The Book of Negroes

The Book of Negroes 

by Lawrence Hill

 

 

“I had chosen freedom, with all its insecurities, and nothing in the world would make me turn away from it.” 

“I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. There was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains”

“Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.” 

“I remember wondering, within a year or two of taking my first 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.”

“Reading felt like a daytime dream in a secret land. Nobody but I knew how to get there, and nobody but I owned that place” 

“I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn.”

“She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied.” 

“But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.” 

“Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.” 

“I stood up to take some air outside. The stars were brilliant that night, and the cicadas were crying in endless song. If the sky was so perfect, why was the earth all wrong?”

 

 

“Not having to think about food, or shelter, or clothing is a rare thing indeed. What does a person do, when survival is not an issue?” 

 

“After two months at sea, the toubabu brought every one of us up on deck. Naked, we were made to wash. There were only two-thirds of us left. They grabbed those who could not walk and began to throw them overboard, one by one. I shut my eyes and plugged my ears, but could not block out all the shrieking”

 

“Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons” 

“Turn your mind from the ship, child. It is nothing but a rotting carcass in the grass. The carcass has shocked you with its stink and its flies. But you have walked past it, already, and now you must keep walking” 

 

“That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future” 

 

“It seemed to me that the trading in men would continue for as long as some people were free to take others as their property” 

 

“I let go of my greatest desire. I would never go back home”