The Book of Negroes

The theme of names and naming is related to the act of storytelling, though it also has its own separate resonance. The title of this novel, upon its Canadian publication, was The Book of Negroes, but it was changed to Someone Knows My Name by the American publishers for a variety of cultural and sociopolitical reasons, and with the blessing of the novelist himself. The American title suits the narrative well, and emphasizes the central importance of names and naming. From its opening pages, when the elder Aminata declares her African name to the little white, British girl, to the very last chapter, when Queen Charlotte addresses her by her African name, not her anglicized one, the novel lingers on the act of saying one’s name.

This act has immense resonance for the enslaved peoples who are stolen from their homeland. Aboard the slave ship on the Atlantic crossing, Chekura begs Aminata’s forgiveness, and she tells him she does not hate him. He repeats her name over and over, willing himself to survive the horrors of Middle Passage, and when she says his name, he declares, “Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live” (66).His words resonate for the other captives, who also ask for her name. Then, they call out their own names, hailing from many diverse regions in Africa: “In the darkness, men repeated my name and called out their own as I passed. They wanted me to know them. Who they were. Their names. That they were alive, and would go on living” (66).

Later, on the platform at the slave auction, Aminata sees Biton being sold. The whites are all shouting, making their bids, and Biton looks around, catching Aminata’s eye in the crowd: “He opened his mouth. Aminata Diallo, he said. I couldn’t hear a thing over the noise of the crowd. But I saw his mouth move and knew he was saying my name” (112). The stark power of this scene is undeniable. Over and over, the act of saying one’s name functions symbolically as an act of moral and psychological defiance in an unjust world. When Aminata comes to America, her African name is anglicized to Meena, but when the Queen uses her African name, she honors the place from which Aminata has come. At the end of the novel, telling her own story, in her own name, allows her to reclaim her own complex identity. 

The theme of migration is introduced in the novel’s very first pages, when Aminata warns her readers to avoid “large bodies of water,” urging: “Do not cross them” (7). Even the sunset is dangerous, she warns, for “what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit…to light the path of the slave vessel” that is travelling across the sea (7)? An old woman at the novel’s opening, she declares that she has “weathered enough migrations for five lifetimes”; so, she will no longer travel, but prefers to be buried here in England (7). Earlier, upon arriving in Nova Scotia, she tells Daddy Moses and Jason Wood, “we are travelling peoples,” then proceeds to tell them her life story (319). Like the preacher he is, Daddy Moses answers “amen,” and “God has sent us on a long migration and he has seen to our survival” (318-319).

Aminata goes from Bayo to Charles Town, from Charles Town to New York City, from there to Nova Scotia, and from there to Freetown; she leaves Freetown in an attempt to return to Bayo, only to be betrayed and forced to return to Freetown. From there, she willingly emigrates to England at the end of her life. Some migrations are forced, some are chosen, but all of them shape who she is, and what she becomes. One of her bravest acts is her attempt to return to Bayo, and when she bids her friends farewell in the small shallop (a type of boat) loaned to her by the Governor of Sierra Leone, she fully believes “she will never see them again”; so, she spends a moment “remembering all the people I had left behind in my migrations—enforced and elected,” and then she bravely walks onto Bance Island, the place where she was once shipped across the sea as a slave (431).