Last spring, the novelist Lawrence Hill headed to Jamaica with his teenage daughter, Caroline; he was slated to appear at the Calabash Literary Festival. I flew in from Toronto on the same flight. We landed in Kingston around 3 p.m. and drove all the late afternoon through a lush green heat to Jake's, a resort in the Parish of St. Elizabeth where the event is held.
We arrived at dusk, in time to sit down for the lively welcome dinner. It had been a long day and I retired shortly afterward. I wanted to hit the beach early the next morning, before beginning a hectic day interviewing authors. "I'll join you for a morning swim," Hill said as I was leaving the table. I asked, "You'll be up before 6?" I was highly skeptical.
But early the next day, as I sat reading on the porch, Hill came round the corner in swim trunks and sandals, a towel slung over his shoulders. He had already been for a run. We followed a gently winding path to the seaside. The sky was white, overcast, but the water was deliciously mild. We dove right in.
"Hey Donna," Larry called after he had swum some distance away. His voice carried across the glassy surface of Calabash Bay. "How did the salt get in the ocean?"
"I don't know, Larry," I said. "How did the salt get in the ocean?"
"Well," he said, paddling closer. "What if there was a giant truck, and what if it was carrying a big load of salt, and what if it was driving along the coast, and what if, then ..."
And so began an outrageous story. Hill was grinning and playful, giddy as a boy, a far cry from the reserved, soft-spoken man who had nodded modestly the night before when introduced to the dinner crowd as a special guest. His novel The Book of Negroes had won the overall Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book a few days before.
But this is the first thing to know about Lawrence Hill: He is a compulsive storyteller in the oral, African-American tradition. He comes by this gift honestly. His father, civil-rights activist Daniel G. Hill, had a famous penchant for the hilarious tall tale. Aspects of Hill's previous novels - Some Great Thing and Any Known Blood - recall Langston Hughes's humorous stories of black everyman Jesse B. Semple.
Hill's irrepressible curiosity and daunting intellect compel him constantly to ask "what if?" His astonishing The Book of Negroes, champion of this year's literary love-in, Canada Reads, began with a big "what if?" Hill had read in a history book that a third of the black loyalists who abandoned Canada for Sierra Leone in the late 18th century had actually been born in Africa. That meant they had been kidnapped from Africa, sold into slavery, perhaps in the American South, had escaped north, settled in Canada and then eventually returned to Africa, a trajectory Hill has described as "a milk run all around the world."
What if a little girl had been kidnapped in Africa and enslaved in South Carolina, Hill wondered. What if she escaped north to serve the British in the American Revolutionary War, wound up in Canada and then returned to Africa. What if she had been involved in the struggle to abolish slavery? What would her life have been like?
Hill's answer is the story of Aminata Diallo. Hill draws upon the traditional slave narrative, real and fictional accounts of black people who endured slavery and their perilous flights to freedom. Toni Morrison's Beloved is perhaps the best-known contemporary example of the form. Hill differentiates his narrative in a couple of ways: For one thing, we meet Aminata when she is a little girl, well before she is sold into slavery. Because of that, we never see her primarily as a slave.
More significantly, we know her people: Her father is a respected jeweller who begins teaching her to read the Koran; her mother is a midwife who teaches her how to deliver babies. They reside in the prosperous and bustling village of Bayo (in modern-day Mali). This knowledge of her roots develops in us a deeper regard for her experience.
