Reading 3 Reflections

The section begins with Aminata finding out she is pregnant with Chekura’s child. She meets Solomon Lindo, the state indigo inspector. He offers to buy her, but is refused. Aminata decides she wants to get married to Chekura, since she’s carrying his child. Robinson finds out, and forcibly shaves her head in the middle of the yard as punishment. She still has the baby, though, and names him Mamadu, after her father. When Mamadu is around ten moths old, he is stolen, and sold so far away even the fishnet can’t reach him. Afterwards, Aminata retaliates against Appleby by doing nothing, and he eventually gets so fed up he sells her to Solomon Lindo. She moves to Charles Town with Lindo, where she eats far better, and has less work. Lindo teaches her to read more, and she becomes a midwife-for-hire in Charles Town. She learns to barter and about arithmetic, and begins doing Lindo’s books. She does errands and writes business letters for Lindo. She catches the babies of Dolly and Mrs. Lindo. Lindo gives her a gift, the knowledge of where she came from, and is taken to the Charles Town library, where she sees a map of Africa, which confuses her, as there is little information about where she came from on it. Smallpox sweeps through Charles Town, and most of the household dies. Lindo leaves for New York City, and Aminata is somewhat lost in the time he’s gone, but Chekura reappears. He quite quickly disappears, though not before telling Aminata Lindo sold their son. They don’t speak aside from a fight when he returns until they leave to New York at the end of the reading.

I know how she felt when Mrs. Lindo died, because Mrs. Lindo was like a mother to her, and my own mother died rather unexpectedly three years ago. I know how she grieved, and I recognized a lot of the patterns in my grieving in hers. We both lash out at those close to us, and felt alone afterwards, because someone important had been wrenched away from us. It was also different, though, in that I kept my feelings far too bottled up, and she let them all wash out in a torrent. I busied myself, like Lindo did. I feel like this was one really effective area, where I could empathize and not have it ripped away immediately, and this really propelled me through the rest of the book. I was asking questions for once, and not just reading it for the sake of reading it. It made the book fun for me, though it wore off by the end.

Reading Two Reflections

The reading starts in London again, with Aminata venting her frustrations with the abolitionist movement. It then moves to young Aminata, having just arrived on an island in the Americas. Aminata is very sick, but recovers, slowly. They are taken to a slave market, and are sold. The new American slaves are again forced to walk, and are taken to Robinson Appleby’s indigo plantation. Aminata meets Georgia, and starts to learn Gullah, the language of the slaves, and the slaves’ pidgin English. She learns of the trade of the plantation, and begins helping Georgia with the baby catching. She learns Mamed, the overseer, is a Muslim like her, and learns to read from him. Chekura begins to visit her. At the end of the reading, she is raped by Appleby.

This reading does something for me. The sickness and recovery, as I have had my fair share of sickness and injury requiring serious recovery. Feeling like I can’t do anything for days at a time is something I have felt, and in this way, I can actually empathize with her. Ive also been in situations where I had to work extremely hard, though certainly never at risk of a beating. When I was on the band trip last year, we went to an aerial park in South Dakota, and the courses were extremely physically taxing, and I had people behind me all the time, so I was being pushed to go through quickly. Then, again, it devolves back into something that I feel I can’t see happening, let alone empathize with. It had a chance to draw me into the story, but then it lost me again. I think that it has a chance to get people to empathize with it, but that it’s very hard to do so when the author can’t seem to go more than three pages without something awful and unimaginable happening to the protagonist.

Reading One Reflections

At the start of the reading, Aminata is in London, old and decrepit. She’s working with the slave trade abolitionists. The story quickly moves into hew childhood, where she’s a somewhat pampered child living a care-free life in a village in modern day Mali, but she is abducted by slavers. On the three month journey to the coast, she helps multiple women with their childbirths, a skill she learned from her mother. Once at the coast, she is stuffed into a tight-pack slave ship, which leaves fairly quickly. While crossing the Atlantic, many slaves die, from everything from disease, to starvation, to being part of a failed rebellion. At the end of the reading, they arrive in the Americas.

Aminata’s story starts in a very cliche way. Carefree childhood, shattered by the destruction of her home and the capture of the protagonist. This makes it hard to empathize with her from the start, because she is thrown into the exact same scenario we’ve all seen a hundred times in other stories. It even continues this way: a difficult, forced journey, to the lair of the enemy, in this case the slave castle. This is where The Book of Negroes starts to diverge a bit from the typical fantasy hero’s journey, since they will normally get their powers at this point, but it starts one of several cycles of threes in the book. Three journeys across the water, three separations from Chekura, three times she has a child (Mamadu, May, and the reunion with May). It’s the start of an unbelievable book and a forced story.