The Book Of Negroes

This is an historical fictional autobiography. It is the story of Aminata Diallo, a young African girl, captured and sold into slavery in the mid 1700s. Her experiences of survival, love, loss, learning, travel, hope, betrayal all make for a most compelling read.

The mix of historical fact with

Show More

fiction prompted me to research more about the experiences of blacks in Canada, specifically in Nova Scotia.

Show Less

Aminata Diallo was an eleven year old African girl living with her village in the mid-1700's. Her father, a village leader and a learned Muslim, had taught Aminata the Muslim prayers and to read a bit of Arabic. Her mother was a skilled midwife known throughout the region and had taught her skills

Show More

to Animata from her earliest childhood.

But everything changed when another village attacked Animata's village. Her father and mother were killed, and Animata was forced to march in shackles across hundreds of miles to the coast to be sold as a slave and boarded onto one of the infamous slave ships bound for the American colonies.

We see the horrors of the slave ship through Animata's child eyes. She barely survived the most horrific conditions. Weak and sick, she was sold with the other unsaleables into the devastation of being a non-person, a slave.

Because of her previous education and training with her parents, she was able to covertly learn to read and write English and also became quite valued for her midwifery skills.

During the chaos of a British attack during the American Revolution, she was able to escape to the British lines. There she worked as a scribe for the British who promised freedom to former slaves who would work or fight for them for the duration of the war. When the British were defeated, they convinced the former slaves to sign up for free land and a supposedly free life in Nova Scotia. All blacks transported this way had their names written in a volume called The Book of Negroes, (the original Canadian title of this book).

But promises were broken and Animata continued to search for freedom, her lost children and husband and a life of human dignity.

This novel puts a very human face on slavery and the slave trade through the eyes of an intelligent and resourceful woman. It's a story of betrayal at every level by her masters and white people who portrayed themselves as friends.

In addition it highlights a chapter of black history that I was not aware of. Although I was somewhat familiar with Freetown in Sierra Leone, I found it fascinating that the British sent former slaves to Nova Scotia and the lives they endured there.

3.8 stars

Show Less

A beautiful work, the story of a woman who is taken as a slave as a young girl, and her journey across Africa and thence across the ocean to America, where she works on an indigo plantation and as a house slave. Along the way she learns how to read and write - expressively and well - and continues

Show More

to nurture her reputation among her fellow slaves as a part-time midwife. She ultimately steals back her freedom and escapes to Nova Scotia with the Loyalists, and eventually returns to Africa, to Freetown, and then London, where she assists the abolitionist cause. This illustrated version contains many beautiful illustrations that add a certain richness to the story. The title of the book comes from an actual document which records descriptions and information on those African American slaves who fought for the British Crown in the American Revolution. The document was recorded in 1783 and contains information about 3000 African Americans. The former slaves recorded in the Book of Negroes were evacuated to colonies in British North America, and it is this truth underlying the story that perhaps makes this book so poignant. Recommended.

Show Less

Aminata is only eleven years old when she is kidnapped by slave traders and forced to march to the Atlantic ocean, miles from her small village, to be branded, sold and put on a slave ship to South Carolina. Aminata has been trained by her mother as a midwife to “catch babies” and has also had

Show More

some education…both skills which help her to survive. Thus begins Lawrence Hill’s engrossing slave narrative Someone Knows My Name (known as The Book of Negroes outside of the United States). The novel spans a period of more than forty years and is narrated in the voice of Aminata (aka: Meena) who describes her life aboard a slave ship, living on an indigo plantation in South Carolina, as an escaped slave in New York, and later as an immigrant to Nova Scotia when the British government moved thousands of blacks there with promises of freedom. Aminata eventually returns “home” to Africa – specifically to Sierra Leone, later called Freetown. But her journey does not end there. As a literate black woman who has survived the most unimaginable terror and treatment, she agrees to go to London to work with the abolitionists trying to outlaw the slave trade.

