It hit me like the text’s “sack of hammers.” Somewhere around page 389 of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, I realized I had become so completely engrossed in his masterful telling of the hard life and crueller times of Amanita Diallo that I had forgotten I was reading a novel. But I was. And it is a brilliant one.
The Book of Negroes tells the epic story of Amanita, a precocious, eleven-year-old girl stolen from her home in West Africa by slave traders in 1756. After being force-marched overland to the sea, she is squeezed into the bowels of a slave ship and dispatched across an unfamiliar, dangerous ocean to America, sold to a plantation owner, used andabused, then sold again. Near the end of the American Revolution, she escapes and becomes part of an exodus of black loyalists seeking British-promised freedom in Nova Scotia. But when reality turns out be less than advertised, Amanita ultimately joins another historic exodus—this time back to...
Stephen Kimber is a professor of journalism at the University of King’s College and co-founder of its Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. His latest book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, was published in 2013 by Fernwood.
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