She joins a group of freed slaves, sponsored by abolitionists in London, sailing to Sierra Leone to create a free colony. Aminata loses her husband and her two children. In return for their help in the war, they will be given land in Nova Scotia to start a free life. Aminata escapes and finds herself on the British side, inscribing the names of freed slaves in The Book of Negroes (a real historical document containing the details of 3000 slaves). She becomes a skilled midwife and is eventually re-sold to Solomon Lindo, who teaches her to read and write.Īmerican agitation for independence is gathering strength, but it becomes obvious that their call for ‘freedom’ does not include slaves. Aminata, age 11, is captured by slave traders and sold into slavery in South Carolina, where she suffers rape and other terrible abuses. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.Africa, 1755. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink.
If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them.
“Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages.
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