THE BOOK OF NEGROES (48 page)

I now stood facing King George III. I curtsied. He nodded. I waited, as instructed, for the King of England to reach out his hand or to speak, but he did neither.

He nodded several times, and opened his mouth to speak. But then he turned his head slightly and his eyes opened wider. He did not appear to know what he had meant to say, or who I was, or where we were.

I gazed calmly at the large, round, reddish face and the glassy eyes of the man who presided over the greatest slaving nation in the world, and I understood that there would be no conversation between us. I was led away, but I was not troubled. For all I knew, the King could have been on the verge of one of his fits. I had read all about them. The Bank of England had even issued a coin, years earlier, to celebrate the King’s return to sanity. I wondered what the people of my homeland would ask if they knew that
I had met with the
toubabu faama
—the grand chief of England. Never in a million years would they believe that he suffered from an illness in his head and had chosen an African queen.

As I was leaving Buckingham Palace, the same aide who had shown me the guest book now pressed into my hand a leather-bound volume. The Queen of England had given me
On Poetry: A Rhapsody
by Jonathan Swift.

THE TESTIMONY IN PARLIAMENT and the visit to Buckingham Palace had drained me again. I sought quiet and solitude and my best comfort, literature. I was rereading Swift’s book when John Clarkson tapped lightly on my door.

“There is somebody here who wishes to see you.”

“But I am not dressed to see anybody this evening,” I said.

“I do not think the lady is concerned with your attire. She reports that she has been waiting a long time to meet you.”

And then I saw an African woman—a girl, really—step into my room. Cheeks smooth like ebony. No moons and no scarification, but she looked like somebody from my village of Bayo.

“I am sorry,” I said, my mind turning. “I know I saw you today in the rain. I could not stop to greet you then.”

“The rain did not bother me. What were a few hours of standing in line? Mama, I have been waiting for years.”

She stepped forward and threw herself into me with such vigour that she nearly knocked me over. It was the embrace for which I had been praying for fifteen years. We rocked on our heels, and clung to each other. I couldn’t speak, so I just kept squeezing until my muscles grew tired.

We parted enough to look into each other’s eyes, but our hands remained locked.

MAY AND I DID NOT LEAVE each other for two full days. We slept in the same bed, ate at the same table, and walked hand in hand by the Thames. The mere sight of the woman made me want to keep on living. Her lips brushed my cheeks every hour. I wanted to live on and on so that I could see her, and soak up her beauty, and love my own flesh and blood just a while longer.

I had little need to tell her what had happened to me, as she had read reports of it in the newspapers. Over the hours and the days, I came to learn what had happened to her.

The Witherspoons had never changed her name from May, or hidden from her that she had been “adopted”—as they put it—in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. They claimed, however, that they had saved May after she was abandoned by an African woman.

But May had been old enough to remember our life together, and from the very start she had questioned the story. The Witherspoons had taken her from Shelburne to Boston and sailed promptly to England. They doted on her at first but grew impatient and then angry when she refused to stop asking where I had gone.

“I had a terrible will,” she said, “and they did not appreciate the tantrums in which I screamed for my mother.”

The Witherspoons kept May as a house servant. She was locked in her room at night. She was not allowed to walk about London on her own. She had been taught to read and write and serve tables and perform domestic tasks, all of which she had to do daily. She had never been called a slave. Nor had she been paid.

At the age of eleven, she asked to go free, and they refused. One night she wriggled out of her bedroom window, dropped into the street and ran until a black preacher swept her up in his arms and asked why she was fleeing barefoot. The preacher let her stay with him and his wife until he could find a family in his own congregation to take her in. The woman
of the family washed houses and the father sold newspapers and they squeezed May into the room with their own two children. May worked with the woman, washing houses, for three years, until she was able to get work teaching at a school for the black poor in London.

“You learned to read and write,” I said.

May said she remembered me scratching out words for her to practise. “I knew how much you loved words, Mama, and I wanted to love them too.”

“What happened to the Witherspoons?” I asked.

They had come after May. But the family that had taken her in sought the help of an abolitionist named Granville Sharpe, and he had “fierce words” with the Witherspoons and reminded them that they had no right to detain a Negro who had liberated herself from their possession. He said that he would humiliate them in court if they persisted. The Witherspoons moved to Montreal to open a shipping business, and May remained in London.

The next day, May took me to the school where she taught. Reporters followed us all the way there, and watched for hours as I spent the day with thirty African children who were learning to read and write. The conditions were crude and they had few resources, but May told me that it was much better than what others had. Many white children did not even attend school. When the papers wrote about my visit, I began to be asked every week to speak in a school, library or church. I addressed black people and I addressed whites. I would speak about my life to anyone who cared to listen. The more people who knew about it, the more would press for abolition.

