|
In Someone Knows My Name (Norton, $24.95), novelist Lawrence Hill daringly offers something we’re not quite used to in books about our enslavement: a happy ending. In 470 pages the author sweeps us across two continents and three countries with determined heroine Aminata Diallo.
We first meet her in 1745 in her home village of Bayo, in West Africa, where slave poachers slaughter her parents and she is sold to a plantation on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. Forced to plant and harvest indigo, against great odds the enterprising Aminata learns to read. When she secretly marries Chekura, a slave from a neighboring plantation, and gives birth to Mamadu, a son, her jealous owner sells this stunning beauty to Charles Town (the precursor to Charleston) indigo trader Solomon Lindo, who recognizes Aminata’s intelligence. Is this where she at last finds freedom? We won’t tell, but Hill’s elegant voice will leave you and your book club members spellbound.
Though he has written at least four acclaimed works, including Some Great Thing, Someone is an introduction for many of us to Hill, 50, who first conceived the story in 2002. In the four to five years it took to craft this gripping tale, Hill drew on his experiences as a father—at the time his eldest daughter, Genevičve, was about the same age as young Aminata—as well as his travels on several continents. Hill wants us to remember Aminata and other often forgotten women. “I put back aspects (of our past) so all can imagine,” he says. “I hope a reader will say, ‘What courage this woman must have had to survive.’ ”
30-SECOND BOOK EXCERPT
In this exclusive passage from Someone Knows My Name, Aminata, now enslaved on a South Carolina indigo plantation, learns how to read, which opens a new world of possibilities while also raising painful questions:
“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…. And I lived in hope that one day I would find a book that answered my questions. Where was Africa, exactly, and how did you get there? Sometimes I felt ashamed to have no answer. How could I come from a place, but not know where it was?”
Related Links:
Help select the storyteller of the year for the first annual ESSENCE Literary Awards. Vote now! » |
