Slavery

One of the main issues in The Book of Negroes is the slave trade from Africa to the United States. Africans were captured in their homeland and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to many different continents and countries. Not many people really think about the issue of slavery now a days. Our generation has not really been affected by slavery. According to David Northrup, in his book, The Atlantic Slave Trade 2^nd Edition, most of the Africans slaves in the Atlantic Slave Trade were enslaved between 1700 – 1850. This is a long time ago.

However, the slave industry in the US was big back in the day. But the US was only one place that Africans were shipped to. In school, we are taught about only the slavery in the United States. However, in reality the U.S. only received about 7 percent of all slaves from Africa. According to Paul E. Lovejoy, there were 11,863,000 slaves that were exported from Africa during the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade. Within the novel, Aminata, mentions in her journey across the ”river”, that only two-thirds of the captives made it all the way across alive. Northrup confirms this number when he estimates that one third of the Africans died on the trip across the ocean. When I see numbers, it helps put things into perspective. So looking at these numbers, it is a huge eye opener to the issue that the slave trade was even outside of the US.

Another statistic I found was that 65 percent of slaves were male and 23 percent were children (male and female of the age of 15 or under). In my novel the main character is an 11 year old girl when she was captured and brought to the US, so she would fall under the 23 percent that were children. 

All of these facts about the Atlantic slave trade of Africans were fascinating and new to me.

ISP Blog #2

I am going to evaluate my ISP novel, The Book of Negroes, using the Reader Response Theory. The author mentions a number of times in the novel  why she is writing the book and how she hopes people who read it will respond to it. Reader response theory looks at how I interact or am impacted by the story because of who I am and how I read it.

I think as a 16 year old boy, I may not understand all of the things that the author wants me to understand. But I think I do have a connection with the main character and her personality. Aminata is a feisty and sassy girl. She says things the way she sees them and she finds it hard to not say everything she is thinking and feeling. This is like me. I laugh whenever she does something sneaky or rebellious because that is what I would want to do if I was her. I think Aminata and I would get into a lot of trouble if we were friends.  She hates to see people hurt other people and she sticks up for the underdog. I am like this too. I really like Aminata’s spunk and determination.

A few years ago I read a book about Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman was born as a slave in the US but escaped and became free. She helped rescue many other slaves through the underground railroad. I think reading the book about Tubman makes me realize what Aminata and the other homelanders are in for when they arrive in the US even before this book talks about it. I know she will be a slave and I know how slaves were treated.

Also, I have some very good friends who are from Africa. Some are from Ghana, some are from Ethiopia and one is from Kenya. It is hard to believe that black people were treated like animals. I know back then that white people didn’t think black people were real people but that is so different from now that it seems strange. I am glad we don’t think this way anymore.

I think all of these things help me experience this book differently than someone else.

ISP Blog #1

For my ISP novel I'm reading The Book of Negros. Throughout the first 1/5 of this novel there were many predictions that I was able to make, whether they were good predictions or far fetched predictions, I still was able to make predictions. Some of the time when I would make a prediction it would be based on a clue I believed the author had planted, like she was foreshadowing. For example when one of the soldiers that captured them mentioned how not a single captive has ever returned home before, she said, "Then I will sleep by day and walk at night. But listen to me, friend. I will come back. And I will come home."  When reading this, I would predict that most likely she was going to be the first to escape or break free and make it back to her home. In most fictional stories that's how the story would go, but my novel is non-fiction, so I was able to make many predictions without knowing for sure what the out come will be. Like whether she would actually return home, or she could be killed and that's what she means by going home.

My novel is about the life of a little girl who was taken from her village at a young age for slavery. You can only imagine all the graphic images she paints into your mind. The most graphic image she described for us was when she would be stepping over dead bodies that laid on the path they were walking on from past journeys. I can only image being forced to walk on this really narrow path in a forest with body after body you would need to walk over. Being bitterly cold from being naked, having bruises on my neck or wrists from the restraints, having cut up bloody feet and hunched over from being so hungry. When she talks about having a break at night or a rest before continuing to walk through the night, I just think of my most tiresome day I've ever endured and times it by two and that's how I picture how she is feeling.

The captures that captured the villagers are not always from across the ocean, they could also be from other villages. While Aminata was making the journey to the boat to take them across to ocean she met a younger boy who was working with the captives so he wouldn't be sent over seas. When Aminata first met the boy and it was mentioned, I wasn't really sure why it mattered that she talked to him once in a while until he had made some acceptations for her with the captives and took care of her. I soon realized that there was a bigger picture of why she mentioned him in her story because when she was getting into the boat to cross seas, she saw the young boy all bruised up and beaten and boarding the boat as well. This put a lot of stuff into perspective when you see a young boy who helped capture villagers and walk them night and day for months to send them over seas just to save himself, then to see him all beaten up and forced to do the same as everyone else he was leading it was very saddening. He had to do so many things he may not wanted to do to people he may have cared for and to be treated in the end just like everyone else.