The Book of Negroes

by Lawrence Hill

  "When shall we disembark?" I asked.

  "Tomorrow," Clarkson said.

  We spent the rest of that day and all the next morning looking out at the lush green land in the distance, and were at the ship's railing when we saw a new vessel drawing near. Clarkson stared through his looking glass and groaned.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  He handed me the looking glass, which I lengthened and adjusted. Peering through it, I spotted naked homelanders on deck. And then the stench engulfed the Lucretia. The stink grew as the ship drew closer. Some of the Nova Scotians went below to their rooms, but I was transfixed. I didn't want to see it, but could not turn my eyes away.

  Clarkson headed for his cabin and returned to the deck dressed in his uniform as a naval lieutenant. The approaching ship had also prepared for the meeting: all captives had been sent below decks. The true nature of the ship could not be disguised, however, because the stink made us choke and gag. I knew exactly how the captives were chained in the belly of the ship, and I could imagine the running sores on their legs and the moans leaking from their lips. A white man was rowed from his ship to ours and allowed to climb aboard.

  Clarkson exchanged handshakes, pleasantries and goods with the man. The lieutenant gave him three barrels of dried meats, and the slaver gave Clarkson barrels of fresh water and oranges. They shook hands as if they were friends. Later, when the man was being rowed back to his ship, Clarkson saw me staring at him.

  "It's best to remain cordial with the enemy," he said.

  "Why did you let that vessel go?" Peters asked him.

  "Mr. Peters, I do not control these matters."

  "You are sanctioning the trade of men."

  "I received water and oranges from them—things that you and your fellow adventurers badly need," Clarkson said. "Do you think I took those supplies for my own consumption?"

  "Why did you not stop that ship?"

  "Mr. Peters, this vessel is not a warship. Do you see any cannons or soldiers with muskets? Everything about me opposes the trade in slaves, but we have to pick our battles. We have come to establish a free colony—not to start a war with the slave-traders."

  I had not even set foot back on land and I already could see that nothing would be simple. I admired Peters for objecting to the slave trade. But for the time being, I felt that Clarkson was right. I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn. First we had to get off our ships, build shelters and find food.

  That night, while I watched from the Lucretia, dark clouds rolled in over the mountain. The skies grew black and starless. Lightning sawed through the clouds, illuminating the ships in the harbour and sending waves of thunder crashing across the bay. From the caves in the mountain, the thunder shot back at us, echoing over and over like cannons in the night. Many of the people on the ship were terrified, but I had not forgotten the storms, even after all these years, and I knew that they would pass.

  BY THE THIRD DAY OF BAKING IN THE SUN, it became clear that the Sierra Leone Company had no plan for getting us off the boats. With just one rowboat per ship, it would have taken an eternity to move a thousand passengers and our belongings to shore. While I stood on the deck with the others, feeling that the Lucretia was less a liberating vessel than a prison at sea, I watched sixteen oarsmen row a massive canoe carrying a straight-backed homelander in a regal English chair. Behind him sat a coxswain, and ahead, a beating drummer. We heard the tam-tam rhythm skimming over the harbour waters before we could make out the faces of the men. King Jimmy was coming to pay tribute to John Clarkson, who ordered his sailors to fire twenty guns in salute and told us to address the chief as "Your Excellency."

  "Not on your life," Peters muttered.

  Thomas Peters stood erect beside John Clarkson at the top of the ship's ladder, but the chief brushed past him, reaching out his arms to embrace Clarkson. King Jimmy greeted the white soldiers in English and shook their hands, but he refused, in his first moments, to even look at us. King Jimmy gave Clarkson fifteen pineapples and an elephant tooth in exchange for unwatered rum.

  He looked at me and asked the lieutenant: "Your mistress?"

  "I am old enough to be his mother," I said.

  King Jimmy guffawed, motioned at the Nova Scotians assembled on deck, and said, "King John Clarkson have many servants."

  Thomas Peters spoke up. "We are the Nova Scotians and we come as equals."

