Book Reviews

This is the final reading of this book. The reading will cover from page 400 to the end of the novel.

This reading begins with the Nova Scotians mourning the recent tragedy in Freetown. Some call for armed rebellion, however daddy Moses seems to diffuse the situation partly and Clarkson helps bring the reality of the situation to light. Afterwards Aminata meets a man by the name of Dr. Falconbridge. Falconbridge was surgeon on a slave vessel and connects with Aminata over the horrors he witnessed. She also meets with his wife who despite having some racists beliefs, is intelligent and direct. Through Falconbridge she finds a connection inland and pursues it. He unfortunately must take her to Bance Island where she meets the second in command of the fort there. The man and her have a rather heated confrontation hoever by the end her agrees to arrange passage for her inland. Clarkson attempts to convince her to come with him to England to fight with the abolitionists instead, however she is dead set on finding her hometown. After saying her goodbyes Aminata journeys with a trader named Alassane into the interior of Africa. A great many days into the journey, Aminata overhears the traders plans to sell her in the next village. Despite contracting a fever Aminanat escapes and flees, eventually finding her way to a small village. She recovers here spending a month in the villagers care in return for stories of her life and her struggles. Eventually she regains her strength and travels back to the coast. She decides that her search for Bayo is not worth her freedom and she wishes to help Clarkson fight for the freedom of others. Arriving in England she meets again with Clarkson and nearly succumbs to fever, however after recovering at his household, she meets with the abolitionists. They seek to control the writing of her story to maintain authenticity, however Aminata is relentless and eventually is able to gain the right to write the book herself. She also wrote a report and spoke to the parliamentary committee on the nature of the slave trade and her life. This circulates her story around London and she becomes famous, speaking at schools and literary societies. She is eventually invited for tea with the King. On her wait to this meeting she spots a young black woman in the crowd, but scarcely gives her a second glance. She meets with the King and Queen, but is hardly granted a meeting, however the act is important enough. She then returns to he place of residence, and receives a visitor, the girl in the crowd earlier, her daughter, May. She learns of May’s escape from the Witherspoons in London, and of May’s current position as a teacher in a school for black children. Aminata’s story is published by May’s fiancee, and the abolitionists make their movement in parliament. Aminata slowly succumbs to old age and the story ends with her awaiting the news of the slave trades end.

The last few chapters of Aminata’s story are powerful ones. The lull of the previous reading ends abruptly with her flight from the traders, the moral struggle of choosing her freedom over her home presents a instance of development in Aminata’s character that is both profound and beautifully written, so much so it surpasses all other similar instances in the entire novel. There are some lulls and unnecessary points but the story concludes so wonderfully that even the astounding coincidence of her finding her daughter seems to fit despite its implausibility. I was greatly impressed with the latter half of this book, and the conclusion ended the story perfectly.

This reading covers pages 352-400. This is a shorter reading, despite its eventfulness.

This reading opens with Aminata still living in Birchtown, somehow pressing on despite her daughters disappearance. It is in 1790 when a young visitor named Thomas Peters arrives and speaks to all the residents about his intent to visit London and attempt to get land granted to the Black loyalists. He sets off and eventually returns with news about a company planning to create a Black settlement on the coast of Africa where which any of the residents of Birchtown could attempt to go. This settlement is named Sierra Leone after the Company funding the excursion. Soon they meet a British lieutenant named John Clarkson who offers them passage to Africa. Aminata befriends Clarkson and assists him in registering every person eligible to come with them on their journey. They eventually head to Halifax where the travelers shelter while Clarkson outfitted the ships for the voyage. It is here Clarkson informs Aminata that the ship Chekura had taken to Nova Scotia had gone down and that everybody aboard had perished. This devastates Aminata, however with the last of her family now gone, she finally makes the decision to join the excursion to Sierra Leone. Aminata arrives at the coat of Africa unharmed and the Nova Scotians disembark for their colony. They meet the neighboring peoples the Tenme, who serve a ruler named king Jimmy. They also find themselves close to Bance Island, the slave factory from which Aminata was sent to America. Working to establish the town of Freetown, they work hard to set up a settlement and unload the supplies the have brought. Aminata does her part and even learns to speak with the Tenme. The Nova Scotians are dissapointed in the lack of land for them to work, however many recognize that they are, slowly approaching freedom and need the help of the company. Aminata however, feels the need to return to her home, and begins to plan her voyage inland. Eventually a coffle of slaves is lead through Freetown. The Nova Scotians are outraged and Thomas Peters attempts to stop the coffle, however he is shot and the slaves, lead away.

