The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina.
Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white, is precisely evoked by Lawrence Hill, himself a Canadian of mixed-race background. In pages of harrowing description, sugar merchants are seen to appraise their ‘cargo’ like cattle, prodding and poking orifices for signs of disease.
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