The Book of Negroes
Lawrence Hill
HarperCollins Canada, 2007
490 pages, $24.95
When The Book of Negroes won the 2009 edition of Canada Reads, CBC Radio’s annual Survivor-like literary elimination contest, broadcaster Avi Lewis, who was championing the book, referred to author Lawrence Hill’s “titanic task” in taking on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century and refracting it through the life of one woman, Aminata Diallo, an African girl who is kidnapped as a child and shipped to the Thirteen Colonies where she is sold into slavery. It is likely that Lewis didn’t intend the obvious pop cultural association that accrues to his particular choice of words in this instance, but in fact Hill’s book shares much in common with James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning film about the great twentieth-century nautical disaster. The Book of Negroes and Titanic both view historical events through a fictional lens, employing a panoramic background, and filtering their respective narratives through the personal journeys of specific, individual characters. But more importantly, both cleave to a populist sensibility, avoiding difficult moral questions in favour of stock figures and situations, and providing a fictional experience that, notwithstanding the tragic nature of their historical backdrops, is comfortably familiar to a mass audience.
It is hard to deny that The Book of Negroes has found a mass audience. The novel has been a mainstay on Canadian bestseller lists since the Canada Reads broadcast in March 2009, but even before that it had been read by what Lewis himself acknowledged were “tens of thousands of Canadians.” It won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. If it is not already, the book seems well on its way to becoming a canonical work of CanLit.
In one respect, this is unsurprising. The novel’s epic sweep and its historical setting are perfectly suited to a national literature that favours stories set in an idealized past, where good and evil are easily demarcated and where readers are not asked to make tricky moral judgments. Not that Hill should be castigated for pointing out the evils of slavery, which as an institution remains one of the greatest blights on Western civilization in history. It would be absolutely ludicrous to criticize The Book of Negroes for not showing the good side of the slave trade. Still, it is worthwhile to examine the way the characters in the novel are portrayed, and to ask whether these portrayals contribute to a nuanced understanding of human nature within the context of the fiction itself, as opposed to the grander perspective of historical events.
In so doing, it is important always to bear in mind Hill’s predisposition to populism. Courting a mass audience requires a protagonist who can appear sympathetic, or who evinces certain heroic qualities that a reader can aspire to emulate. As a character, Aminata Diallo shares a number of common traits with earlier Hill protagonists – Mahatma Grafton in Some Great Thing and Langston Cane V in Any Known Blood. All three are independent spirits, driven to go their own way by forces arising from inside them. All three refuse to accept the circumstances of the worlds they find themselves in, and all three actively question authority.
And, not incidentally, all three are writers. The Book of Negroes opens in 1802, in London, where the free Aminata is working with a group of abolitionists who wish to end the slave trade. She is old and weak, with hair that is thinning and breasts that “have fallen, where once they soared like proud birds” (the rather unlikely simile is indicative of a writing style – be it Aminata’s or Hill’s – that is not devoid of a certain purpleness in places). Nearing the end of her life, she has decided to write down her “own private ghost story.” Her impulse to do so arises out of a feeling that although the well-intentioned whites with whom she lives in London express sympathy for her experience, they do not truly understand it:
The abolitionists may well call me their equal, but their lips do not yet say my name and their ears do not yet hear my story. Not the way I want to tell it. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.
“[W]hat purpose would there be to this life I have lived,” Aminata asks, “if I could not take the opportunity to relate it?” Accordingly, Aminata pens her experience for an imagined anonymous reader who may some day stumble upon the pages she has written.
All of which is fair enough to a point. But the fictional conceit of imagining that it is Aminata, not Hill, who is crafting the careful, grammatically correct sentences in the book also testifies to one way in which the author stacks the deck in favour of his character right from the beginning. As a child, Aminata is blessed with an unusual curiosity and precociousness, which allows her to learn midwifery from her mother in Africa. This ability will come in useful once she arrives in Carolina, where she is identified as a “sensible” slave (i.e. one that understands English and can learn various skills beyond simple manual labour). Insensible slaves, we are told, “couldn’t speak to the white man, and… would never be given an easier job, or taught an interesting skill, or be given extra food or privileges.”
