the book of negroes

I just finished reading The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. During my block of student teaching I'll be working with the grade 12 English teacher to do a unit on the novel in February.

I had high expectations going into the book. When I mentioned what I was reading, most people who were familiar with the book gushed that they had loved it. So maybe the high expectations have tainted my response to it. I liked the book, and I would definitely recommend it. I learned a lot from the book, too; even though it's a novel, the amount of history threaded through the chapters had me doing quick google searches out of curiosity.

The thing that kept this book from becoming one of my all-time favourite books was the main character, Meena. I never really connected to her. I felt that the book was more focused on jamming as much history as possible into it than it was on developing character depth. Meena was captured from her village in Africa, travelled across the Atlantic on a slave ship, worked on a Southern plantation, worked as a house slave, escaped, worked for the British, moved to Nova Scotia, moved to Sierra Leone, tried to find her way back to her village, and finally ended up in England telling her story to assist the abolitionist movement. Everywhere Meena went she a) survived and b) rose to a higher position. She encounters major historical figures, including the King and Queen of England. She is incredibly smart; she learns to read and write, learns how to be independent, is a skilled midwife, and picks up languages quickly. But she just didn't seem believable -- she didn't seem real to me. The book begins with her looking back on her life as an old woman in London, so perhaps knowing where she would end up took away from the suspense. By the four hundredth page, I was wondering when the book would be over.

I'm not trying to be overly critical -- it was an excellent book and it made me stop and think about the long history of black Canadians. I was truly moved by the realities of the slave trade (although reading Toni Morrison's Beloved a few years ago has probably desensitized me somewhat). While I understand the literary and historical value of The Book of Negroes, it's not one of my personal favourites. I lean more toward character-driven stories -- the Jane Eyres and Anne Shirleys and Hagar Shipleys that I feel like I know personally.

There's going to be a lot of material to work with when teaching this novel. The author has helped developed a very useful teacher's guide:

http://www.lawrencehill.com/BON-Teachers-Guide.pdf 

I don't know yet how much leeway the grade 12 teacher will let me have with this, but I'm already mulling over different ways to approach this book with a class ... I think the book does have a wide appeal and will hopefully connect with the majority of the students.