Aminata’s story is horrific. Hill spares no details of the cruel treatment of slaves aboard the slave ships or at the hands of white plantation owners. The reader experiences the grief of women who lost their children to slavery…often before the age of two years old; the terror of rape and abuse; the longing to be free. In many ways, this is a difficult novel to read.

Near the platform stood a group of Africans, some barely able to stand and others with pus dripping from sores on their legs. Five of them looked like they would not regret the closing fist of death. I felt my stomach churning, my throat tightening. I looked down to avoid meeting their eyes. I was fed, and they were not. I had clothes, and they had none. I could do nothing to change their prospects or even my own. That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future. – from Someone Knows My Name, page 189 -

Hill’s research and the historical background of the novel is impecable. He explains in an afterword:

In terms of the sheer number of people recorded and described, the actual Book of Negroes is the largest single document about black people in North America up until the end of the eighteenth century. It contains the names and details of 3,000 black men, women and children, who, after serving or living behind British lines during the American Revolutionary War, sailed from New York City to various British colonies. – page 471 -

In Aminata, Hill gives a voice to the thousands of blacks who were enslaved in the latter part of the eighteenth century and in this way, the novel becomes more than just an historical document, but instead becomes a personal story of one woman’s courage and determination. Hill’s novel is really a family saga immersed in an historical time period.

I cannot say I enjoyed this book – but I feel I am a better person for having read it. Hill’s narrative is well written and stunning. Aminata’s story is one which we should not forget.

Highly recommended.

Show Less

Also published as The Book of Negroes.
This was a very readable account of the sufferings and abuse of slaves taken from Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Their struggles were represented by Aminata Diallo who we meet at the beginning of the book as an old woman helping the

Show More

abolitionists fight for the termination of slave importation to Britain.
In order to support the cause Aminata (known as Meena) writes her life story and it is this account that we read in the succeeding pages.

She was abducted from her villiage in the interior of Africa, where Whites, or Toubabu, had never been seen but were widely feared. At the age of eleven she was forced to walk for 3 months to reach the coast where the slave ships waited. She was branded with the name of her owner and forced on board a ship whose stench could be smelt for miles away.

In America Meena worked on an indigo plantation, but also used the skills she'd learned from her mother, a midwife. She learned the use of medicinal herbs through Georgia, who took her in and nursed her to health after the arduous crossing. She also learned to read from the overseer, who noticed a spark in her. Reading was strongly forbidden amongst the slaves and had to be done in secret.

From here, circumstances took her to Charlestown, New York and on to Nova Scotia in Canada where freed slaves who had fought for the British were offered a 'new life'. Finally the oportunity come to return to Africa, occupying an area of Sierra Leone known as Freetown. Many of those settling down here had never set foot on African soil; they had been born under slavery in foreign lands.

The book is filled with details of the struggle of slaves at this time and the apalling way that they were often treated, but it also glows with joyous times and friendships, sharing and hope.

And there was a wonderful quote from Jonathan Swift, writing about the failings of the cartographers of Africa who had no idea what was in the interior of the country:
So geographers, in Afric-maps
With savage-pictures fill their gaps
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

Highly recommended.

Show Less

Fantastic read. I couldn't put it down and I thought it would be awful reading a story about slavery, but it is so much more than that.

For a big book, I was amazed how quickly I whizzed through this. Compulsively readable, it follows one woman from her early childhood in Africa, her capture by slavers, transportation to America, and long struggle to get back to her homeland. As someone who likes to learn things by reading fiction,

Show More

I appreciated the broad range of its subject matter - covering the way the slave market was established and facilitated, attempts to set up a colony in Canada, the duplicitous British, and the politics of the abolition of slavery in Britain. There is an elegant simplicity about the whole thing: a very good read.

