Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes is a sweeping tale of a girl, Aminata Diallo, who is captured from what she eventually learns is her homeland of Sierra Leone and what she endures as a slave in pre-Revolutionary Colonial America. She is a gifted midwife like her mother. She is also somewhat learned in her father’s Muslim faith which is what sustains her on the treacherous Middle Passage. Immediately she stands out as special in the eyes of the many whites or, toubab, she encounters. It is obvious that she is very bright and a quick study of almost anything thrown at her. We see her propensity for midwifery and languages take her from an indigo plantation on St. Helena Island off the coast of the Carolinas to being a house servant in the home of a Jewish couple to Nova Scotia as a free woman to Sierra Leone as part of a resettlement group to London to speak to Parliament in the fight to abolish the slave trade. It is a story involving slavery that Americans are not often privy. Yet, for the obviously amazing amount of historical research that went into this tome, Hill did not, for me, deliver a tour de force book focused on the Colonial period of American slavery. His writing style fluctuated from broad strokes to ones quite narrow. I was jarred several times from lengthy details about one event just to have its conclusion or the next event glossed over. Everything seemed to always come to too neat an ending including the entire novel itself. Better developed characters could have made this read more epic for me. The prose lacked any real color but moved along at a steady pace. It is also heavy on dialogue and dialogue that is...in the pocket. Again, the ending was very neat and a bit fantastical. He took some judicious liberties with some real life characters that our heroine, Aminata, would have encountered in this era. Hill does a decent job of revealing the irony of the colonists who rebelled and demanded their freedom from British rule with its juxtaposition against the enslavement pf Africans. What also shines is the use of place and how it impacted the treatment and well-being of enslaved and freed people of African descent in the burgeoning U.S. The Book of Negroes is, with its flaws, an engaging read that is strong in the history it puts forth during the time when the Atlantic Slave trade was at its peak and being challenged by abolitionists and what one woman endured to find freedom and her own sense of place.
