The Book of Negroes: The award-winning classic bestseller

by Lawrence Hill

I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first steps, why only men sat to drink tea and converse, and why women were always busy. I reasoned that men were weak and needed rest.

“Mama is beautiful,” I said. “Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

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!

I looked up from the street and again at the wretched captives. I vowed not to let the noises of the city drown out their voices or rob me of my past. It was less painful to forget, but I would look and I would remember.

The dead infant was the child I had once been; it was my own lost Mamadu; it was every person who had been tossed into the unforgiving sea on the endless journey across the big river.

I could see that Solomon Lindo was a better class of man than Robinson Appleby. But he was tainted by the very world in which he lived, and from which he too richly profited. I did not want to hate him, but neither could I forgive him.

There was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains.