Someone Knows My Name

I kept thinking as I was reading, this book HAS to be non-fiction. The things that were endured were gut wrenching. A great story to read in the times that we are in today. It makes you feel appreciation for the things that different races have overcome. A must read.

Someone Knows My Name: A Novel This is a fantastic book! I never knew much about the transatlantic slave trade and in this book you will read the pages of truth about Black Loyalists and their history. Its about a woman with great faith and determination and a loyalty to her homeland. Meena is one of the strongest and courageous woman I have ever know. This story will change you...it is simply brilliant.

Thanks to the storytelling skills of one who has the vision to imagine one female's journey through decades of slavery, revolution and abolitionist fervor, once more the silent rise from the depths to howl their grief, rage and spirit. Born a free Muslim in her village, Aminata Diallo leaves childhood behind, as well as the dead bodies of her father and mother, captured by slave-traders, chained to others on a months' long trek to the ship that will carry this valuable cargo across the ocean to the American colonies. Bereft, Aminata stands horrified as dead slaves are tossed overboard or leap from despair into the waiting sea. Taught by her mother to "catch babies", the girl delivers two infants during the course of the voyage, but death strikes once again on a shipboard uprising, white men and Africans butchered in a melee of impromptu weapons and deadly "firesticks". The sights and smells of this ordeal remain imprinted on Aminata's soul, the past severed as she is thrust into a new, forbidding world. At an indigo plantation in South Carolina, Aminata learns more harsh lessons of slavery, the humiliation of belonging to someone far more powerful and unpredictable, introduced to cruelty, degradation, love and motherhood, stripped finally of all she holds dear. Brilliant and curious, "Meena" learns to hide her accomplishments behind the façade of obedience. Even in her darkest moments of despair, Meena holds fast to the truth- she was born free and belongs to no one. In such a story, the telling of truth is burdened with outrage: man's inhumane treatment of those they would exploit, the onus of slavery through centuries, the capacity for evil in the pursuit of profit. In Meena, we witness the toll on one human life. Somehow this courageous woman endures, making her way from Africa to South Carolina, New York, Nova Scotia, back to Africa and London. She catches babies from one continent to another, learning the falsity of promises and the impossibility of another voice to tell ones story: "Beware the clever man who makes wrong look right." Educated, well-spoken and determined, Aminata gathers languages to tell her tale to all who may listen, to Africans and abolitionists alike, of the Diaspora from her homeland to many countries, everywhere speaking her truth. What Barry Unsworth did for the Middle Passage in Sacred Hunger, Lawrence Hill does for the suffering of slaves, shackled first to one another, then to their owners, even abolition serving the interests of trade before humanity. Aminata Diallo's story is personal, yet speaks for many, the devastating journey of a young girl from a stolen childhood to old age, her spirit undaunted in spite of those who would own or use her. To be reminded of this nightmare is to be reminded of the collective inhumanity of those who rationalize deeds to serve the god of profit; more importantly, Aminata celebrates the extraordinary courage of the human spirit in the face of evil. Luan Gaines/ 2007.

When the British were finally evicted from the Thirteen Colonies at the end of the War of Independence, part of their cargo manifest were the "Loyalists". Among those who remained loyal to the British Crown were a group with more practical needs. Former slaves, whose roots lay in Africa, decided their options were better with the British, who were debating the wisdom of the slave trade, than with the new "Americans" who continued to find profit in human commerce and slavery. The British accepted that responsibility, transporting 3000 "Negroes" from New York City to Nova Scotia, still a fledgling Atlantic Coast colony. Lawrence Hill combines the lives of some of those transported former slaves into one woman, Aminata Diallo, who he gives the task of entering their names into the military's record: "The Book of Negroes". In this outstanding work of semi-fiction, he traces Aminata's life from her childhood in Mali through years of slavery in South Carolina to her final years in London. Her status, and her race, means that wherever she resides is considered her "home". Yet, as Aminata learns to her sorrow, "no place in the world was safe for an African" and that "survival depended on perpetual migration". Aminata was an exceptional child. The daughter of a Muslim scholar and a midwife mother, she is taken by slave collectors at a young age. Once aboard the slave ship, her talents are recognised by the ship's doctor and she's given the task of assisting as a "nurse", particularly in "catching babies" as her mother taught her. However, she arrives in North America ill and weak. Considered worth little, she's taken to an indigo plantation. She's "rescued" by a Jewish indigo inspector who, along with his wife, furthers her writing and accounting skills. A slave is shuttled about at the owner's whim, and Aminata is taken to New York just prior to the independence effort. Although she sees little of the conflict, at its end she's taken up by a Royal Navy officer, who utilises what she's learned to be the recording clerk for The Book. She joins the exiles to Nova Scotia in hopes of starting a new life. In South Carolina she had married and borne a son, now long disappeared into the hinterlands, but Aminata retains hope to rejoin them both. There's little for a freed slave in Nova Scotia and racial unrest flares when the colony's economy flags. A last hope is a novel idea put forward by British "abolitionists" seeking an end to the slave trade. The Sierra Leone Company has taken up land on the West African coast as the means to resettle Britain's former slaves. The threat of being caught up in the traffic still looms, as the battle to end the trade has barely started. Aminata's desire to find her home and return to it dominates her thinking. She's hardy and risks don't temper her craving to restore her roots. John Clarkson, the Navy officer who has become a patron, now wishes to use her abilities once more, this time to relate th

