Inhabiting History in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes

“Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.”

Author Lawrence Hill lives in the city that neighbours mine. From about page 10 of The Book of Negroes I cultivated a fantasy of spotting him while I was out grocery shopping, or at the Home Depot, mustering up the courage to hail him from a safe social distance, and showering him with praise for his book. If he then accepted my invitation to grab a take out coffee, there are questions I would put to him, and aspects of craft that I would love to discuss. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from The Book of Negroes?

When writing about history, as a novelist, it’s so important for the storyline and characters not to be overwhelmed by the the author’s research and the actual historical context that serves as the setting and the impetus for the work more generally. Hill does a brilliant job of making history come to life through the experiences of the narrator and main character, Aminata Diallo. At no point did I feel as if the narrative was serving the historical truth rather than the other way around.

This was a compelling, page-turning experience for me, and precisely because of Aminata’s remarkable (her)story, which I understand to be an entirely plausibly portrayal of what it would have been like to be stolen into slavery and to live within its grip in some measure for the rest of your life. Hill’s work shows so powerfully that textbook history and critical history are no match for the power of creative writing to breathe life into the past and thereby help us truly understand it.

Another thing that I appreciated about The Book of Negroes was Hill’s decision to write it from the perspective of an elderly woman. Aminata’s expertise is as a midwife and a writer. Hill demonstrates that you can write convincingly of the experiences of people who are not the same sex, gender, profession, class, sexual persuasion, who are not of your own time, place or culture. (The book takes place mostly in the 18th century.) Yes, you can write convincingly in the voice and perspective of someone who is not at all like you. Just as, as readers, we can use our imaginations to inhabit those lives so dissimilar from our own. It is part of the magic and the pleasure and purpose of literature. If anyone tells you otherwise, or implies that such identity hopping is not correct or proper per se or needs some justification, ask them what else they think literature is about.

One of my questions for Hill is about the title of the novel. I appreciate the way it emphasizes the construction of the identity of Negro. Historically, there was an actual document called The Book of Negroes, which recorded the names and details of about 3,000 black men, women and children who sailed from New York City to various British colonies. They served or lived behind British lines during the American Revolutionary War and left as Black Loyalists. Hill’s novel contains this important event—both the documentation of the book and the departure of the Loyalists, their attempts to establish a new life in Nova Scotia. But Aminata’s story is much much longer and broader than her involvement in The Book of Negroes. So I do wonder how Hill arrived at choosing to replicate that title for his own title. How do you decide what to call your work?