This reading is consistent with the previous in the sense of strong character like Thomas Peters and John Clarkson. It also explores some deep themes of what it means to be free and to fight for freedom, intertwining with some amazing character development on Aminata’s part. However there are not as many potent scenes and the story seems to drift into a lull after Chekuras death. This does not discourage me as a reader and the story continues to be informative and holds my interest.

This post will cover pages 233-351. Once again this is a longer reading so I apologize for the longer post.

The third book opens once again with an elderly Aminata working with the abolitionists to fight against the slave trade. After a short scene in a church. It returns to Aminata`s trip with Lindo to New York. Lindo attempts to make amends with Aminata over the course of the trip, but to no avail. Once arriving in New York they stay at an inn run by a black man named Sam Fraunces. Sam understands Aminata’s position and offers to help her escape from Lindo when he can. After attending a concert with Lindo and witnessing the opening violent riots that would begin the American revolution, Aminata makes her escape. With Sam’s aid she makes her way out of town to hide in the woods, only returning once she is sure Lindo has left due to the British closing the harbor. From this point she works for Sam and teaches at the local chapel. She builds a house in canvas town, a black ghetto, and quickly befriends many of her students and neighbors. She has many encounters over the next few years, meeting a British lieutenant named waters and a girl carrying his child named Rosetta. She watches as the conflicts of the American revolution escalate, and as many of her friends side with the British under the promise of freedom. When the British surrender, however, it appears they have betrayed the black population who sided with them. Yet Waters seeks out Aminata and informs her that the British would keep their promise through a technicality in the peace treaty they signed and he asks together with his commander if she would work with them to register all the residents of Canvas Town in the titular “Book of Negros”. Aminata accepts. Following this she is once again reunited with Chekura after nine years apart. Aminata then works to register every Black loyalist in the book of negros, including Chekura who leaves ahead of her, but not before getting her pregnant with another child. Aminata is scheduled to leave with the last of the British boats from New York, surprisingly however, before she can leave Robinson Applebee appears and attempts to claim her as his property. He almost succeeds but Solomon Lindo arrives and claims Aminata, promptly freeing her immediately after. He attempts to apologize but Aminata, scared for the moral safety of her developing child, flees. Aminata then travels and arrives in Nova Scotia in a settlement called Shelburne. She immediately faces intense discrimination and ends up in another Black ghetto called Birchtown. She does not find the land she is promised, however she meets a blind preacher paralyzed from the waist down named Daddy Moses. She makes a home in Birchtown and befriends the locals, acting as a midwife, working at a print shop, and surviving with the others among disease and the cold. She then has her second baby in Birchtown, naming it May after the month of her birth. She raises May on her own, as Chekura is still missing, and teaches her to read, walk and speak. During her employment at the print shop Aminata befriends a white loyalist woman named Alverna Witherspoon. She finds herself in both the employment of the Witherspoons and ion need of their help several times. First when May becomes terribly sick, and secondly when the white loyalist ex soldiers begin to violently riot and kill many of the Black loyalists. The second time when sheltering with the Witherspoons Aminata leaves to see if her house in Birchtown is still standing after the recent riots. Returning to the Witherspoons residents Aminata finds their house empty and abandoned. Taking May with them, the Witherspoons had fled. This is where the reading ends.

