The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

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“To gaze into another person’s face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity and to assert your own” –Aminata Diallo. The Book of Negros was written by Canadian author Lawrence Hill. The Book of Negros is about a young girl named Aminata who is brought to London, England, in 1802, by abolitionists who are petitioning to end the slave trade. As she awaits an audience with King George to speak on her personal experience of being a captured slave, she recounts on paper her life story. Aminata was abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village, Bayo in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves. Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. Despite suffering humiliation and languishing in starvation, fortunately years later, she forges her way to freedom; by following the Slave Triangle: living in Africa to working on a plantation in the southern states and serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes”, which eventually leads her to manor houses of London. “This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the United States for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own” (Haper Collins Canada, 2007). The Slave Triangle had a huge impact on everyone all over the world, and it was significant for Aminata Diallo to follow the slave triangle in The Book of Negros because it teaches the reader about the cruelty of slavery, the process or different stages of the slave triangle and the exploitation of people and goods.
There are many possible contributing factors...

... middle of paper ...

...nful portrait of what it was like to be enslaved and travel through the slave triangle.

Works Cited

Bolt, C. (2007, July). The Slave Trade and the Unholy Triangle. Retrieved February 19, 2014, from bwa-baptist-heritage: http://www.bwa-baptist-heritage.org/gha_sl_cb.htm
Hill, L. (2007). The Book of Negroes. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada.
London and the transatlantic slave trade. (n.d.). Retrieved February 25, 2014, from Port Citites: http://www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/ConNarrative.103/chapterId/2257/outputFormat/print/London-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade.html
The Book of Negroes. (2007). Retrieved March 17, 2014, from Haper Collins Canada: http://www.harpercollins.ca/books/Book-Negroes-Lawrence-Hill/?isbn=9781554681563
The Trianglular Trade. (2009). Retrieved February 21, 2014, from The Abolition Project: http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_43.html

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