WHEN THE CHILLS RETURNED TO MY FLESH, nobody in London had Peruvian bark. The fevers nearly swept me away, but May tended to me in my illness for months. Soup and bread, soup and bread, soup and bread, rice and a bit of mutton, when I was able to hold it down. I looked more
and more like a skeleton. But I had a reason to live, so once more I clawed my way back to health.

May and I moved into lodgings paid for by the abolitionists. They rented two pleasant rooms for us at the rate of fifteen pounds a year, and hired a cook to make our meals.

In 1805, John Clarkson paid a visit to our new home, bringing me a new map of Africa. The cause of abolition was advancing steadily, he said, and the committee was endlessly grateful for my work.

“Is there anything at all that you need?” he asked. I asked May to let us have a moment alone.

“You won’t have to feed me much longer,” I told Clarkson, “but I ask you to take care of my daughter.” I secured his promise that the abolitionists would support May until she reached the age of twenty-five and see that she received any additional education that she wanted.

“She is an eminently capable young woman, and we will do our best to put her on a solid footing in life,” Clarkson said.

“Good,” I said.

“I hope that’s my last contest with you,” he said, “because you’re some negotiator.”

I smiled. “It’s in my blood.”

WHEN I URGED THE ABOLITIONISTS to donate to May’s school, they complied. When we set up once-a-week church meals for the black poor, they gave food. But as they prepared to pounce with a motion in Parliament, they would consider only the slave trade.

“One step at a time,” John Clarkson told me.

“Hop with two steps,” I said. “Children do it. So can you.”

May’s school expanded to include forty and eventually fifty students. It did so well, and received so many materials and donations from the
abolitionists that some white students began to attend as well. May renamed it the Aminata Academy, and I became known as the school’s grand
djeli.
Every student in the school knew that the word meant storyteller, and each one looked forward to my Friday morning tales. I always began the same way. Unrolling a map of the world, I would put one finger on a dot I had drawn to represent my village of Bayo, put another finger on London and say: “I was born there, and we are here now, and I’m going to tell you all about what happened in between.”

I AM FINALLY DONE. MY STORY IS TOLD. My daughter sleeps in the room next to mine. At first, I objected to being left alone at night. But May softly tells me that she has a man in her life now, and that they are planning to have a baby. Get yourself a good midwife, I say, because my hands tend to shake these days. And she says, Don’t you worry, Mama, all that will be done.

May tells me that she has found a publisher for my story. But the abolitionists have their own publisher and insist on correcting “allegations that cannot be proved” and she doesn’t know whether to give in or to use the man she has chosen. Does your man know the story of our people? I ask. Yes, May says. Then look him in the eye and see if he’s a good man, I say. She has done that, she says, and she knows he’s a good man—the publisher is her fiancé. But, she says, the abolitionists claim that they have earned the right to publish my story. I stamp my foot. It hurts. The fevers are back and my bones burn. Next time, if there is a next time, I will put my foot down gently. I tell my daughter, in a voice that even I can barely hear, to thank the abolitionists for their food and shelter, and for the contributions to May’s school, because without education our children’s hopes are drowned, but that my story is my story and it will be published by the one who lets my words stand.

“This man who is going to marry you,” I say. “When do I get to meet him?”

“You’ve met him, Mama, but you keep forgetting.”

Write to my friend Debra in Freetown, I tell May. Tell her to come. Tell her to put Caroline in your school. May tells me that maybe Debra should stay in Sierra Leone, that maybe Sierra Leone needs her. Write to Debra anyway, I say, and pass on my love.

I would like to draw a map of the places I have lived. I would put Bayo on the map, and trace in red my long path to the sea. Blue lines would show the ocean voyages. Cartouches would decorate the margins. There would be no elephants for want of towns, but rather paintings of guineas made from the gold mines of Africa, a woman balancing fruit on her head, another with blue pouches for medicine, a child reading, and the green hills of Sierra Leone, land of my arrivals and embarkations.

They bring me the newspapers as well as tea with honey, because I don’t get out any more. I seem to be napping so much of the time, and can’t keep track of the days. May says she has news about the publisher and a cartographer. They will work together, she says, and include a map with my memoir. May and her new man are dressing up to go and hear William Wilberforce make his motion in Parliament. They say he is going to win this time. He’d better. I have helped him all I can.

May kisses me on the forehead and is gone. The girl has young legs and moves like a cyclone. I, with bones afire, have no more tolerance for walking. I will cross no bridges and board no ships, but stay here on solid land and take my tea with honey and lie back on this bed of straw. It is not such a bad bed. I have known worse. They can wake me with the news, when they come home.