Show Less

I was disappointed with this one. As a story, it should have been a great one. But it was perhaps a little too epic in scope. Huge, significant chunks of the protagonist's life were glossed over. She lost a child and as a reader I couldn't feel any of her loss - it all flew by. Yet other details

Show More

were well rendered with great detail, like the march to the boats. I may have enjoyed it more had the author focused on a shorter time frame, or simply written a longer, more detailed book. But on the whole, the writing just could not carry the story's ambition.

Show Less

A tremendous account of a young African abducted from her village and sold as a slave on the Coast. I found the narrative riveting thanks to the details, the precise and colorful language and the simplicity of story. What I enjoyed most was Hill's capacity to describe powerful, hurtful, passionate,

Show More

emotional scenes about the treatment of slaves without moralizing and judging through a vivid description of history. Nonetheless the reader feels compassion and empathy for the main character and her plight without feeling pity. I liked his choice of characters which did a great job of showing the different points of view and allegiances. An enlightening and captivating read.

Show Less

Aminata survives kidnapping by slave traders at the age of 11, the horrors of the slave trade and, later, an exodus to Nova Scotia, back to Sierra Leone and finally England. She.becomes a skilled midwife delivering babies of fellow slaves and learns to read and write. While in England later in

Show More

life, she meets her long lost daughter who was sold as a slave to another family many years earlier.

Published as "Someone Knows My Name" in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and "The Book of Negroes" in Canada, the author was inspired by a historical document entitled "Book of Negroes." which listed the names of slaves who escaped the US for freedom in Nova Scotia, and is available in national archives in both countries.

Show Less

A truly amazing book and one that has filled me with increasing knowledge of what a young woman went through in the guise of slavery.

The end part that deals mostly with the Abolitionist movement in Britain brings up most of the outside conflicts of the pro- and con-abolitionist movement. Meenah's

Show More

story, though, speaks of the dehumanizing aspects of slavery and is the biggest anti-slavery reason presented.

I was thrilled and amazed at the changes the author's voice went through as he wrote this woman's "memoirs": from happy child to confused child to frightened, dying child, and finally into slavery. Meenah has a few happy moments in her life but most of it is misery well-described, whether she is working on the indigo plantation (and instructed in the Gulah dialect) or spending long hours transcribing and learning letters and numbers, she is always working. And her life is not her own.

Highly recommended for readers who are ready for a mature story on slavery and its effect on the slaves.

Show Less

The Book of Negroes is likely the best description of details of the slave trade I have ever read, particularly the journey from an African village to the coast. The writing is excellent and very well-researched. In fact, the factual portions of the book are woven so well with the fictional parts,

Show More

it seems as though this were a memoir of a real African named Aminata. This is a superb novel that deserves a lot of attention.

Show Less

I really got into this story of Aminata Diallo's life. Aminata was kidnapped by slave traders when she was 11, sold to an indigo farmer in South Carolina, then to a Jewish business man. She escaped to New York, worked with the British during the war of independence, was given passage with other

Show More

loyalists to Nova Scotia. Having never given up her dream of going home, Aminata joins a group of "adventurers" whom the British are sending to start a free colony in Sierra Lione. From there, Aminata tries to complete her quest to return to her native village. She eventually goes to England where she works with abolitionists.

Aminata is a wonderful character with stregth, intelligence and, in spite of all that happens to her, she retains a good heart and kind spirit.

The story is well researched (historical fiction). I learned many things I hadn't fully realized before. As a Canadian, I was especially interested in the migration to Nova Scotia where the black loyalists were not as welcomed as I was taught in school.

Show Less

I enjoyed this, although wasn't sure that it quite lived up to the hype. It was an interesting way of finding out more about the Loyalist Africans, about whom I knew very little, but I wasn't always convinced by Aminata's point of view: a bit too detached and analytical at times.

Somewhere in the

Show More

book a character asks 'Are you okay?'. Now, I know the first recorded use of OK was in 1790, so it is possible that this phrase was already in use (the book ends c.1807) - but it struck me as unlikely.

Minor nitpicks aside, it kept me reading and I think it's a good story. Just not quite as good as I was expecting.

