The Book of Negroes

“We had no more clothing than goats, and nakedness marked us as captives wherever we went. But our captors were also marked by what they lacked: light in their eyes. Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person’s face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.” 

This passage expresses the dehumanizing act of enslaving fellow human beings. The young Aminata, newly captured, does not yet understand the processes by which one human being robs another of humanity, but she knows that something terrible is going on, and her own nakedness torments her. Even as a young girl of eleven, she knows to look for “light” in a person’s eyes—its absence signifies a lack of humanity, one that can never be put back, even if that person is clothed. In her nakedness, the young Aminata knows this truth about human beings, while her captors seek to erase her humanity and reduce her to the level of animals. This passage, and many others like it, uses evocative language and emotion to render the physical and psychic experience of captivity in its most basic forms: it proceeds from the physical to the emotional with devastating effect.

“Our captors paid the oarsmen with cowrie shells. I felt a cowrie in the sand, under my toes, and scooped it up before they yoked us by neck again. It was white, and hard, with curled lips ridged like tiny teeth, the whole thing as small as my thumbnail. It was beautiful and perfect, and it seemed, unbreakable. I rinsed it with water and put it on my tongue. It felt like a friend in my mouth, and comforted me. I sucked it fiercely, and wondered how many cowries I was worth.” 

This passage illustrates the ways in which currency plays a symbolic role in the novel. At this point in the story, they are still in Africa, so the accepted currency is cowrie shells. Aminata, having be raised to value this currency, draws comfort from it, admiring its strength and its beautiful shape. She celebrates it in a very visceral way, by sucking on it, and in this way, recognizes it as a friend. The scene’s ominous subtext, however, is contained in the act of exchange that is occurring: her captors are fellow blacks from her own continent, and they are betraying their own people. As she wonders how many cowrie shells she is worth, it is also important to remember that her father compensated his father-in-law for the “loss of a daughter” by paying him “four hundred strung cowrie shells,” thus introducing the concept of exchanging human beings for currency (11).

“Over to my right…the river flowed fast and wide…. At the shore of this angry river waited many canoes, each with eight rowers. I had never seen so many boats and rowers. To my left, the water expanded into eternity. It heaved and roared, lifted and dropped. It was green in some parts, blue in others, forever shifting and sliding and changing colour. It foamed at the mouth like a horse run too hard. To my left, the water had taken over the world.”

At this moment in the novel, Aminata has come to the largest body of water she has even seen in her young life. She has never seen the ocean, and she is about to get on a ship to cross the Atlantic, as so many from the African continent have done, and will do for many years. The slave trade—a massive forced migration of people—comes down to this moment in time, with water. Water is depicted in many ways in this novel, most of them emphasizing its danger and its power. It becomes a metaphor for the suffering of African peoples; on the slave ship, it receives their corpses, or offers freedom to those who wish to end their suffering through suicide. It saves and it separates. It is powerful and a barrier at the same time. 

“I turned back to see my homeland. There were mountains in the distance. One of them rose like an enormous lion. But all its power was trapped on the land. It could do nothing for any of us out on the water.”

This short passage is the moment when Aminata says goodbye to her “homeland,” though even that word is complicated in the novel. She bids farewell to Bayo, not to Africa, which is a word/concept she has not yet learned. Interestingly, she will not even learn the word “Africa” until she is in America, on the boat ride to St. Helena’s Island, South Carolina. Geography, she will learn, is more complicated than the words “home” and “homeland” can express. The next time she sees these mountains, she will be returning to Africa to live in Freetown. But even then, she questions whether she is home, and what that word actually means.

“[T]here are men, women and children walking about the [London] streets without the faintest idea of our nightmares. They cannot know what we endured if we never find anyone to listen. In telling my story, I remember all those who never made it through the musket balls and the sharks and the nightmares, all those who never found a group of listeners, and all those who never touched a quill and an inkpot.” 

This passage contrasts the suffering of enslaved people with the lives of Europeans, in this case, Londoners. As they walk the city streets, they cannot know what the people of Africa have endured. But the novel also reminds us that the city of London contains its own suffering, and that many of its inhabitants, the “white poor” (449), lead lives of desperation and struggle too. The passage also deconstructs the act of storytelling, reminding readers that telling one’s story requires objects such as a quill, and an inkpot, which are more likely to be found in this culture rather than in tribal cultures, where oral histories are more often employed.

“It struck me as unbelievable that the toubabu would go to all this trouble to make us work in their land. Building the toubabu’s ship, fighting the angry waters, loading all these people and goods onto the ship—just to make us work for them? Surely, they could gather their own mangoes and pound their own millet. Surely that would be easier than all this!” 