Aminata’s “sensibility” gives her a leg up from the start; she begins learning to read on the sly, eventually becoming, in the words of a white ex-surgeon “better read than nine out of ten Englishmen.” When she finds herself in the employ of a Jewish indigo merchant named Solomon Lindo, she is taught rudimentary accounting and ledger keeping – all skills that will pay off later on in the novel. There is a certain calculation here; Aminata’s native intelligence, her wit, and her easy ability to learn new skills are essential elements in ensuring her survival, and they are also helpful plot devices to move the story forward.
Moreover, they allow her the opportunity to ruminate in a baldly didactic way upon her situation among the whites in the Thirteen Colonies:
After all the books I had read, and all that I had learned about the ways of the white people in South Carolina, I now felt, more than ever before, that these people didn’t know me at all. They knew how to bring ships to my land. They knew how to take me from it. But they had no idea at all what my land looked like or who lived there or how we lived.
And elsewhere: “That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.” Passages such as these, which feel more like artificial authorial intrusion into the narrative than the authentic representation of Aminata’s voice, emphasize Aminata’s philosophical, analytic approach to her experience, at the same time as they underscore the antipodal relationship between good and evil in the book.
In addition to being sensible, Aminata is among the most morally unimpeachable characters to appear in recent fiction. Her innate goodness and her strength of character are practically saintly; she carries the sword of righteousness with her at all times. She stands up to Lindo, telling him at one point: “You own nothing but your own conscience.” After escaping in Manhattan, she teaches the blacks in the makeshift Canvas Town to read and write, and never once does she give in to the impulse for revenge against her captors. Indeed, when her husband Chekura suggests killing one of them, she replies, “There’s been enough killing in our lives.” Later, when asked whether she hates all white men indiscriminately, Aminata replies, “If I spent my time hating, my emotions would have been spent long ago, and I would be nothing more than an empty cowrie shell.” She’s right, but that’s not the point. From a fictional perspective, her Christ-like predisposition to turn the other cheek shaves away layers of complexity from her presentation. Aminata’s unalloyed virtue bleeds her character of any moral ambiguity, and thereby of much fictional interest.
Her white captors, by contrast, are the very personification of evil. Even Lindo, who is initially presented as more enlightened than other slave owners – he pays Aminata a weekly wage and refers to her as a servant rather than a slave – is eventually unmasked as the man responsible for separating her from her young son. But Lindo’s malevolence, which he tries to slough off when it is unveiled, cannot compare to that of Robinson Appleby, Aminata’s first master, who frequently resembles a moustache-twirling villain from a silent movie. After Appleby discovers that Aminata has become pregnant, he viciously slices off her hair, snarling: “Say ‘I gots wool on my head, not hair.’” And earlier, when he discovers that Chekura has been “sniffing after” Aminata, he rapes her as a means of proving his own dominance:
“Who owns you?” he said.
“Master.”
“I say who owns you?”
The wiry hairs on his chest scratched my breasts. The stubble on his cheeks bit into my face.
“Master, please don’t –”
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” he said.
Appleby’s brutal sexual assault is in stark contrast to the orgasmic coupling between Aminata and Chekura later on in the novel:
Licking and touching every inch of his skin, I basked in the smell and the sweat of him and felt my passion rising under his tongue and his fingers as they circled and teased and devoured me. Our lips met. I brought just the very tip of him into me and we stayed like that, kissing and licking and slowly rocking. I moaned as his lips tickled my nipples and his thumb slid against the hard, extended ridge of my womanhood. Chekura arched and slid deep inside me and we inhaled life one from the other. The sound of his breathing and gasping brought me to the peak of my own pleasure. Once, twice, three times I shook and shuddered as my husband spilled himself deep inside me and we cried out together.
The reference to “the hard, extended ridge of [her] womanhood” is an example of the manner in which Hill wants to have things both ways in the novel. Aminata is kidnapped into slavery at age eleven, just before she is to undergo the procedure of female circumcision that would remove her clitoris, thereby depriving her of the ability to take pleasure in sexual congress. This “lucky” accident of fate allows her to engage in the kind of unbridled coupling with Chekura that Hill delights in describing throughout the book.