Show Less

One of my favorite books of all time, this is what reading is all about to me, well-researched history, a wonderful protagonist and a new vision about where we come from and how we have treated each other through the forming of our countries (as we know them today). Although the writing is simple

Show More

and straighforward, it is beautiful and poetic too. This is a story of a strong, spirited and brilliant Muslim African woman, born in 1754 (from the small village of Bayo, situated somewhere near Sierra Leone) who is captured and forced into slavery at the age of 11. She tells her story from her waning days in London, as a free woman. It's a powerful story, blending fact with fiction and taking readers down a road of slavery during the Revolutionary War, unknown to most. The reader travels with Aminata Diallo from interior Africa to its coast; to the South Carolina low country indigo plantations, to New York City, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, then London. Mr. Hill does not sugarcoat anything, this is a brutal, disturbing read; and Aminata lives many lives. At times artistic license is a bit far reaching, but still, that lends to make it engaging and entertaining within a difficult subject. Aminata is a character of great fiction; and this is a powerful story. Highly recommended if you can accept the brutal realities of slavery and the slave trade(s).

Show Less

MOST BRILLIANT PORTRAIT OF SLAVERY - from one young African girl's abduction at age 11 (1745), her voyage on slave ship to S.Carolina, later time spent in NYC, then as part of the "freed" slaves in Nova Scotia, then back to Africa, and to London Eng. as an old woman testifying in abolishonists

Show More

courts (1802)
An unfortunate title -- renamed "Someone Knows My Name" in the US.
DEFINITELY WORTH READING - GREAT BOOK CLUB READ - WHY HASN'T OPRAH PICKED THIS UP YET ???

Show Less

An amazing story that is told simply and fully. This book is the definition of a page turner and, furthermore, tells an important story that people need to know about. Everyone knows that the slave trade existed but few know what it was like. The Book of Negroes follows a woman, Aminata, from

Show More

childhood through to old age as she goes from being abducted from her home village in Africa to playing a key role in the abolition movement. One of my favorite books that I would recommend to anybody.

Show Less

Lawrence Hill has written a book that is unforgettable. The story of Aminata (Meena) Diallo who is taken from her African village as a young girl to be sold into slavery in South Carolina and eventually manages to flee to freedom and return to Africa is filled with details so rich that the story

Show More

seems real. The tragedies that befell her (the forced removal of her son, the drowning death of her husband when they had finally managed to reunite and the kidnapping of her daughter) would have devastated anyone. The other difficulties she surmounted (illnesses, starvation, cold, beatings, riots) would have been more than most could survive. The fact that she survived and learned to read and write and pass on her knowledge make her a heroine that we would all like to emulate.

Hill is part black himself (or I guess in these Obama days we should call him bi-racial). His father is a sociologist descended from Africans enslaved in the united States and both his parents were civil rights activists. In fact, the idea for this book came to Daniel from a book he took from his parents, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 by James W. St. G. Walker. Lawrence's brother Dan Hill was a musician and singer that I much admired in the 60's and 70's. Recently Dan Hill wrote a piece in Maclean's about the struggles his son faces as a young black man in Canada. Although we no longer enslave black people I don't think we can say that they are yet treated as equals. I hope that lots of people will read this book and think about the struggles black people (and other visible minorities) face here and now.

Show Less

This novel features an African girl named Aminata Diallo, who was abducted around 1756 at the age of 11 and force-marched with other captives from her village in West Africa to the coast of Sierra Leone, where she was shipped to the British colony of South Carolina. Aminata's father, a Muslim, had