This passage seems to ask a very simple question, namely, would it not be easier for every man, and every culture, to do its own farming, its own production? Aminata struggles to understand why an entire group of people can arbitrarily decide to enslave an entire continent of people—Africans—to do their labor. The answer, which unfolds through the entire plot but also through the use of symbols, is that entire economies are built on human capital. The Atlantic slave trade is an extraordinarily complex machine, made up of ships, currency, and goods such as mangoes and millet. But to unravel that machine will take many years, and horrible suffering. 

“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.” 

This passage again expresses the theme of storytelling and also weaves in the theme of naming. Aminata is now free, and living comfortably in London. She is also fighting for a cause she believes in, the cause of abolition. But she is still fighting for recognition, this time from the abolitionists themselves. She finds their attempts to tell her story to be oppressive, however well-meaning they are. Words have a power—Aminata has known that all her life, ever since her father started teaching her letters and words in Arabic. Her words, in particular, have the power of a “sleeping lion,” evoking the lion-shaped mountains of Africa, which she looks at longingly as her ship leaves for America. She glimpses those same lion-shaped mountains when she returns to Africa to live in Freetown, but it is only by writing these experiences down that she gives them their strongest force.

“‘If you were born there, they call you an African. But here they call all of us the same things: niggers, Negroes. They especially call us slaves.’

‘Slaves?’ I said.

‘Slaves. It means we belong to the buckra…the men who own us.’

‘I belong to nobody, and I am not an African. I am a Bamana. And a Fula. I am from Bayo near Segu. I am not what you say. I am not an African.’” 

This conversation takes place on the boat ride from Charles Town to St. Helena’s Island, en route to Appleby’s plantation. It is significant that this is the moment when Aminata learns the word “African,” because on the plantation, she is taught how to discard her African behaviors in order to blend in with the other slaves, and in order to escape beatings from her master. Here, she still identifies herself as part of two African tribes, her mother’s and her father’s, and from the village of Bayo. In the New World, she will learn that these terms have meaning to almost none but her.

“When she came back to bed, [Georgia] said, ‘Your African mouth is like a galloping horse. Slow down and steer, honey child, or you will hit a tree.’” 

Georgia is Aminata’s mother figure in the New World, teaching her language and behaviors that will keep her safe and allow her to make her way in this new life. They share a bed, a home, and a life, as is evident in this passage, which shows their literal and figurative closeness. Georgia is teaching Aminata to be less “African,” but she does so lovingly, appreciating the young girl’s abilities and talents. Aminata is smart, and she learns fast, but she must also be careful or she will “hit a tree,” an idea which evokes the dangers that slaves must always navigate. 

“‘We got our ways,’ Georgia said. ‘Niggers got mouths like rivers. Our words swim the rivers, all the way from Savannah to St. Helena to Charles Town and farther up. I done hear of our words swimming all the way to Virginia and back. Our words swim farther than a man can walk. When we find someone, up he comes in the fishnet.’” 

The power of language is one that the slaves must learn how to wield, for their own physical and emotional survival. In addition to the Gullah language, which they use to protect themselves from whites, the slaves also have the fishnet, in which words and messages swim from plantation to plantation, connecting people who have been forced apart. 

“When Georgia’s hair was finally covered by the dried, dyed cloth, I paused to admire the shade of indigo above the wrinkles by her eyes and the corners of her mouth. It seemed that both the scarf and the face had soaked up the wisdom and the beauty of the world.” 

This passage highlights the beauty and grace of Georgia’s wisdom, which aids Aminata and many other black people in the novel. Even in this life of suffering and enslavement, Georgia creates beauty. But Georgia has to work hard to gain this beautiful object, the indigo cloth. And, the indigo itself is a hard-won product: it only comes into being through the labor and suffering of slaves.

“Our first lesson began with the pronunciation and spelling of my name. Mamed was the only person in South Carolina who ever asked for my whole name. He spoke it properly, and then he taught me how to write it. But on the plantation he would always call me Meena.” 

This passage describes the code switching that all black people must learn in order to survive enslavement. What Mamed is doing—teaching Aminata to read and write English—is a radical act of defiance. Armed with these skills, Aminata will someday testify before the British Parliament, thereby directly influencing the cause of abolition. This passage also connects the act of storytelling to the theme of naming. Mamed calls her by her real name, Aminata, but only in private. It is only at the end of her life that Aminata will reclaim this name again.

“Reading felt like a daydream in a secret land. Nobody but I knew how to get there, and nobody but I owned that place. Books were all about the ways of the buckra, but soon I felt that I could not do without them. And I lived in hope that one day I would find a book that answered my questions. Where was Africa, exactly, and how did you get there? Sometimes I felt ashamed to have no answer. How could I come from a place, but not know where it was?” 