This reading was huge and there was much to reflect on, however I will attempt to summarize my thoughts on these chapters as best as I can. I found throughout the reading almost consistently all the new characters introduced and development current characters were given was mature and in depth and interesting. The characters shared interesting and powerful scenes, and each presented a different situation in the setting. This brings my only criticism of the characterization, some characters, for example Sam Fraunces, seemed to have viewpoints that only existed to communicate to the reader that the way of thinking they held existed in the setting. While this fits well with the historical narrative it seemed clumsily presented. Outside of this minor flaw the setting took place in a rather glanced over part of the history of the American slave trade and it was in finding this focus that Lawrence Hill most certainly hit his stride, it was interesting and impressively written.

This post will cover pages 163-233 and conclude book 2 of the Book of Negros reading. I apologize for the length there was a lot of major events in this chapter.

This reading begins immediately after the previous one with Aminata recovering from Appleby’s attack. The discussion of her recovery is short lived however, and she begins to tell of the redirection of Appleby’s attacks to another girl, and how two more years go by with her working on the indigo plantation. She understands she must escape and get home, however with seemingly no escape from the plantation she continues to assist Georgia as a midwife and learns to read and write from Mamed. Her visits from Chekura continue during this time and eventually as the two get closer and closer, Chekura gets Aminata pregnant. Soon a couple of white men visit the plantation, one is an indigo inspector named Solomon Lindo and the other is a rich trader named William King. Lindo seems to respect her somewhat, and upon discovering she can read chooses not to tell anyone. However King mocks Aminata and attempts to rape her, luckily he is interrupted just in time. Soon after Aminata informs Chekura of her pregnancy and they get married. As Aminata’s life continues on the plantation signs of her pregnancy begin to show and Appleby takes notice of her situation as well as her visits with Chekura. He punishes her by cutting off her hair and taking her clothes however she maintains her dignity and bears her child safely, albeit without Chekura. Chekura does eventually arrive to see his child, a boy Aminata names “Mamadu” after her father, and Aminata continues her everyday life on the plantation. One day when Aminata wakes up she finds her child missing, she runs outside just in time to see Robinson Appleby giving her child to a man in a cart, who drives off with it. He tells her that he has sold her child. Devastated, Aminata refuses to work and falls into a deep depression. Appleby punishes her but she does not work, so he eventually sells her to Solomon Lindo. Lindo treats her with respect  and she befriends his other “servant” Dolly a short fused, angry woman, and Solomon Lindo’s wife Mrs.Lindo. She assists Dolly and works as a midwife to pay Mr. Lindo for her room and board. She also learns to keep Mr. Lindo’s books, while he teaches her further reading and writing as well as Arithmetic. Working in Charlestown, she helps bring Dolly’s son into the world, helps Mrs. Lindo give birth, and witnesses her first “Map of Africa”. After years, she hears news of both Georgia and Fomba’s deaths, which, with scarcely any room to recover, was followed by a smallpox epidemic which took the lives of Dolly, Mrs. Lindo, and their sons. During the following months of grief, Aminata finally reunites with Chekura. He is not able to stay, but he and Aminata share a night together and informs Aminata that Lindo helped sell her baby, and that the baby died. This causes a large fight between Lindo and Aminata. To attempt to patch things up, Lindo takes Aminata to New York on for business, and this is where the chapter ends.

This reading is ripe with tragedies, some presented eloquently, others bluntly, most in impressive fashion, some in disappointing fashion. My opinions on this reading are a flux, Aminata’s character development was everywhere as she learned to thrive and attempted to find happiness, however the idealistic feeling the author had given her still existed. The tragedies Aminata encounters are handled exceptionally well for the most part, bringing humanity and power back into her character. Some vastly important events in the novel are skimmed over, and not for the sake of the shock being overly blunt with these events brings in writing. This is seen in the death of Dolly and Mrs. Lindo, while Aminata’s mourning is handled well, their deaths themselves seemed to take away from them as characters, as they were hardly spoken of except in Aminatas feelings concerning them. All in all the setting, heavy themes, characters and tone of this reading all impress me, and my gripes hardly took away from that.

Book two will be divided into two parts, the first covering pages 99-163, which we will be covering in this post.