Show More

taught her to read and write some prayers in Arabic, and her mother, a midwife, had begun training her to "catch babies". With these skills to offer, Aminata lives a life which is often more that of a servant than a slave; she is rarely beaten or confined after arriving in America, many of her owners treat her with a measure of respect, and in some circles she is admired as a teacher and midwife. Nevertheless, her status is never that of a free woman and her soul is never at rest. She loses a mentor, a husband, her children, but never loses her dream of returning to the village of her childhood and the freedom she knew there. This is almost [Roots] in reverse---rather than a modern descendant of slaves seeking to learn his family's history we have a victim of the slave trade seeking to return herself to her original home. Upon arrival on the North American continent Aminata is puzzled to be referred to as an "African", as she knows only the names of a handful of villages and a river in her homeland; the concept of "Africa" means nothing to her, and the Atlantic Ocean is simply an enormous terrifying river beyond imagining, which she has managed to cross without dying as so many others died. Later, when she has an opportunity to look at maps of the "Dark Continent", she finds much of it is quite unknown to the mapmakers as well. Aside from a few coastal locations, there are no names on the maps, merely drawings of elephants, bare-breasted women, birds and apes. Although Aminata is not based on any historical figure, there are "real people" in the novel, including Moses Wilkinson, Samuel Fraunces, and the abolitionist brothers Thomas and John Clarkson. Other characters are more loosely connected to people who did exist. I enjoyed this story quite a lot; it is fortified with extensive historical research about a time and a group of people that I had not known about previously. The title of this novel outside the USA was originally [The Book of Negroes], because Aminata is employed for a time registering names and a few personal details of black people who had been loyal to the British crown during the American Revolution, and who were promised freedom and land in Nova Scotia. The actual historical document referred to as Book of Negroes is one of the very few sources of information on black Americans of that time period. Occasionally, when outside the story thinking about it, I felt that Aminata's life was a bit too strange for fiction...the kind of thing that only makes sense if it really happened. In order for her to serve as the narrator of her own story, she had to be personally involved in many different events in several locations, and be particularly well-informed for a slave. For the most part, the author did a fine job accommodating this need without stretching my credulity too heavily. One late development (her reunion with her daughter), however, struck me as utterly improbable and unrealistic, as though the author had felt the need to bring the story round to a relatively happy ending.

Show Less

This was one of my book clubs' book for this month and I have to be honest, I was not looking forward to reading it at all. Books dealing with slavery are always painful and I find them hard to read in February, the greyest, bleakest month of the year. How ridiculous to moan about the weather

Show More

making me feel not prepared for a desperate book, no? Certainly my life is pretty cushy and the main character, stolen from her homeland and sold into slavery, facing hardship and horror, should have had it so easy, right? But I felt that way, resistant to the book. So it's a good thing that book club obligated me to read this because it really was a marvelous read and certainly one that is fantastic for book clubs.

Aminata Diallo is eleven and on the verge of becoming a woman. She helps her mother catch babies in their village and neighboring villages. She is pretty happy and generally doted upon by her parents. But one evening, returning from delivering a baby, she and her mother are set upon by strange men and Aminata is stolen, her mother killed. As she is forced past her village, she witnesses her father's brutal death as well. After a three month trek, she arrives at a slave trading post on the coast and ultimately embarks on a slaver journeying to America, specifically South Carolina. This book covers Aminata's, called Meena, incredible life. From a free young girl in Africa to a slave in the southern US and ultimately a free woman in the north who chooses to use her incredible intelligence to carve out a life for herself both in the US and Canada and back in Africa and to become a potent symbol for the abolitionists in London. The scope of the novel is immense but it works. In focusing in on one main character, Hill has personalized history that makes us uncomfortable, history that we've forgotten, and history that we choose to forget or to ignore.

Meena is an amazing woman and she is incredibly gifted, learning languges like a sponge, picking up monetary systems, and practicing midwifery and some natural medicine in order to increase her value. Slavery is portrayed brutally, although Aminata, while suffering it, certainly doesn't have the appalling existence that some slaves did, thanks in large part to her skill in becoming whoever her current master wants. She faces the heartbreak common to slaves where family is torn from her and friends who have become a makeshift family themselves also disappear forever. Her desire for someone to know who she is, what her experience is, and to see into the truth of her soul is agonizing.