In this passage, Aminata has just been taught to read and write English by Mamed. She is reveling in her newfound knowledge, and it also offers her an escape from the exigencies of life on the plantation. However, books are mainly written by and for white people, “the buckra,” yet even so, she loves them. Not only do they teach her about the white world, they allow her to escape from it. Yet reading also leads to yearning, for she longs to understand who she is and where she came from. The books she reads have not provided the answer, nor do the maps she will find later. Yet, she continues to ask questions, and will do so all her life.

“How much had been paid for me, I wondered, and who had arranged to have me brought to this land? How were the black men who stole me from Bayo tied to the Christians and Jews who traded slaves in South Carolina? Just as the world of the buckra was beginning to make a little more sense, it was becoming increasingly confusing. Answers only led to more questions.” 

In this passage, the economic transactions that actuate the slave trade are reflected in an exchange of currency between men of different religions and ethnicities. These disparate economies and cultures are united in their pursuit of economic gain, despite a belief in different gods. Aminata struggles to understand how these people are connected, and how they have united themselves into a common enterprise of stealing human beings from their homes. The barbarism of the slave trade is revealed, as is the cruelty of all the agents involved.

“I had seen enough. 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.” 

Here, Aminata and Lindo have just left the Charles Town Library. Aminata is in “despair” (213), for the maps she has just consulted have not answered her questions about Africa. They have not shown her where Bayo is located, nor have they helped her figure out how she will get back there. Instead of details, the renditions of Africa contain both blank spaces and nonsensical drawings. The knowledge of the cartographers is suspect, and it is clear to Aminata that the people who have enslaved her are morally and intellectually bankrupt.

“I have always had difficulty listening to the frenzied sound of many instruments together. In Charles Town…I had heard flutes, oboes, horns and violins all rise together, but they always seemed like voices at war. Here, though, I could befriend the cellist, fall into his music, heed the melodic urgency, and be touched by the way it dipped low like the voices of village elders and skimmed high like singing children.” 

This passage uses the motifs of singing and music to investigate Aminata’s longing for freedom and for her home. In Charles Town, the music was “frenzied” to her ears. But the cello concert in New York is both soothing and evocative—it speaks to her soul and stirs her desire to be free, just like the enslaved musician himself. She and the cellist are kindred spirits, both enslaved black people who use artistic means to express. It is also significant that the voice of the cello seems like the “voices of village elders,” the people of her homeland calling her home.

“I had imagined, somehow, that my life was unique in its unexpected migrations. I wasn’t different at all, I learned. Each person who stood before me had a story every bit as unbelievable as mine.” 

This passage occurs just as Aminata has started her job recording people in The Book of Negroes. She loves her work and feels that she is helping her people to find a better life. As they line up to have their names recorded in the book, they tell her a little about themselves, and she realizes that each of them has led a complex life, full of suffering. She is struck by their shared experiences, and by their collective suffering, which links each of them to one another, and to her. A little later in this scene, Aminata comments that, in telling her their stories, “They were telling me that they were not alone” (291). Hence, the power of storytelling to connect and uplift, to express uniqueness and commonality at the same time.

“I was rowed out to the George III, inspected for The Book of Negroes by men who did not know me, and allowed to leave the Thirteen Colonies. I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. There was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains.” 

In this passage, Aminata has finished her work, and her white employers have departed for England without even saying goodbye. She is left alone and vulnerable, and must fend for herself and her husband in order to secure their passage to Nova Scotia. Here, the tables are turned, and instead of registering others in The Book of Negroes, she herself is being registered by “men who did not know [her],” and who did not care for her as she cared for the people whom she had registered. The reference to the “Colonies” sets up the larger context—a new nation is being formed, one in which its people had wrested their independence from the British. But this new nation does not recognize Aminata as a full citizen, and thus she “refused to speak [its] name,” highlighting the power of names and naming that is so central in this novel.

“I was in an all-day lineup on that ship, and all the coloured folks knew who you were. Little bitty pint-sized fast-talking African woman writing down the names of half the Negros in Manhattan. You didn’t know all of us but we all loved you…Because you were taking care of us.” 

The speaker here is Jason Wood, Aminata’s young friend in Nova Scotia. He explains to her that he was one of the people whom she registered in The Book of Negroes. She does not remember because she registered so many people, but he understands, and he is grateful to her. He celebrates her actions and tells her how much her work meant to all the people of “colour” who yearned for a better life in a new land. This passage is significant too because it contains three different descriptors: “coloured,” “African,” and “Negroes,” all signifiers for black people. Despite the differing origins and connotations of these words, they can all be collapsed into the phrase “all of us,” which unites disparate peoples into one racial identity, and one psychic identity. They love and honor Aminata for caring for her people, all of her people.