  The Temne chief wasn't paying attention. Turning again to Clarkson, King Jimmy pointed to me and said, "Is she the one you tell me about? The African who knows more books than the Englishmen?"

  John Clarkson frowned. I could see that he did not want King Jimmy to mock me.

  King Jimmy looked me up and down and then sent a torrent of African words my way. I had no idea what he was saying. He burst into laughter and disappeared into Clarkson's cabin to drink rum. Later, he bowed to me on his way out.

  "One day you come to my village. How are you named?"

  "Aminata."

  "One day you be Queen Aminata, wife of King Jimmy."

  "Thank you, but I am already married."

  "Where your husband?"

  When I paused, King Jimmy laughed again.

  "If he on other side," he said, gesturing west across the water, "you free now."

  With that, he climbed over the side of our ship and down a ladder, got into his canoe and was rowed away.

  It seemed absurd that my first conversation as an adult with an African in my own homeland should take place in English. Something about his bombastic nature, expressed in the broken language of the toubabu, made him appear to me more as a buffoon than a threat.

  Within a few hours, King Jimmy sent men in thirty canoes to fetch the Nova Scotians. Pulling steadily toward us, they resembled an army of rowers. I was glad that they were coming to help, but aware of how easy it would have been for them to wage war on us. When my turn came to climb into a canoe, I tried to speak to the young rower who sat closest to me. But he stared blankly ahead, would not even turn his head toward me. He did his job and nothing else—working with his mates to pull us smoothly and quickly to shore. And so it happened that the same men who rowed slaves to Bance Island carried us over the waters of St. George's Bay and onto the shores of Sierra Leone.

  JOHN CLARKSON STOOD UNDER A SHELTER erected out of old canvas sails, with twelve representatives from the Sierra Leone Company behind him and all of us gathered around him. Staying in one spot, I lifted my feet up and down, over and over, to feel the land under my heels. I pulled off my shoes to let the sand of my homeland slide between my toes. I was thinking that I never wanted to set foot again on a ship, and that I had just one journey remaining in my life—a long trip overland.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Clarkson said, "we shall call our new colony Freetown. My orders were to bring you here and then return to London, but the Company directors have sent a note from London, asking me to remain with you for a short time."

  Most of the Nova Scotians broke into applause, and I joined them. I trusted Clarkson more than any other white person, and I believed that he would do his best to help us in our new life.

  Clarkson introduced the men behind him, explaining that the Company had sent them from London to manage the colony in Freetown.

  "Can we not govern our own affairs?" Peters asked.

  "Eventually, of course," Clarkson said. "But the Company has invested a fortune to bring you here and intends to govern the colony to ensure its success."

  Peters groaned. "We didn't come all this way for more white man's rules."

  Daddy Moses was sitting on a cart that had crossed the ocean with him. "Mr. Peters," he said, "give the lieutenant a chance to say his piece."

  "Thank you," Clarkson said. "Each one of you will have to give to the best of your labour. I must warn you that shirkers will not receive food, water, building supplies or anything else from the Company." Clarkson instructed us to place our temp
orary shelters far back from the water, because prime land was reserved for wharves, stores, warehouses and company residences and offices.

  Peters and a few men who were close to him shouted that they had not come to Freetown to build homes for Englishmen.

  But Daddy Moses spoke up again. "Brothers and sisters," he said, "this is not the time to argue. You all have eyes, and you see for me, so tell me this: Can anyone see five hundred homes already built for our weary bones? Do we have a house of worship? Do we have a system for gathering food and hunting game and sharing among ourselves until we are all self-sufficient?"

  Nobody said a word.

  Over the next weeks, we cleared trees and bushes, split wood for fires, emptied supplies from fifteen ships, rowboat by rowboat, ripped up spare canvas, and built simple homes out of mud, clay and thatch.