Book two opens where book one left off, with Aminata arriving in America and being sold as a slave. She is one of the last slaves sold, and she is weak an it doesn’t look like she will survive. However she manages to pull through and eventually arrives on a plantation owned by a man named Robinson Appleby. She goes through a long and difficult period of recovery, where she sleeps for many days recovering from sickness. She is cared for through this, and for a long time on the plantation afterwards, by an older slave woman named Georgia. She helps Aminata survive on the plantation, and she teaches her to speak Gullah, a language commonly used among slaves. On the plantation she finds that Fomba is the only person from her old village to arrive on the plantation with her, however through her friendship with Georgia she eventually manages to access what is called “the fishnet”. The fishnet is a network of information traded among slaves to help them find one another. Aminata uses this to find Chekura, whom she begins meeting and eventually forms a relationship with. She even manages to connect with the strict overseer, Mamed, who is also a Muslim and he teaches her to read. However despite all this support from her fellow slaves, plantation life is extremely harsh and unforgiving. The intense labor which continues for most of the daylight hours is done to produce indigo, a clothing dye. She also survives other tremendous challenges such as being temporarily infected with a sort of early vaccine against smallpox, which makes her sick for days. She also experiences tremendous trauma when she is raped by Mr. Appleby, one of the most disturbing parts of the reading. The assigned pages end with this experience, however Aminata and the story press on.

With the beginning of the second book in this novel my opinions are already starting to change. While I am still unsure about the usage of cliches in the design of most of the original characters, Aminata’s character and the new characters introduced in the chapter have both shown a large improvement since the beginning of the second book. Aminata’s inconsistent ability to stomach horrendous trauma has evolved into a much more real and human stance, and Georgia, despite fitting several cliches as previous characters do, seems much more reasonably written and easy to connect to. Other characters, for example Mamed, retain this easy to connect to standpoint as well as being an unlikely and interesting character. Mamed’s motives, demeanor, and relationship to Aminata make him one of my favorite characters. Aside from this step forwards in characterization the realism and detail of the setting has not faltered. The struggles and hardships faced by each character seem real and startling. This is most horrifically seen near the end of this reading, in which these Aminata faces a terrible rape from her master. This scene has impact, and carries on in the readers mind.

Upon finishing part one, referred to as book 1, in The Book of Negros there are a number of points and idea’s i wish to reflect upon. To start off I will summarize the first book.

Aminata Diallo is the daughter of a Jewelry maker in the small village of Bayo in western Africa at the beginning of the 18th century. She spends her everyday assisting her mother in delivering children at the various villages, and learning basic writing from her father, the only man in the Village to own a Qur’an. She is also a free born Muslim, following Islam with much of her village, this earns her crescent scars on her face as marks of pride. However abruptly the rumor of white kidnappers on the west coast becomes a reality, and her village is attacked, leaving her parents dead and her captured. They are captured by African men working for the white men and are forced to walk in a coffle, which is a string of captured people, to be sold into slavery overseas. She sees many died on the walk, and even more on the boat, as disease and hunger and violence take many lives. However she survives the journey and as the book ends, they arrive at their destination.

To begin with Mr. Hill has done a impressive amount of research for this book. The events and details of every inch of Aminata’s journey seem to be indicators of a wealth of knowledge on the world she lived in, portraying her world vividly and accurately. However, focusing on the characters of this story, some things are rather lackluster. Examples of this would be nearly every character from Bayo, the running themes seems to be almost cliche. This is seen in the strict and selfish wife of the chief, Fanta, who fits the distinctly western trope of the no nonsense housewife who runs the neighborhood. This is also seen in Fomba, the dull giant with a heart of gold, and Aminata’s parents, who seem to be idealized concepts of people rather than characters. Even Aminata suffers from this, being unrealistically capable and strong willed for an 11 year old girl as she seems to shake off death immediately, after only being affected for a second. These faults don’t mean much in the face of the exceptional writing and near perfect setting and scene building, however they dehumanize the characters to idealistic figureheads, disallowing proper investment in these characters stories, and in the end making the audience simply care about them less. That said though what matters about this book is the world and the context, more than the characters. I would say that this book is more about the slave trade than it is about Aminata, and it excels at being that, more than anything.

Bear in mind this is not my final verdict on this book. These statements and all which follow may change drastically before the books end.