficking Virgin Islands Asia Bhutan China Booi Aha Laogai India Debt bondage Chukri System Japan comfort women South Korea Yankee princess North Korea Vietnam Yemen Australia and Oceania Blackbirding in Australia Human trafficking in Australia Slave raiding in Easter Island Human trafficking in Papua New Guinea Blackbirding in Polynesia Europe Sex trafficking in Europe British Isles Denmark Dutch Republic Germany in World War II Poland Portugal Romania Russia Spain colonies Sweden Middle East and North Africa Iran Libya Ottoman Empire
Religion Bible Christianity Islam 21st century Judaism
Opposition and resistance Timeline Abolitionism U.K. U.S. Anti-Slavery International Blockade of Africa U.K. U.S. Compensated emancipation Freedman manumission Freedom suit Abolitionists Slave Power Underground Railroad songs Slave rebellion Slave Trade Acts International law 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution
Related Common law Indentured servant Unfree labour Fugitive slaves laws Great Dismal Swamp maroons List of slaves owners Slave narrative films songs Slave name Slave Route Project Treatment in U.S. breeding court cases Washington Jefferson Adams Lincoln 40 acres Freedmen's Bureau bit Wage slavery Emancipation Day

The author has written about the title:

"I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are asking to have your nose broken. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title."^[1]

Synopsis

Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, near Segu in West Africa and forced to walk for days to the sea in a coffle with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village. After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave and her name is anglicized to Meena Dee. Because of her youth and intelligence she quickly learns English. A fellow slave named Mamed secretly teaches her to read and write after learning that she is Muslim, a religion she shares with her now-deceased African mother.

As a teenager Aminata privately marries Chekura a young boy who works with her captors then sold into Slavery with her both making the crossing to America together.The two conceive a son whom Animata names Mamadu, but the child is sold, as well as Aminata separately, Aminata to a Jewish man named Solomon Lindo who moves her to Charles Town. During the following 13 years she is only able to see Chekura once.

Aminata grows close to Lindo and his wife, who allow her to read and write openly. However Solomon also forces Aminata to pay him a part of any money that she earns through midwifery. After his wife dies of the pox Lindo takes Aminata to New York.

During the rioting at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War Aminata is able to escape from Lindo. During this time Aminata works as a midwife and teacher, helping other black people to learn how to read. Proving that she served the British in the American Revolutionary War her name is entered in the historic "Book of Negroes", an actual historical document that is an archive of freed African American slaves who requested permission to leave the United States in order to resettle in Nova Scotia. Because of her ability to read and write as well as her fluency in two African languages, Aminata is also hired to help record names in the book. While doing this work she is reunited for a few months with Chekura, who also served the British and plans to resettle in Nova Scotia with Aminata. They conceive a second child whom Aminata names May but the two are separated again just before they depart for Nova Scotia.

In Nova Scotia, Aminata arrives in Shelburne and begins to work in the black community of Birchtown. She tries multiple times to locate her husband, who was sent ahead of her to Annapolis Royal, but is unable to encounter any news of him. It later emerges he died during the crossing.

Years later Aminata encounters John Clarkson, a young British naval officer recruiting black settlers to move from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Through Clarkson Aminata learns that the ship carrying her husband to Nova Scotia was sent off course to Bermuda during a storm. Through an initiative headed by Clarkson, Aminata, along with hundreds of other Birchtown blacks, decide to relocate to Sierra Leone with the promise of a better life than what they were given in Nova Scotia.

Aminata eventually returns to Africa, passing along the way, ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America. In Sierra Leone, they attempt to establish Freetown despite the strict rules of the British. Longing to return to her village in the interior of Africa, Aminata pays a slave trader to take her there. When she discovers she cannot trust him, she realizes that what is more important than returning home is to help free her people. As an old woman, she finds herself crossing the ocean one more time to England to present the account of her life so it may help abolish the slave trade. She is eventually reunited with her nearly twenty-year-old daughter May, who cares for her until her dying day.

Awards and recognition

The Book of Negroes won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was the winning selection for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2009, in which journalist Avi Lewis championed the novel. Its French translation, titled Aminata, was defended by Thomas Hellman in the 2013 edition of Le Combat des livres, and won that competition as well, becoming the only title to date to have won both the English and French editions of the competition.

Miniseries adaptation

In 2007, Canadian production company Conquering Lion Pictures announced it had acquired the film rights to the novel. In mid-2013 it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a miniseries of the same name, rather than the feature film originally planned.^[2]

Clement Virgo and Hill collaborated on writing the miniseries, with Virgo also directing. It premiered on CBC Television in Canada in January 2015 and aired on BET in the United States in February 2015.^[2][3]

The mini-series stars Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata, Lyriq Bent as Chekura, Cuba Gooding Jr, Louis Gossett Jr., Ben Chaplin, Allan Hawco, and Jane Alexander.^[4]

The international co-production began shooting in February 2014 in Cape Town, South Africa. Filming also took place in various locations around Nova Scotia.^[5]

References

External links

• CBC The Hour Interview, June 10, 2009.
• Quill & Quire Lawrence Hill Profile.