The Book of Negroes: (U.S. Title: Someone Knows My Name)

Published as as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.” This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own.

Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone—passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America—is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey. Lawrence Hill is a master at transforming the neglected corners of history into brilliant imaginings, as engaging and revealing as only the best historical fiction can be. A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex.

Lawrence Hill is the author of the novels Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing, and the non-fiction work Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. He also co-authored, with Joshua Key, The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq. He lives in Burlington, Ontario.

Interview with Lawrence Hill

Excerpted from the forthcoming P.S. material in the Perennial edition of his bestselling novel, The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill was kind enough to answer a few questions about his inspiration for the book and what it was like to write from a woman's perspective.

HarperPerennial: When did you first come across the ledger called the Book of Negroes, and did you know immediately that you would write about it?
Lawrence Hill: I first heard about the Book of Negroes in 1980 when I read The Black Loyalists, a scholarly book by Canadian historian James Walker. Even before I wrote my first novel, Some Great Thing, which was published in 1992, I knew that one day I would write the fictional story of a woman who had to have her name entered into the Book of Negroes. It wasn't until I began to research and write the novel in 2002, however, that I examined reproductions of the actual ledger. The research and writing took about five years.

HarperPerennial: How did you know when you'd researched "enough"? Did you ever feel overwhelmed by the weight of the history you were trying to capture in the novel?
Lawrence Hill: Completely. I had to assimilate and then play with the history in so many locations-Mali, the South Carolina sea islands, Charleston, Manhattan, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. It felt as though I was writing several novels in one.

Research is captivating, but it also serves itself up as the quintessential avoidance strategy. "How did your work go on the novel today?" "Fine, I spent eight hours in the University of Toronto library." Eventually, you have to put down all the books and start mining your own soul for the story that waits within. The novel was more far-reaching in its first drafts. I chose to pare it back, whittling out hundreds of pages as I strove to make the story more manageable and engaging for the reader.


HarperPerennial: What was your most surprising finding?
Lawrence Hill: The first discovery I made remains the most striking. In 1792, twelve hundred Black Loyalists set out in a flotilla of fifteen ships to sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. A number of the adults on board were not just travelling to Africa-it turns out that they had been born on that continent, so they were literally travelling back to Africa. This back-to-Africa exodus took place more than a century before the famed Jamaican Marcus Garvey urged blacks in the Diaspora to return to the motherland. It took place decades before former American slaves founded Liberia. The first massive back-to-Africa exodus in world history set off from the shores of Halifax, but to date, few Canadians know it.

HarperPerennial: Do you find that Canadians are surprised, or even unwilling to accept, that our history involves poor treatment of the Black Loyalists?
Lawrence Hill: Canadians have had little exposure to aspects of the black experience that-unlike, say, the Underground Railroad-reflect badly on our country and history. Although they saved the Black Loyalists in New York, the British betrayed them in Nova Scotia. In the early and mid-1780s in communities such as Shelburne and Birchtown, Nova Scotia, blacks faced outright segregation, were forced to work for wages inferior to those earned by whites for the same work, were kept (in many instances) in slavery or as indentured servants, were largely denied the farming land that they had been promised in exchange for serving the British during the Revolutionary War, and were attacked physically during Canada's first anti-black race riot. It is a disgraceful time in Canadian history, and-outside academic circles and certain black communities-Canadians have largely avoided discussing the matter. I didn't write The Book of Negroes to wag a finger or to apportion blame. I wrote it because it is an astonishing and revealing story that readers deserve to know. It forms but a small piece of the history dramatized in The Book of Negroes. I carved out this work of fiction to celebrate one woman's journey and to chart her miraculous survival, both physical and emotional.

HarperPerennial: Why did you choose to make your central character a woman? And do you find it a challenge to write scenes, such as the birthing one, from her perspective?
Lawrence Hill: The Book of Negroes is a woman's story and it was from the moment of conception. As a dramatist, I locate stories in the lives of the people who have the most to lose. Her own role as a mother is at risk in this story, yet Aminata has to do what she must to survive, and carry on catching other women's babies. On one hand, it was an immense challenge to write the life story of an African woman in the 1700s. On the other hand, it was liberating and riveting to create a character that I could never be. I have always felt more comfortable writing about people who bear no resemblance to me.

I find the texture of her life fascinating. In the novel, one African who is stolen from her homeland becomes bitter to the point of turning murderous. Another African is so traumatized by the dislocation of slavery that he loses the ability to speak. Aminata somehow manages to keep going and to do so with love in her heart. This is what interests me most about her character. She can't stop all the evil in the world, but she will not stoop to it.