The end

THE BOOK OF NEGROES IS A WORK OF MY IMAGINATION, but it does reflect my understanding of the Black Loyalists and their history.

In terms of the sheer number of people recorded and described, the actual Book of Negroes is the largest single document about black people in North America up until the end of the eighteenth century. It contains the names and details of 3,000 black men, women and children, who, after serving or living behind British lines during the American Revolutionary War, sailed from New York City to various British colonies. Although a few went to England, Germany and Quebec, most of the people whose names appear in the book landed in Nova Scotia and settled in the areas of Birchtown, Shelburne, Port Mouton, Annapolis Royal, Digby, Weymouth, Preston, Halifax, Sydney and other places. It should be noted that some Loyalists sailed from South Carolina, and many are likely to have escaped by other means to the British colonies,
away from the prying eyes of the inspectors registering names in the Book of Negroes.

In this novel, some of the excerpts from the Book of Negroes are real, and others have been invented or altered. Readers who wish to see the Book of Negroes can find it, or parts of it, in the Nova Scotia Public Archives, the National Archives of the United States and in the National Archives (Public Records Office) in Kew, England. It can also be found on microfilm at the National Archives of Canada and, through an electronic link provided by Library and Archives Canada, at:
http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/ic/
can_digital_collections/blackloyalists/index.htm
. As well, the Book of Negroes is reproduced in
The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution
, edited and with an introduction by Graham Russell Hodges, Garland Publishing Inc., 1996.

Some 3,000 Black Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783, and about 1,200 of them gave up on Nova Scotia after ten years of miserable treatment in the British colony. From the shores of Halifax, they formed the first major “back to Africa” exodus in the history of the Americas, sailing to found the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. To this day, the Black Loyalists of Nova Scotia are still known as some of the founders of the modern state of Sierra Leone. Like my protagonist Aminata Diallo, some of the Nova Scotian “adventurers,” as they were known, were born in Africa. Their return en masse to the mother continent in 1792 took place decades before former American slaves founded Liberia, and more than one hundred years before Marcus Garvey of Jamaica became famous for urging blacks in the Americas to move “back” to Africa.

Readers might like to know that in 1807, the British Parliament passed legislation to abolish the slave trade the following year. In the United States, abolition of the slave trade also took effect in 1808. It was not until August 1, 1834, that slavery itself was finally abolished in Canada and in the rest of the British Empire. Another thirty-one years passed before
the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution officially abolished slavery in the USA in 1865.

Though this work is built on the foundations of history, in some instances I have knowingly bent facts to suit the purposes of the novel. I will cite four key examples. First, my protagonist Aminata Diallo is paid by the British government to record the names of thousands of blacks into the Book of Negroes in New York City in 1783. My understanding is that the British did not hire private scribes for the Book of Negroes, but simply used officers from within their ranks. Second, Canada’s first race riot—in which disbanded white soldiers took out their frustrations on the blacks of Birchtown and Shelburne, Nova Scotia—actually took place in 1783, but I have set it in 1787. Third, Thomas Peters—the Loyalist who helped set the exodus from Halifax to Freetown in motion by travelling to England to complain about the ill treatment of blacks in Nova Scotia—travelled to Sierra Leone and died soon after his arrival, but not at the hands of slave traders, as happens in this novel. And finally, although the British Navy lieutenant John Clarkson organized the exodus from Halifax to Sierra Leone and sailed to Freetown with the black “adventurers,” he did not stay in Africa as long as I have him there.

John Clarkson and Thomas Peters are two of a number of fictional characters who are drawn from real people having the same names. Others are Clarkson’s brother Thomas Clarkson; the slave-ship surgeon and subsequent abolitionist Alexander Falconbridge; his wife Anna Maria Falconbridge; King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenberg-Strelitz; Nova Scotia governor John Wentworth and his wife Frances Wentworth; as well as Sam Fraunces, the tavern owner who fed George Washington and other patriots and went to work as a cook for the president after the Revolutionary War.

Moses Lindo was a Sephardic Jew from London, England who arrived in South Carolina in 1756. In Charles Town, Lindo became a member
of the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim—one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States. Eventually, Lindo became the official indigo inspector for the Province of South Carolina. For this novel, I have borrowed Lindo’s last name and his interest in indigo, but everything else about my fictional character Solomon Lindo is invented. In the case of Solomon Lindo and all other characters in
The Book of Negroes
, I have taken complete liberties, creating imaginary dialogue, actions, events and circumstances.