  We depended on the Company for everything. Did we need a hammer? A bit of canvas sail for cloth? Salt pork? Molasses? Bread? Everything came from the Company, which owned the resources, the food, the means to build proper shelters—and which even seemed to own us. When we ached from the hours of working in the sun or were soaked by the sudden storms, Daddy Moses reminded us that there were times to fight, but this was a time to survive.

  For the time being, we had food. The Company had brought supplies in ships from England, and much was left over from our trip from Halifax. However, the cheese had turned foul, the butter rancid, and molasses had leaked out of rotting barrels and covered the floor of our warehouse.

  Daddy Moses couldn't do much work, but he sat where we congregated and threw out suggestions. We divided ourselves into work crews, and set out to collect drinking water, hunt, make meals, and erect temporary buildings. We also built a sick house. People caught fevers left and right, and in our first two weeks in Freetown, ten Nova Scotians and three Company men died. For a time, we had a person dying every day or two. In the mornings, it wasn't uncommon for us to ask each other, "How many died last night?"

  Clarkson warned us repeatedly not to leave Freetown. Outside the town limits, we were told, the Company could not protect us from slavers or potentially hostile Africans. Many of the Nova Scotians seemed content to build their homes and work for the Company, but I felt that being obliged to stay within town was like staying on an island off the coast: I wasn't yet free to reclaim my homeland. Between building churches, houses, granaries and roads, we had no lack of work to keep us busy. But to me, all the sawing and hammering seemed designed to create barriers between Nova Scotians and the Temne people inhabiting the coastal region of Sierra Leone. We were no longer in Nova Scotia, but we were transplanting a good part of it. I felt that the colony we were establishing was neither one thing nor the other. But if Freetown was not what I had come to find in Africa, it was only right to devote myself to it for the time being, and to support the dreams of my Nova Scotian friends. For now, my own dreams would have to wait.

  I managed to avoid the illnesses and fevers that took so many lives, and made myself useful by caring for the sick, catching babies and working sometimes for Clarkson. I slept in dampness at night, and was tired all day. My bones ached and called out at night for a soft feather bed. I thought sometimes of the angry voices of white Nova Scotians warning, "You have no idea how good you have it here." It was true that life was hard for us in those early days in Freetown—our shelters, churches, food and clothes were as rude, or ruder, than they had been in Birchtown. The Nova Scotians grumbled about the poor quality of supplies and our utter dependency on the British, and they appointed sentries and guards to watch out for possible attacks by slave-traders. Still, the colonists felt a quiet optimism about the new lives they were building, and that their security was less tenuous in Freetown than it had been in Nova Scotia or New York. Personally, I concluded that no place in the world was entirely safe for an African, and that for many of us, survival depended on perpetual migration. Now that I had finally returned to my homeland, I had no thoughts of leaving. But I didn't know how long I would be able to live next door to a slave-trading post.

  Although I had lived among the Nova Scotians for ten years in Birchtown, I no longer felt entirely at home with them. I sought out the community of the Temne, though many Nova Scotians called them "heathens" and said that they should not be allowed to trade inside our settlement. Some Nova Scotians seemed intent on taking all of the contempt that they had endured in North America and redirecting it at the Africans. I heard from John Clarkson that two Nova Scotians were so disgusted at having to live under the rules and regulations of the Sierra Leone Company that they ran off to work with the slave traders at Bance Island.

  In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too. I certainly felt more Nova Scotian than African when the Temne women clustered around me, grains and bound fowl and fruits balanced on huge platters on their heads. They knew that I had come with Clarkson and the white sailors, and by the way they squeezed my hands and arms, they seemed to think that I was just as foreign as the British.

  I tried to speak to them in Fulfulde and Bamanankan, but they laughed and had no idea what I was saying. I couldn't wait to learn their language well enough to say that I too had been born in Africa. I knew that the Temne did not see me as one of them and that they never would. Still, I felt a certain connection to them, and the easiest and most natural way to feed that sense of kinship was to learn their language. I memorized new Temne words every day and used them constantly in conversation. I began by learning the Temne words for the oranges, water, fowl, salt and rice that they gave me, as well as words for the knives, pots, beads, cloth and rum that I collected from the Nova Scotians to trade.

