Seeing her intelligence and potential, a fellow Muslim slave named Mamed secretly teaches her to read and write.Īs a teenager Aminata manages to reunite with Chekura, and they sneak off to meet once a month.

She is taken under the wing of a fellow slave named Georgia, who helps her learn English. After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, including a slave revolt, she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave. A boy her age, Chekura, has been forced to assist the slave traders, but is later sent abroad just like the rest. Even before she is placed on the ship, she vows that one day, she will return. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title.' Synopsis Īminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, Niger in West Africa and forced to walk for three months to the sea in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are speaking in a deeply offensive manner if you were to use such words. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada.

In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins.

My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn't escape to Canada. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. 'I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War.

The book of negroes by lawrence hill