Interview with author and a review of his book, now a mini-series on BET
Rating: Three Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I got the idea for the book fifteen years before I starting writing it in 2003,” says Lawrence Hill. “I took a book from my parents’ bookshelves and was so mesmerized that I never returned it. The Black Loyalists by James Walker. It is a history book that gives a detailed, fascinating account of African Americans who threw off the chains of slavery to serve the British during the American Revolutionary War, and who, after the British lost, had their names entered into the British naval ledger known as The Book of Negroes before they were evacuated in 1783 from Manhattan and sent by ship to Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast of Canada.”
The Book of Negroes is about the life of Aminata Diallo, born in 1745 in Bayo, West Africa. In 1802 London, as Aminata is helping British abolitionists, she reflects on her life. At age 11 she was captured by British slavers and survives the voyage to South Carolina. Georgia, an American-born slave, helps her adapt and thrive in the unfamiliar conditions. The man who owns her, Robinson Appleby, is a cruel master. She is sold to duty inspector Solomon Lindo. Despite the hardships, she keeps going. The British promise to free Blacks who fight against the rebels. Because Aminata can read and write, she’s chosen to write The Book of Negroes.
The Book of Negroes is also a 6-hour miniseries airing this week on BET. The Canadian-South African co-production based on Hill’s novel is directed by Clement Virgo, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hill.
“A man in The Netherlands was so incensed by the word Negro in the Dutch edition of my novel that he sent me an email basically beginning with the words, ‘Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book’,” says Hill. “And, he did indeed go on to burn copies of the cover of the book while TV cameras rolled. He didn’t care that the title derived from the historic British naval ledger by the same name.”
Hill had an audience with the Queen in Buckhingham Palace. He traveled twice to South Africa, once for the filming of the TV miniseries near Cape Town, another for winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. To research the book, Hill took five years of interviewing experts, traveling and reading documents from libraries, archives, bookstores and online.
Hill has written nine books. The Book of Negroes is the seventh. Hill met his agent, Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group, New York, on the recommendation of other authors.
Hill grew up in Canada and the United States, the child of an African‑American father and a white American mother who moved to Canada. “I grew up of American parentage knowing, as do all Americans, that the first person that died in the American Revolution was a black man, Crispus Attucks, who sided with the rebels,” says Hill. “But very few Americans and Canadians had heard of the story of thousands of black loyalists, former American slaves who accepted formal offers written by the British to give them their freedom in exchange for service during the Revolution. So because New York City was a central hub of British control during the seven or eight year Revolutionary War, thousands of blacks fled to New York City, hid in Canvas Town in the southern tip of the island and served the British.”
The Book of Negroes: A Novel (Movie Tie-in Edition) by Lawrence Hill. Paperback: 512 pages, Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Movie Tie-in Edition edition (January 12, 2015), Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-0393351392 $15.95.
