I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Larry Hill, and I was thoroughly impressed. He was thoughful, intelligent, and well-spoken and I desperately wanted to like his book. Turns out that was incredibly easy.
With a History degree and two English degrees, I’ve always been a sucker for historical fiction. In fact, my phd thesis was going to examine Historical Fiction as a valid historical discourse, one that solicits reader empathy and imaginative involvement, permits multiple voices and consciously acknowledges the already fictitious nature of historical writing. Academic digressions aside, good historical fiction gets me excited. And the Book of Negroes delivers. This is some of the best historical fiction I’ve read in a long time.
Having read other slave narratives (such as Olaudah Equiano’s which Hill mentions), I had been previously exposed to the terrible injustices and daily torments of these kidnapped peoples; however, none of those stories were as vivid and compelling as Hill’s fictional story of Aminata Diallo. Like the maps of Africa filled with elephants and caricatures of native peoples, it was a story that we needed to illuminate the history and people of the “dark” continent – for such a rich tale of survival that touched the lives of so many should be represented in the fictional world.
The Book of Negroes follows Aminata from her kidnapping at the age of 11, through the long march to the slave ships, across the ocean to South Carolina, to New York, to Nova Scotia, to Africa and to England. The story moves swiftly, and each of these stops is exhilarating. Hill did an incredible amount of research and the details of life in his many settings are not only convincing, but rendered so successfully that I often found myself wincing at circumstances worse that I ever could have imagined.
Aminata herself is a remarkable heroine – intelligent and courageous, she perseveres despite so many unfathomably painful setbacks and losses. Midwife, scholar, planter, mother and wife – she brings admirable integrity to each role. She is also complemented by many colourful characters that remain with the reader long after the narrative leaves them behind (Georgia, a fellow slave from South Carolina happens to be a personal favourite). Hill frees these people from being mere numerical entries in the ledgers of the Book of Negroes – he endows them with the humanity that they have been oft denied by other humans and by history itself.
Aside from compelling characters, the greatest strength of Hill’s novel is its exploration of basic humanity – of good and evil, of strength and weakness. It is a study of human nature under terrible conditions that rings with veracity. Hill doesn’t shy away from exposing the hypocrisy of abolitionists who want to end the slave trade but will not take on slavery (and to a lesser extent, the Africans who owned slaves themselves), or describing the African slavers who sell their own people. Although race is undeniably important, Hill’s work is a success because simple humanity overpowers discussions of race (as it should), in fact, like Equiano, Aminata is eventually described as a “black white woman” – denying the exclusivity upon which both racial stereotypes are founded. Aminata is consequently the ideal historian, and her re-writing of history is a perfect rendering of the basic humanity which she was long denied.
