The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley Page B

historical novel, The Book of Negroes , had won a 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and had become an international literary hit. The book’s title refers to a real historical document, a ledger that recorded the passage of slaves transported to Nova Scotia in return for their loyalty to Britain during the American Revolutionary War. Hill brings the slave narrative to life through his protagonist: a stoic West African woman who preserves her dignity despite her deprivations—a situation with which men in prison could identify. And Lawrence Hill was particularly well positioned to have additional street cred with many of the men in the prison book club. Born of a black father and a white mother, he was a role model as a successful black man.
    After Carol’s first call and email inviting him to attend, Hill declined because of a busy writing schedule and the three-hour drive to the prison. She contacted him several more times and asked in a variety of pleading ways without success. Finally, as he tells it, she invited him out for coffee, where he showed up intending to say no, but found he was no match for Carol’s persistence.
    That was in 2010, before I joined the book group. Frank, Ben and Dread were among the members in attendance at that first meeting with the author. “It was the most intimate, detailed, focused, sustained conversation about the book that I’d had with any group, period,” Hill later told me. “And that includes PhD students and graduate seminars and everything. So they were really amazing.” The experience was so rewarding that he told Carol he would be happy to return.
    And so on my fifth meeting of the Collins Bay Book Club, in the early summer of 2011, Lawrence Hill was back to talk to the inmates. He was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a shiny jacket that was a marked contrast to the plain-colour prison blues and whites that the book club members were wearing. One of Hill’s previous books documents his journey as a light-skinned black man straddling two identities. And that day the men saw a man with a close-trimmed Afro that could pass for just very curly hair and a man whose skin tone was ambiguous.
    I was captivated by the protagonist of Hill’s book,Aminata Diallo, who is kidnapped, at age eleven, by slavers from her native West Africa in the 1700s and sold to a South Carolina indigo plantation. Before boarding the slave ship, she is forced to walk in a coffle to the ocean, during which time she experiences her first menstrual period. She survives the horrific conditions of the slave ship and years of plantation labour, while enduring what surely must have been the most agonizing aspect of her bondage: having her two children taken from her. Even though it was the voice of a young female narrator, it could have been the voice of some of the black inmates’ female ancestors. Aminata’s journey takes her to Nova Scotia after her name is entered in the ledger that comes to be known as the Book of Negroes. The actual historical ledger now sits in the National Archives at Kew in London. But Nova Scotia is not where the story ends.
    The book club ambassadors had done a good job advertising the author visit and some thirty men showed up for the meeting on that hot June day. It was the largest turnout I had ever seen— double our usual numbers. Most of the new faces were black and many of the new arms were heavily tattooed. We scrambled to set up extra chairs for the attendees.
    Ben kicked off the conversation by commenting, “You always cultivate this grace in all your books, I noticed.” Ben had been present at Hill’s 2010 prison visit, when they had first discussed the book, and since then he had read another of Hill’s works, the author’s debut novel, Some Great Thing .
    The author’s eyes opened wide and he smiled at Ben. He talked about imbuing his characters with admirable qualities like courage because he liked