Diversify Your Reading Challenge 2022: Historical Fiction

Now I know that some people will naturally assume that I would pick Sea Island Lady by Francis Griswold for this month's Diversify Your Reading Challenge 2022. Some say that A Sea Island Lady is the best book ever written about Beaufort's past. I do not happen to agree. I like Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill much better, probably because it was inspired by an historical document. 

Hill's multiple award winning book is rooted on a 1783 naval ledger kept by the British to account for the 3000 enslaved and free Black Loyalists who were transported into Canada at the end of the American Revolution. The original Book of Negroes ledger is 150 pages long and full of data and genealogical information about who the Black Loyalists transported to Canada were. "As a research tool it offers historians and genealogists the opportunity to trace and correlate people backward and forward in time with other documents, such as ship manifests, slave ledgers, and census and tax records." (1)

Hill's novel was published under two titles: In Canada as The Book of Negroes after the ledger and in the United States as Someone Knows My Name. It has become one of the all-time best-selling books in Canada.  (2) In it, Hill tells the life narrative story from the perspective and memories of an African child, Aminata, who was stolen at age 11 from her village. She is first enslaved on St. Helena Island indigo plantation. But her yearning to be free places her in conflict with her owners. She learns to read and write in secret in expectation that doing so will help her to get back to Africa. She becomes skilled as a midwife. Her literacy and personal knowledge of the transported Black Loyalists allows her to work on compiling the Book of Negroes in the novel.  Her tale covers six decades, 1745 to 1805, three continents, Africa, North American and Europe, and topics related to enslavement, abolitionism, and what it means to be a human being. I agree with Publishers Weekly that "Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force." (3)   

As the book cover indicates, it was adapted into a 6 part television miniseries entitled The Book of Negroes by Canadian Broadcasting Company and Black Entertainment Television in 2015.  

A few words to protect myself from being pilloried by others for not choosing the Griswold novel: 

A Sea Island Lady is one of those books one either loves or hates. Many local residents and visitors fall into the "Love" category. Personally, I have never liked it. The protagonist's mealy-mouthed support of her deadbeat alcoholic husband annoyed me so much that I quit reading the book about page 500. I also think - as did many of its contemporary reviewers in 1939 when the book was first published - that it was way too long for its own good. I lost interest and patience about half-way through the almost 1000 pages of text. This is not to say that I don't recommend that others read it. You may well enjoy the book and find it more to your reading taste. At the very least, the parts about the effect of the Great Sea Island Hurricane and phosphate mining bear obvious signs of Griswold's diligent historical research. However, I do recommend that one reads it in conjunction with Dr. Rowland and Dr. Wise's volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Beaufort County South Carolina to help separate the fiction from the facts.

Notes: 

(1) Hill, Lawrence. 2007. "Freedom Bound." Beaver 87 (1): 16-23.  https://search-ebscohost-com.scsl.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=24097871&site=ehost-live.

(2) MacKay, Marlo, and Laurel Tarulli. 2015. "Dal Reads." Reference & User Services Quarterly 54(3): 16-18. doi:10.5860/rusq.54n3.16.

(3) "Someone Knows My Name." 2007. Publishers Weekly 254 (35): 39. https://search-ebscohost-com.scsl.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=110965591&site=ehost-live.