by Ann Walmsley
“You’ve said it so succinctly,” said Hill. “I had to find my way in a culture that was pretty much entirely white, and the only blackness I had access to was in the United States, when we went to visit my family there. So I found my way through reading and writing and travelling. I started reading black literature and all the books that my parents had on their bookshelves. And I started travelling to Africa. And I went to live, as you know, in the States.”
Carol asked Hill to read a couple of passages from The Book of Negroes. He read two of the most memorable passages of the book: when Aminata has just disembarked from the slave ship and is frightened by the “smoke” coming from her mouth as her breath condenses in the cold morning air; and when another slave inoculates Aminata against smallpox by implanting a lesion under the girl’s skin.
Then it was time for the men to come forward to have their books signed. I was moved to see how eager they were—how precious this opportunity was for them. All toughness was gone, their respect for Lawrence Hill palpable. I was also disappointed that I hadn’t heard their reactions to the novel. But I wasn’t surprised. When my London book club had organized author visits by William Dalrymple and Esther Freud, the members’ curiosity about the writing process dominated and we often refrained from asking tough questions about the book itself.
Sitting beside Hill, I had the opportunity to hear him talk to each man. Dread was second in line and asked for his book to be signed to his wife and daughter. Hill asked him how old his daughter was.
“Ten,” Dread said. The mood between them was warm and Dread lingered, asking him about the subject of his next novel. Hill confided that it was a book about an illegal immigrant. Dread smiled broadly and left abruptly. I watched him walk away and wondered what could have affected him so much about what Hill had said.
When Ben came forward with his book, they chatted about the other novel that Ben had read, Some Great Thing, which draws on Hill’s years as a reporter for a Winnipeg newspaper.
“Did you like the part where the guy got arrested for putting a vacuum cleaner down a mailbox?” asked Hill. “I had a lot of fun writing that.”
“I liked his character,” said Ben.
“I met a guy in court one time who got arrested for vacuuming letters out of a mailbox. That gave me the idea for that scene,” said Hill. He’d been a reporter covering the court beat that day.
When it was his turn, Graham asked Hill to sign the book to him and thanked him for coming, in a way that communicated thanks from all the men. Carol told Hill that Graham hoped to work with youth once he was granted parole. I had a feeling that she would try to get them together “on the outs,” prison slang for “on the outside.”
Juan engaged Hill in a conversation in Spanish, knowing that the author had lived in Spain for a year.
As the lineup gradually shortened, I noticed that Carol had stepped out of the room and left her orange leather purse sitting open on her chair. “Nothing is ever taken,” she told me when I remarked on her trust at the prison. Indeed, according to protocol, she would have left any valuables, like her wallet, keys and cellphone, in a lockbox at reception. However, the black markers for writing name tags disappeared from the name tag table by the end of the meeting that day. As we learned soon afterward, the ink was valued for tattooing. We realized that it would be better to print out name tags in advance.
An hour later, over lunch in downtown Kingston, Lawrence Hill told me there had been one question from the men this time that he had never considered before. “When Ben asked me about grace—nobody’s ever put that to me,” he said. “It was an utterly fascinating thing to hear my own books reflected back to me in that line.
“Those guys are likely taking a lot more from books than other people because they have more time and they have more energy and they’re able to focus on it and they have more need.” He said that he was particularly attuned to those who had lived on the margins due to race and that some of the books that had affected him most profoundly had come from the prison experience, which was one reason why he had felt compelled to visit the book club, despite his busy schedule.
He had also engaged with people inside before, it turned out—a few years earlier. When a secure-custody facility for juveniles in Ontario was frustrated with its inability to get a small group of young men to read, the corrections authorities called Hill and asked if he would give it a try. The kids were between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, serving long terms, and they could read, just wouldn’t. Other interventions had failed, but Hill succeeded after getting together with the boys once a week over lunch in the prison library.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“I gave them books individually,” Hill told me. “I figured out what a kid would like after talking to him for a couple of hours.” It was never a book from the prison library—too uncool. The books were gifts from him—personal recommendations. Sometimes it was a father-son memoir, sometimes a story written by a famous prisoner, sometimes one of Hill’s own book proposals. “They were really interested in how I was pitching it and they were speculating about whether I’d find a publisher,” he said. “It was full of drama for them.” They would come back sometimes complaining that they had hated a book he’d given them. “They hated the beginning, where the character did this, the climax where the character did that, and the ending that was so unsatisfying,” he recalled. In other words, they’d read the book.
Two days later, Book Clubs for Inmates held its first fundraiser on Amherst Island. Lawrence Hill was the guest of honour and my fellow volunteer Derek engaged him in an interview for the audience of local residents, who had paid twenty dollars a head to be there. It was early June, and the little island situated on the migratory flyway was at its most glorious. There were birds nesting in every low-lying notch, oriental poppies nodding their heads and old-growth lilac bushes and irises blooming in profusion. Incredibly, a robin had made its nest in the wreath on Carol’s front door and each time she opened the door she had to be careful not to disturb the three blue eggs. A mourning dove sat demurely on her nest in Carol’s bird feeder.