“That night, while I watched from the Lucretia, dark clouds rolled in over the mountain. The skies grew black and starless. Lightning sawed through the clouds, illuminating the ships in the harbor and sending waves of thunder crashing across the bay. From the caves in the mountain, the thunder shot back at us, echoing over and over like cannons in the night. Many of the people on the ship were terrified, but I had not forgotten the storms, even after all these years, and I knew that they would pass.” 

In this passage, Aminata and thousands of blacks from New York have arrived in Sierra Leone. They cannot disembark from their ships, however, because the Sierra Leone Company has not yet figured out how to get that many people onto land. Even a voluntary migration such as this requires planning and resources, and perhaps a touch less arrogance on the part of the whites. Nature unleashes all its powers upon the earth, upon both the natives and the emigrants. Some of the black people aboard those ships were born in this very land, while others were born in the New World. All of them are united in their desire to start a new life as free people. But the land of their origin contains dangers, as exemplified by the violence of the storm and the ominous thunder that shoots at them like “cannons.” The imagery of advanced warfare, such as “cannons,” signifies the complicity of the Africans with the Europeans who enslave them. But Aminata is resolute: she is not afraid because she trusts in her own strength. The extreme vulnerability of the people on board the ships is also highlighted here: they are between two worlds, the world of slavery that they left behind, and a new life that promises freedom. In between those two worlds lie “mountain[s],” “caves,” and water, symbolizing the dangers they left behind and those yet to come.

“Pulling steadily towards us, [the Temne men] resembled an army of rowers. I was glad that they were coming to help, but aware of how easy it would have been for them to wage war on us…I tried to speak to the young rower who sat closest to me. But he stared blankly ahead, would not even turn his head toward me. He did his job and nothing else—working with his mates to pull us smoothly and quickly to shore. And so it happened that the same men who rowed slaves to Bance Island carried us over the waters of St. George’s Bay and onto the shores of Sierra Leone.” 

This passage highlights the shared complicity of the African slave traders with the Europeans who engage in the slave trade. The implicit threat of conflict between the black settlers and the Temne tribe looms heavily over the colony of Freetown. It is only the presence of the British—and their weapons—that prevent a clash, as well as the desire of the Temne to engage in commerce. Aminata tries to connect on a human level with the men who row her and the other colonists ashore. But the young rower is merely a cog in the machine, and he just “stare[s] blankly ahead,” not recognizing their shared humanity or their shared racial identity. Indeed, commerce trumps race, as the same men who row enslaved blacks to the New World are rowing the colonists to their new life.

“In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too. I certainly felt more Nova Scotian than African when the Temne…clustered around me...[T]hey seemed to think that I was just as foreign as the British.” 

Nearly every other word in this passage is a geographic, ethnic, political, or racial signifier. Yet, each word only contains meaning in relation to another word. At the plantation, Aminata searches for a connection to “African” identity, even as she is taught to discard it. Ironically, she has only just learned the word “African” on the boat ride to the plantation. She left America as a Loyalist, defined by her allegiance to the British, even though they still actively engage in the slave trade. In Nova Scotia, her black skin is still a disadvantage, and when the economy falters, the blacks are attacked by the whites. Once in Africa, she is no longer considered “African,” but “foreign.” Her longing to go home to Bayo is her lifeline to the girl she used to be, but she will never get back there, nor will she get that original identity back.  

“I…wandered over to look once more at the portraits of the King and Queen. I stroked the candle holders, sat in a comfortable chair and read an article in an English newspaper about the composer Mozart, and finally approached the shuttered windows giving onto the back of the building…I touched the shutters, saw that they were not locked, and cautiously opened them. I looked up at the blue skies, but heard the sounds of human groans. My gaze dropped. On the ground behind the stone fortress, inside a fenced pen, I saw forty naked men. They sat, crouched and stood. They bled and they coughed. Each man was shackled to another, at the ankle. For a moment, I forgot how long it had been since I lived in Bayo, and I strained to see if I could recognize any of the faces of the men.” 

In this scene, Aminata has returned to Bance Island, this time voluntarily. With the help of Alexander Falconbridge, the reformed naval surgeon who has now renounced slavery, she is seeking the help of William Armstrong, second-in-command of all English forts, and keeper of Bance Island. She wishes to find her way back to her long-lost home, the village of Bayo, and only these men can help her. In his luxurious residence, she enjoys the comforts of European life, newspapers, portraits, the music of Mozart. But when she opens the shutters to the area just below the house, the horrors of slavery are starkly evident. There, penned in like animals, are her fellow human beings and fellow Africans. Her gaze drops from the blue skies to the black bodies, and she tries to recognize their faces because she too is one of them. Here, it becomes clear that all the trappings of European life—its luxuries and comforts—are based upon the enslavement and debasement of black bodies, reduced to a shackled mass and stripped of their individuality.