Author Lawrence Hill. (Lisa Sakulensky/HarperCollins Canada)
The original Book of Negroes measures about a foot-and-a-half by a foot-and-a-half and runs just over 150 pages. Though known to just a handful of scholars, this remarkable hand-written ledger is a historical treasure. Detailing names, ages, backgrounds and often degrading physical descriptions (“stout wench”), it’s the first public documentation of black people in North America — specifically, the 3,000 freedom-seekers who left New York for Nova Scotia and other British colonies near the end of the American Revolutionary War. In exchange for their service to the empire, Black Loyalists were promised liberty and land. What they received was little better than the circumstances they left behind: poverty, hunger, disease and servitude.
Everyone has heard of Canada’s involvement in the underground railroad; less known is this country’s own history of slavery and its dubious distinction as the site of North America’s first race riot. In 1784, gangs of unemployed white men attacked the black settlement of Birchtown, N.S., destroying 20 homes. Angry at their betrayal by the British, 1,000 Black Loyalists sailed for Sierra Leone just ten years after arriving in Canada, embarking on the world’s first return-to-Africa journey.
This story of the migration from Africa to the Americas and back was an irresistible one for Lawrence Hill, who borrowed the title for his new novel, The Book of Negroes. The Burlington, Ont. author has long been drawn to issues of black history and identity. Hill’s many books include the 2001 novel Any Known Blood, which follows an African-American family from slavery to the present day, as well as the 2002 part-memoir, part-polemic Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. His civil-rights activist parents founded the Ontario Black History society in the family’s suburban basement in 1978.
“My parents were great storytellers,” Hill says over the phone from a hotel room in Halifax, where he is promoting the book. “And they always interwove the most painful, oppressive stories with rollicking, raucous humour. It’s a very common survival strategy for oppressed people, whether they’re black, Jewish, Russian – that combination of horror and humour. My parents taught me the emotional saving grace of humour.”
Written over five years – “an exciting, daunting, endless and thrilling process,” he says – Hill’s masterful and affecting epic tells the story of Aminata Diallo. A skilled midwife and able to read and write – thanks to covert tutoring by a fellow slave – Aminata survives kidnapping by slave traders at the age of 11, the horrors of the Middle Passage and, later, an exodus to Nova Scotia, then Sierra Leone and finally England. CBC Arts Online spoke with Hill about storytelling, his favourite research discoveries and Canada’s history of slavery.
(HarperCollins Canada)
Q: The title is taken from the original historical book and is such a provocative and profound name for a novel. When did you decide to use it for your story?
A: I first thought of calling it Migrations, but it sounded too stilted and academic and boring. Then I got more into the original Book of Negroes and decided to have Aminata not only have her name entered into it, but to participate in writing it as a scribe working for the British in Manhattan. So, using it as the novel’s title began to seem like the right thing to do. I’m not a religious person – I was raised by two atheists – but I love the religious ring of The Book of Negroes. It sounds like something straight out of the Bible. I think it says everything.
Q: This book is in many ways about storytelling. Aminata asks, “What purpose would there be to this life I have lived, if I could not take this opportunity to relate it?” And there are many scenes in the book where captive Africans call out their names to each other and tell some of their history. It seems that storytelling might be the ultimate act of resistance.
A: Absolutely. [The slave traders] can do what they want to you but if you can at least say your name and have someone else say your name back to you, it seems like the most gratifying thing in the world for these poor, wretched captives in the holds of slave ships. To have somebody else say your name is like saying, “I acknowledge your humanity,” while you are trapped in a totally dehumanizing process. I was very touched as I tried to envisage these scenes where people were desperate to have their names be said and stories told.
Q: I imagine in researching a book like this, the small, everyday details of what people ate, or how they spoke, would be the most interesting. Was that the case for you?
A: Oh, yes. The most interesting thing was reading first-person accounts by black people and by Europeans who were living in the time. I read every single memoir I could find from the period. One in particular, which was published in 1789, was by Olaudah Equiano. He was an African who was kidnapped as a child, like Aminata, and taken to the Americas and got free over time. The book made him very famous in London when he published it. He wrote about seeing his breath in the cold for the first time and he thought his mouth was on fire. That was a fascinating detail, which I borrowed and used in the book.
Another incredibly interesting detail came from Anna Maria Falconbridge, whose husband helped establish the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone as an abolitionist. She goes to what was called a “slave factory,” where people were held off the coast of Africa until they are sent away in ships. She describes what it looks like to see the men and women chained in this pit of mud, out in the open, exposed to the sun and rain, like pigs in a pen. And she was shocked because she was this white, privileged woman from London and she wasn’t supposed to see or know about these things.
It was these kinds of stories that really helped me write the novel, not the scholarly stuff. This was the stuff that told me what they were wearing, what they were feeling, where their scars were, how were they made to walk and how they were chained together.
Q: Aminata is such a strong and compelling female character. Did this story have to have a woman at its centre?
A: It had to be a woman. I believe you locate the story in the shoes of the person who has the most to lose. And for dramatic purposes, this woman needs to catch babies as a midwife and she needs to lose her own babies as a woman and as a mother. There’s so much irony and the sadness in that. There was just no way it could be anything but a woman’s story. I just felt it in the gut.
Q: Lately, there’s been a greater willingness to acknowledge offences like Native residential schools or the Chinese Head Tax in the discussion of Canadian history. But there still seems to be a reluctance to address Canada’s involvement in the slave trade. Why is that?
A: I think we have this innate emotional need to think of ourselves as morally superior to those Americans who did all those dastardly things down south in slavery. And, often, we who think that don’t know that slavery existed in our own backyard. There’s a great resistance to looking at the fullness of our history. Often, we look at it in a congratulatory way: We have multiculturalism and we’re a tolerant nation and we look after each other.
I love Canada and I choose to live here and I’m proud of that, but I don’t think it serves us to sugarcoat our history. I’m not interested in pointing fingers or apportioning blame. I just wanted to dramatize and bring [this history] to the forefront so that we understand and appreciate it. And that’s not just that we were a haven for slaves along the underground railroad. But, also, that we practiced slavery here, too. And that we brought these Loyalists to Nova Scotia and betrayed them terribly and treated them in the worst possible way. And this isn’t just black history. It’s Canadian history.
The Book of Negroes is published by HarperCollins Canada and is available in stores.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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