Hill talked about the title of The Book of Negroes. Publishers in the U.S. and some other English-speaking countries sold it under the title Someone Knows My Name because of concern that readers would find the word Negroes offensive. Hill told the people at the fundraiser that although he initially fought the idea of publishing under a different title, he came to understand why the publishers felt so strongly. “I mean if you use the term ‘Negro’ in Canada, most people will look at you as though you are a bit outdated and you haven’t read a newspaper in fifteen years, but try using the word ‘Negro’ in Brooklyn, you’ll get your nose broken. It’s a serious, fighting word and the American publishers were concerned it would be so alienating to readers they wouldn’t pick up the book. The word is now mostly a derogatory word, meaning someone who has no self-respect or self-pride as a black person, so it’s a very cutting term inside black culture.”
By the time Carol and I were back together again with the men in the Collins Bay Book Club three weeks later to discuss the novel Such a Long Journey, the whole question of The Book of Negroes title had taken an ugly turn. Just before Hill came to visit our book club, he had been in the Netherlands, where he had spoken to various audiences. An attendee at one of those events was now threatening to burn the book to protest the use of the word Negroes in the Dutch title, Het Negerboek. On the very morning of our book club meeting, the Dutch group, known as the Foundation to Honour and Restore Payments to Victims of Slavery in Suriname, partially carried out their threat by burning the book’s cover. When asked by the media about his reaction, Hill said that the book’s title was designed to focus attention on an obscure historical document and he condemned the threat of book burning as a form of intimidation against those who valued the freedom to write and read.
Carol and I were keen to ask the men how they had reacted to the title. “Let’s name the ele
phant in the room,” said Carol, to open the discussion. “It’s race.” There she went again—so blunt! But they looked at her approvingly. She asked them what percentage of the prison was black. Dread, who was black, estimated only 15 to 20 percent. Graham, who was white, said it was more like 40 to 50 percent. Everyone jumped in with their estimate, talking over one another.
But, Carol wanted to know, in the men’s opinion, was the title insulting? “If you went past a bookstore and there were twenty books in the window and one of them was The Book of Negroes, what do you think?”
“The majority might take offence,” said Dread.
But, Ben said, “I might want to read it.” Dread rolled his eyes.
Stan said there was a new edition of Huckleberry Finn inserting the word slave to replace “the N-word” and that he’d seen some of the discourse in the media. “There was this one highly educated black man from Harvard or whatever and he was saying leave the word in,” he said, “because it teaches kids what that word meant to people.”
The conversation veered into discussions of mistreatment of other racial or ethnic groups in history, including the Irish, First Nations people and Jews. But Dread argued forcefully that slavery’s duration over four hundred years had caused the disintegration of family structure among black people. “It’s way way way way worse,” he said. I cast my mind back to Lawrence Hill’s character Aminata in the book and how the slave owners robbed her of her children.
At least one of the white inmates in the room cast his mind back as well. “It happened hundreds of years ago but the resentment gets passed on from generation to generation,” said Stan. “Here’s a white man,” he said, referring to himself. “And I gotta look at it as someone that made it happen. It’s disgusting.”
“I agree with you, Stan,” said Carol. “Because I felt as I read The Book of Negroes a sort of collective sin or guilt that it was white people such as me who did what they did.”
But then Rick, the guy who’d done time in the Southeast Asian prison, brought an end to the white liberal sentiments. “Myself, I don’t feel that. Whatever happened, happened. My heart breaks. What are you going to do? You can’t be judged based on what somebody else has done, just because you’re white. I don’t feel I’m part of the collective sin.”
Others simply expressed their feeling that slavery was wrong. Graham wondered aloud: “What in the world made people think that they had the right to get on a ship and go to the other side of the ocean, grab a bunch of people, enslave them and bring them back?”And Frank made the point that various African populations enslaved each other on their own continent.
I looked around the room. The fact that we were having this conversation at all was remarkable. As Graham had said in a letter to Carol two months earlier, prison was a very divided place and he was surprised by how the book club “totally knocked down” the barriers between the racial, ethnic and gang-affiliated groups in the prison.
“I’ll take your comments back to Larry,” said Carol. She was now on familiar terms with Lawrence Hill. “What shall I say—it was a lively discussion. I’ll tell him to keep the faith.”
Hill himself took an opportunity to document the Netherlands incident and his reaction to it in a lecture that he delivered some months later. Now published as a thirty-three-page book, it is titled Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: Anatomy of a Book Burning.
First Three Cups of Tea and then The Book of Negroes was in the news. Reading a book that was newsworthy gave the men a sense of participating in something timely and meaningful. I made a mental note to think about that during my next round of book selections.
