Stephen Amidon

The Sunday Times February 8, 2009

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Review by Stephen Amidon

Among the abundant evils brought about by the European trade in African slaves, one of the greatest was the systematic silencing of so many black voices. The erasure of native languages, coupled with strict laws against slaves learning to read and write, meant that generation upon generation of potential chroniclers of the African exodus were deprived of the means to narrate its history. Lawrence Hill’s expansive third novel is an attempt to remedy this crime. The Book of Negroes opens in 1745 in west Africa, where 11-year-old Aminata Diallo lives with her jeweller father and midwife mother. She is a bold, brilliant girl who dreams of becoming her village’s storyteller. “Perhaps, one day, I would be the only woman, and one of the only people in my entire village, to be able to…write in the gorgeous, flowing Arabic script.” Her idyllic life is shattered when she is captured by slave traders, who ship her to the New World on a hellish transport. After surviving a bloody onboard rebellion, she is carted off to a South Carolina indigo plantation, whose owner soon takes unwelcome notice of her. “Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful,” Diallo later claims, “but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.” Despite all manner of deprivation and tribulation, Diallo survives the eventful half-century to come. “I ain’t killable,” she matter-of-factly explains when a fellow slave remarks on her durability. Her journey takes her to revolutionary war-era New York City, to inhospitable Nova Scotia, and even back to Africa. She serves as a midwife for both blacks and whites, and also secretly learns to read and write English, skills that help her win her freedom – or at least a bastardised version of it – when the British hire her to write “The Book of Negroes”, a catalogue of all slaves eligible for release from bondage under the terms of a treaty signed with newly independent America. But no matter how heroically Diallo strives, cruel reminders that she is ultimately nothing more than property continue to batter her as she passes from actual enslavement to impotent liberation. She ends her long journey in London, where abolitionists led by William Wilberforce ask her to join their campaign against the slave trade. She quickly becomes a celebrity, earning a meeting with King George and Queen Charlotte, who is rumoured to have a touch of African blood herself. What is best about Hill’s novel is the author’s richly meticulous recreation of late 18th-century slave life, based largely on the actual Book of Negroes, which contains the names and brief histories of over 3,000 slaves who took refuge with the British. European cartographers thought Diallo’s native land so primordial that, in the words of Swift, they filled in their maps’ empty spaces with “elephants for want of towns”. In Hill’s rendering, however, Africa is held together by a sophisticated social fabric that is shredded by the slave trade. Ironically, it is America, with its malarial swamplands and pestilential cities, that is truly primitive, its savagery intensified by an economy that is mercilessly devoted to the bottom line. The slaves’ daily strategies for surviving this brutal system are finely detailed, whether they involve a folk remedy for smallpox, a wide-ranging underground news network called “the fishnet”, or an ingenious private language called Gullah. Given Hill’s historical integrity, it is ironic that his publishers in America, Australia and New Zealand should have blanched at using the actual title of a valuable historical document for his novel for fear that the archaic term “Negroes” would cause offence. They called it Someone Knows My Name instead – at least they didn’t name it The Book of African-Americans. If the novel has a fault, it is that the author is at times a bit too enamoured of his heroine, casting Diallo in such relentlessly heroic terms that she is in danger of becoming iconic rather than human. In its grand historical sweep, however, The Book of Negroes succeeds admirably in giving voice to a captive people who were for so long kept mute

Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill Doubleday £12.99 pp496