On the one hand, the contrasting descriptions of sex with Appleby and Chekura are absolutely appropriate to their respective contexts: a violent encounter in the first instance, a loving one in the second. On the other hand, the descriptions are a clear (not to say heavy-handed) illustration of the irreconcilable dichotomy between the forces of good and evil in the novel, and its attendant moral reductivism.
Appleby is not a bad man because he rapes Aminata: Appleby is evil to the core, and the sexual assault is merely a particularly brutal manifestation of this evil. In contrast to the slightly more nuanced portraits of Lindo and the English abolitionists, Appleby is little more than a caricature of the brutal slave owner. “You don’t own that baby any more than you own the wool on your head,” he tells Aminata when he finds out that she’s pregnant by Chekura. “They both belong to me.” Doubtless this attitude prevailed among white slave owners at the time – for how else is it possible to so completely subjugate another human being than to view him or her as nothing but chattel? Nevertheless, from a fictional perspective, these characters are drawn in particularly broad strokes, with little attention paid to the ambiguities and contradictions that exist inside every human being.
True, Aminata does strike what is described as a “deal with the devil” in bargaining with a group of slavers to take her back home, and she eventually ends up questioning her own people’s practice of owning woloso – second-generation slaves – but neither of these things significantly impinge upon her essential rectitude. Aminata avers that her deal with the slavers is questionable, but insists that “it was better than no deal at all.” In trading three barrels of rum for passage inland in hopes of returning to her home town of Bayo, Aminata is merely employing the same survival instinct that has kept her alive throughout her ordeal. And as for the woloso, the only conclusion she allows herself to reach is that “the trading in men would continue for as long as some people were free to take others as their property,” a conclusion that neatly removes her own moral agency from the equation.
None of this, coming as it does late in the novel, adds much complexity to Aminata’s journey from victim to survivor, a story that demands an upward arc from subjugation to freedom, and from darkness into light. The kind of arc, come to think of it, that would be appropriate to a melodramatic Hollywood blockbuster, for which Hill’s novel, with its cinematic approach and easy morality, seems tailor-made.
Here we return, inevitably, to the subject of Hill as populist. The appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of readership necessitates a certain smoothing out of his story’s rough edges. It’s important to make Aminata’s experience arduous, but not so much so that a reader becomes uncomfortable. “I ain’t killable,” she says at one point, and it is essential that a reader believe this in order to stay with her on her journey. Similarly, a reader’s sympathies must never be compromised: it must remain clear at all times on which side of the moral divide righteousness resides. If this means that Aminata needs to be presented as unwaveringly upright and the forces of evil surrounding her unswervingly corrupt, so be it. That human beings are unpredictable is a truth that would only complicate matters unnecessarily.
It is tempting to think of earlier periods in history as less complex than our own, and this is one possible reason why so many Canadian novelists look to the past for their settings and their subject matter. By locating their fiction in the past, they free themselves from the responsibility of addressing the thorny issues of moral uncertainty and ambiguity that exist in contemporary society. But this approach evinces a kind of historical blindness that disregards the fact that while circumstances change, human nature does not. If Aminata is ultimately unconvincing as a character, it is in large part because she is simply too good to be true. Likewise, the world in which she finds herself, with its absolute distillation of moral certainties, doesn’t require readers to confront any discomfiting questions about their own natures or prejudices or darker impulses.
A reader comes away from The Book of Negroes with no greater insight than that slavery is wrong, which is an attitude that most readers could reasonably be assumed to have held going in. But this, too, is an adjunct of the populist instinct. The populist does not seek to jar people out of their complacency, for it is precisely this complacency that allows for mass appeal. The populist reinforces truths that an audience already knows, and bolsters attitudes that an audience already holds. The populist does not use language that is unfamiliar or challenging, nor does he expose his audience to ideas or characters that may frighten them in their contrariness. The populist appeals to surfaces, not to depths. The populist, in short, views the world in black and white.
Tags: Issue 77
This book is absolutely brilliant. Lawrence hill did a magnificent job.
Historical fiction masterpiece which builds characters around actual people who fought slavery, etc. I loved this book and learned so much. I never knew the British founded a colony of Blacks in Nova Scotia, and knew nothing of the colony in Sierra Leon. I loved all that I learned from this book.