5
RED SKY AT MORNING, JAILERS TAKE WARNING
THAT SUMMER, THE INTENSE HEAT in the cells at Collins Bay forced some inmates out of their bunks and onto the floor to stay cool and sleep. In the absence of air conditioning, the smell of sweat was all that circulated in the cells. But that June, something else was heating up the prison. A new federal government measure to increasingly house two inmates in cells that were designed for one sparked an inmate work strike at Collins Bay. The men refused to wax floors, cook inmate meals, clean bathrooms or show up for anger management programs. I pictured double-bunking during the heat wave, with two men trying to find enough space on the floor of a singleton cell. One man might have to lie with his head close to the toilet. But the strikers were concerned about more than that. Graham told me they were worried about their own safety. He said that doubling up the population could increase the risk of violence as the men attempted to share cells, showers, laundry facilities and telephones, while competing for spots in correctional programs. The competition for telephone time was already intense.
The strike was only twenty-four hours old on June 29, the day I had planned to meet each of the four book club ambassadors one-on-one for the first time. The correctional authorities had agreed that I could write the story of the inmates’ great “adventure” in the book club and, to that end, talk to some of them at length. And I now felt comfortable enough with these four men to do so. The chaplain broke the news about the strike when he met me at security. He warned me that the men might not materialize. He explained that it would take guts for the four guys to leave their cells to meet me because anyone crossing the yard during “Work Up” (work hours) might be suspected of strikebreaking, especially since I was meeting them in the same building as CORCAN, the prison industry workshop.
The guard at reception looked at my tape recorder suspiciously—a tiny Sony digital recorder. But the chaplain assured him that the warden had approved it. All that needed to happen then was for the men to show up.
As predicted, Dread and Ben were no-shows. I didn’t blame them, given the pressure. With Graham and Frank scheduled for the afternoon, I spent the rest of the morning sorting the latest book shipment and thinking back to the previous week’s book group—the last one before the summer hiatus.
We had discussed Canadian author Rohinton Mistry’s gorgeous debut novel, Such a Long Journey, about a Parsi bank clerk in Mumbai named Gustad Noble, who is unwittingly drawn into a money laundering scheme. Gustad tries to do the right thing with the stash of rupees he’s asked to safeguard, a situation that Carol and I thought had the potential to trigger interesting debate because of the ethical dilemma it posed. And we hoped the men would enjoy the chance to laugh a little at the book’s comic episodes and to escape in their minds to the bedlam of 1970s politics in India. We assumed that books that enabled armchair travelling beyond the prison walls would be popular in prison.
Twelve guys showed up for the meeting that week. I could see that the Lawrence Hill Effect had evaporated. No surprise really. Back in London at my “Literary Ladies” Hampstead book club, attendance always surged when we had author visits. I looked around the room. The four ambassadors were there: Graham and Frank, Dread and Ben. Three guys were sitting just inside the door. “The Muslim guys,” explained Graham, indicating three black men. “They’re all buddies.” One of the three, Winston, had arrestingly intense eyes. Elsewhere in the room were Rick, Juan the writer and Marley, with his pink-mirrored sunglasses. I could never discern what Marley was thinking behind those lenses.
As I was greeting everyone, an inmate with a Marine-style “high and tight” haircut and military posture walked in. I had seen him at The Book of Negroes book club meeting and had overheard Lawrence Hill urging him to read John Steinbeck. “Hi,” he said with a broad smile, shaking our hands in a manner that suggested he was hungry for contact with the outside world. “I’m Gaston.” He chose a chair between two other burly white inmates: Graham and Stan.
When Such a Long Journey was first published in 1991, it made the Booker Prize short list. It also won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction that year, beating out a book by veteran novelist Margaret Atwood. Quite a warm reception for a first-time novelist. However, the jury of prison public opinion was still deliberating.
The session started off well with
an animated discussion about Gustad, whose sedate life goes off the rails in other ways. His high-achieving son, Sohrab, rejects his father’s plan for him to attend the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, his daughter falls ill and his wife yields to superstition. Then Gustad finds himself agreeing to store a package for an old friend who now works for Indira Gandhi’s spy agency. His strong moral principles, derived in part from his sense of loyalty and his Zoroastrian faith, fail to give him insight into his actions. Meanwhile, chaos mounts around him in his interactions with the quirky characters in the novel.
“Gustad’s a complicated character,” said Carol. “Maybe you liked him, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought a lot of things about him were kind of heroic.” I confessed that I didn’t like Gustad much at the beginning because of the way he stifled his son’s artistic ambitions. We opened it up to the men.
“At first I didn’t like him,” said Ben. “But when I thought back, he was a religious guy and so I understand why he was such an honest person, patient, obedient and ambitious for his kids too.”
Rick admired the protagonist for not running off with the money. So did Frank: “I felt he was an honourable guy. If you’re doing a deal with him, you know he’ll hold up his end.”
Gaston, who I later learned had robbed a string of banks, was amazed that Gustad was never tempted to steal the piles of money accumulating in his house. “You know sometimes, thinking a little bit criminally, thinking what I would do, I would have taken some of it,” he said. And Gustad would have been justified in skimming some, in Gaston’s view—he argued that better the money go to a guy making an honest buck and caring for a sick daughter than to thieves. “He’s gonna give his money to the money launderers and obviously they’re going to steal it, when he could take it and he’s a guy who obviously works for a living.”