Highlighting the issues of survival and identity, strength and love, trust and despair, this book never shies away from the true horrors of existence as a slave and even as a free black woman dependent on the duplicitousness of the white community that wants to use her. Hill has written a marvelous and historically important book. My only quibble with it was really at the end when an unbelievable coincidence changed the tone of the book a bit abruptly. Aside from that, the writing was engrossing and Aminata was a wonderful character. Even as thick as the book is, it takes no time at all to be so comsumed by the plot and characters that you'll have a hard time putting it down. Highly recommended reading.

Incidentally, in Hill's native Canada, this was titled The Book of Negroes. For some reason, the publisher felt compelled to change the title here in the US but the replacement title does reflect the story very well.

Show Less

I had to read this book for a book club, and I was dreading it because of the subject-matter. I have read a large number of genocide-survivor narratives, and even a few slave narratives, in my academic life (all non-fiction) and I have been emotionally shattered by each and every one of

Show More

them.

However, once I got over my initial hesitation and read the first few pages I was spellbound by Aminata's amazing voice. The magic of Hill's book is that, while Aminata's story is indeed horrific and gut-wrenching, and while Hill spares us no details, the book itself manages to be lyrical and beautiful and even -- dare I say it -- hopeful.

While Hill does not claim perfect historical accuracy, the book would also have enormous value as an accessible introduction to 18th and early-19th century African, North American and British history and the history of the slave trade, as well as to the foundations of race relations and human rights abuses on three continents (including here in Canada).

Canada Reads got it right -- this is the book everyone in Canada (and elsewhere) should read this year.

Show Less

This is a totally wonderful book that covers the life of an African woman from childhood to old age. The book is set in the late 1700's, and we visit darkest Africa to South Carolina, to New York, to Nova Scotia, to Sierra Leone and finally end up in London England. Aminata is a young girl of 11

Show More

when she is abducted by slave traders and made to walk for three months with other captured people to the African coast. She then boards a slave ship which takes her to the southern United States where she begins her life anew as a slave on an indigo plantation. We are with her through all her heartaches and sacrifices. We are also there to share in her moments of happiness. What keeps her going through everything and through the many miles that she journeys is the thought of eventually returning home to her small village in Africa. And her determination to gain her freedom helps her through all her trials and tribulations. She never does manage to make it back to her village, but she does see Africa again. This book is totally fascinating and Aminata herself is such a strong and courageous character. It's hard to believe that she is a fictional person, but I'm sure there were many strong-minded women like her. It is a truly great historical fiction novel that is a well-deserved winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. I highly recommend this book, although it is not easy to read sometimes. I felt overwhelming sadness for this brave woman as I read her fictional life story.

Show Less

Someone Knows My Name is an excellent piece of historical fiction writing. Aminata Diallo is abducted from her West African home at age 11, marched for months to the coast where she is sold by slave traders. Barely surviving the horrific ocean crossing, she is delivered to the Carolina Coast to

Show More

work the indigo plantations. Her adventures and harships, as she travels the eastern coast of the Americas and Canada, back to Africa and ultimately to England, are mesmerizing. It is always a surprise to me when a male author creates such a believable, authentic, unique and memorable female character, and Lawrence Hill has done exactly that in this riveting book.

Meticulously researched, steeped in history and harsh reality, Someone Knows My Name entertains, educates and resonates. After finishing the book in a weekend marathon of reading, I scoured the internet for more details and facts surrounding this facet of slavery I knew little, if anything, about. British relocation of American slaves to Novia Scotia at the end of the Revolution, and their subsequent resettlement with other former slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone was both fascinating and sobering. Observed through the intelligent eyes of Aminata, the irony of the American patriots' fight against British oppression is painful. Aminata carries herself with dignity, strength and pride through repeated and shameful acts of inhumanity, living to tell her story in her own words, on her own terms. This book is beautifully written, heart wrenching and deeply moving, and I recommend it highly.

Show Less

This book caused me to think. Gripping, real, and very eye opening.