  I learned how to count to a hundred, and how to greet a person in the morning, at noon and at night. I learned to ask, How are your children? How goes the work? How stands the house? and It all goes well and Thank you very much. I needed to learn those words. It would be impossible to travel inland without speaking to the local people.

  But even as I learned new words and phrases each day, I wondered just who exactly I was and what I had become, after more than thirty years in the Colonies. Without my parents, my husband, my children or any people with whom I could speak the languages of my childhood, what part of me was still African? I would never feel truly at home again until I found my way back to Bayo.

  WITHIN A MONTH, we had cleared the land for a townsite, erected tents or huts for all of the Nova Scotians, erected a few key Company buildings and finished a basic church, which became our community centre. For a time, we took turns in the church. The Baptists had it first thing Sunday morning, the Methodists at noon, and the Huntingdonians later in the afternoon.

  Within two months, we had hewed out four streets running parallel to the river and three streets perpendicular.

  The Nova Scotians, led by Thomas Peters, asked repeatedly for land grants so that we could begin farming. But the surveyor died, succumbing like so many people—white and black—to this new climate. The Company used this misfortune to insist that the Nova Scotians devote ourselves entirely to fortifying the town and building company structures.

  Thomas Peters tried in vain to rally the Nova Scotians against the Company. I admired him for trying. The British had given false promises to the Loyalists who fought in the Revolutionary War and travelled to Nova Scotia, and they had lied once again about what we would receive in Sierra Leone. They did not attempt to enslave us, but nor did they set us free. They did not give us the promised tracts of land or any other means of becoming self-sufficient in Freetown. We depended on them for our work, our sustenance and even the materials and tools to build our homes. And they set the rules by which we lived.

  "They betrayed us in Nova Scotia and again right here in the land of our ancestors," Peters said to a group assembled in Daddy Moses' church.

  "Give it time," Dadd
y Moses said. "We are not yet free, but we are moving in that direction."

  I shared Peters' disappointment that we found ourselves once again under British control, but anger did not burn in my heart. I believed that Daddy Moses was right—freedom would come to us, one day at a time. But I also had other things on my mind. Freetown, for me, was nothing more than a stepping stone.

  Before leaving Halifax, I had imagined that the colony we set up in Freetown would blend in with African settlements, and that I would rarely see Europeans again. As it turned out, the Temne people came daily to trade with us, but did not invite us to join them in their villages. And a steady stream of commercial, supply and military vessels plied the African coasts and brought sailors every week to Freetown. They stopped for provisions, trade and simply to rest, drink and eat, and thus our new colony in Sierra Leone became an unlikely mix of Nova Scotians, Africans, British officials, and sailors on leave from their ships.

  As well, the captains and crew of slave vessels regularly took time out from buying slaves at Bance Island to come drinking and looking for women in Freetown. I worried, initially, that the visiting slave-traders might try to re-enslave the Nova Scotians in Freetown, and spoke to Clarkson about it.

  "We're better to let them have their fun than to try to bar them from town and incur their wrath," he said.

  "It makes the Nova Scotians uncomfortable," I said, "and it puts me ill at ease too."

  "What are we going to do?" he said. "Identify every visiting sailor by ship?"

  "They trade in slaves," I said.

  "Not here in Freetown."

  "What makes you so sure?"

  "They can get all the slaves they want at Bance Island," Clarkson said. "Trying to take people here would be messy, and cause problems, and they don't want that. All they want is to drink and carouse. Bance Island is where the slavers go to work. This is where they come to play."

  FOR A TIME, I LIVED WITH A WOMAN named Debra Stockman, who had been pregnant on the trip from Halifax and whose husband died en route. I caught Debra's baby several months after we arrived, and taught her to wrap the baby around her back in the African style. I taught her to feel the straining in the baby's legs and backside, so she could loosen the infant from her back, remove her waist clothes, and let her do her business.