Hearing your own name spoken in public isn't usually something significant. Yet, on a slave trading ship that transported up to a thousand Africans to North America, this act of public acknowledgement was momentous. Calling out their full names to each other was equal to "affirming their humanity". In the early mornings from the bowels of the vessel the chanting voices represented not only an important ritual of recognition and respect, it was also a way of finding out who had made it through the night. The conditions on the slave ship were abysmal: the Africans were jammed together and shackled most of the time, lacking food and water and sanitation, leading to exhaustion, infections and starvation. Many lost their minds, many more died. When the captives arrived in North America they were traded and sold like cattle and their suffering continued. The brutality of the West African slave trade in which millions of Africans perished is well documented. However, when a knowledgeable and perceptive novelist transforms these records and the many personal accounts of cruelty and tragedy on the one hand and survival, perseverance and hope on the other into one inclusive narrative around one memorable character, the realities of the many merge into one rich and lively, heart wrenching and joyful history-based novel of exceptional beauty and power. First we meet Aminata Diallo, the heroine of The Book of Negroes, as a frail old woman, yet with a fiery spirit and resolve that she must have had all her life. Hill's novel lets her relate her story in her own voice, direct and uncomplicated, yet subtle and insightful. Written in the best African story-telling tradition, it addresses readers directly, absorbing us completely into characters, times and places of the struggle for survival and eventual freedom. Nurtured by loving parents in rural Mali, Aminata, unusual for the time, was educated in reading and the Qur'an by her father and learned the skill of "catching babies" from her midwife mother. Hill's familiarity with places and cultures of different peoples in West Africa gives the depiction of village life and tradition vivacity and veracity. At age eleven, during a raid on the village, the young girl is seized by African slavers and forced to join many others on the long, hard road into slavery. The memory of her parents, killed during the attack, gives her strength and guidance throughout her ordeal. Her beauty and intelligence combined with her midwifery skills, help her to stay alive during the dangerous passage to North America and for the next decades, sold as property to different more or less abuse owners. Aminata's portrayal of survival in the midst of so many who perish, of violence and misery, but also of friendships found and lost, as well as love and family, evokes a rainbow of emotions in the reader - from despair and sadness to delight and joy. Hill's talent placing himself into the mind of his heroine is admirable. Through

The actual Book of Negroes is an amazing historical document (a British military ledger) that contains the names and descriptions of 3,000 men, women, and children who served or were supported by the British during the American Revolutionary War. Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes is a brilliantly imagined novel based on the document of the same name and the events surrounding the relocation of thousands of Black Loyalists to various British colonies and eventually to Sierra Leone after the conflict. Similar in approach to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Hill's offering spans the lifetime of the fictional Aminata (Meena) Diallo, an African born woman who escaped to freedom. At the beginning of the novel Meena is in London, an old woman who has lived a tumultuous life. At the urging of her abolitionist sponsors, she is asked to pen her story which would be used as evidence depicting the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave trade. Meena, an intelligent, educated woman, authors her autobiography via vivid flashbacks through time. She writes, "Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary." She continues and details her life as a young child in an African village, her capture and Middle Passage crossing, enslavement while in America, relocation to Nova Scotia, return to Africa (Freetown, Sierra Leone), and partnering with abolitionists in England. However to summarize the book in such a way is a huge understatement - it is steeped in historical facts that educate and enlighten the reader; I was pulled in immediately after reading the opening passages. Before her capture, African spirituality/religion, education (Meena's father taught her to read and write, her mother taught her midwifery), family structure, and culture are illustrated in her interactions with her parents and other villagers. After witnessing her parent's murder at the hands of African slavers, she is coffled and mournfully treks through the African interior for months before arriving exhausted at the coastal slave port. Meena transcribed the inhumanity of the trade, the stifling stench and horrid conditions aboard the slave ship, the rapes and attempted revolts that occurred during the crossing, and the shameful and dehumanizing experience on the auction block. She suffers hardships in America at an indigo producing plantation in South Carolina. She experiences the love and loss of a husband and children. Unwilling to work after the abrupt sale of her son, she is eventually sold to a new owner and escapes to freedom while in New York. Once there, she is employed by the British to record entrants into the infamous "book" and relocates to Nova Scotia. After a decade of struggling against the harsh elements, barren landscape and broken promises regarding land o