A BLOG ABOUT LANGUAGE

FEB. 13 2015 9:00 AM

What I Learned About

Language When I Titled My
Novel The Book of Negroes
By Lawrence Hill

The title of my novel, The Book of Negroes, has undergone a series of changes since
HarperCollins Canada published it eight years ago. The original name resurrects a
long-forgotten British naval ledger used to document the exodus of 3,000 African
Americans from Manhattan. These African Americanstheir stories also form the
subject of my novelbecame known as the Black Loyalists because they served the
British in Manhattan on the losing side of the American Revolutionary War. The Tories
had enticed slaves to throw o their shackles and ght, promising freedom to any man
or woman who would take refuge behind British military lines. But the British lost the
war, so they rewarded the 3,000 Black Loyalists with free passage by ship from
Manhattan to Nova Scotia (on the Atlantic coast of Canada) in 1783.
In 2007, shortly before the rst printing of the novel in the United States, my American
publisher (W.W. Norton & Co.) changed the title to Someone Knows My Name. I was
told that American bookstores were reluctant to order a book with the word Negroes

on the cover. In the Netherlands,

meanwhile, where the Canadian title
was translated quite literally to Het
Negerboek, a small group of protesters of
Dutch Surinamese descent was so
outraged that they burned copies of the
book cover in an Amsterdam park.
When, back in the States, BET bought a
six-part miniseries adaptation of the
story (the rst episode airs Monday), the
network opted to use my original title,
which persuaded Norton to re-release
the book as The Book of Negroes. This
back-and-forth made me wonder: What
is it with the word Negroes? How has it
come to be so incendiary?
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The word Nigger
traditionally pitched with such venom
that my father ordered me as a boy to
ball up my sts and start ghting the instant I heard anyone use ithas made a
comeback. Its the title of comedian Dick Gregorys autobiography, which sold more
than a million copies, and a history tome by Harvard Law School professor Randall
Kennedy. Hip-hop artists have ushered it back into near-respectability.

Negro, on the other hand, has moved from respectable to despised. The U.S.
government removed the word from its census forms in 2014. For many, it suggests
that the person so designated is a weak-kneed Uncle Tom with no self-respect as a
black person.
It wasnt always thus. For most of the 20th century, Negro was a neutral, respectful way
to designate Americans of African descent. (Martin Luther King Jr. used it repeatedly.)
Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1917. Three
years later, Langston Hughes wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers. In 1928, W.E.B.
DuBois received a letter from a high school sophomore who argued that Negro, or
nigger is a white mans word to make us feel inferior. He replied: Negro is a ne
word. Etymologically and phonetically it is much better and more logical than African
or colored or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions a Negro by any other
name would be just as black and just as white; just as ashamed of himself and just as
shamed by others as today.
In my own family, I saw and heard the word Negro used many times. My fathers Ph.D.
dissertation, completed in 1960, was entitled Negroes in Toronto: A Sociological Study of
a Minority Group. When he was named chairman of the Ontario Human Rights
Commission in 1971, the Globe and Mail newspaper ran a headline with these words:
Negro appointed chairman of human rights board. However, by 1978, when my
mother and father co-founded the Ontario Black History Society, the word Negro had
quietly fallen to the wayside.
According to University of Baltimore law professor Michael Higginbotham, the
beginning of the end of Negro coincided with the rise of the Black Power movement.
(Think James Browns 1968 song Say It Loud, Im Black and Im Proud.) As civil

rights advanced, fewer and fewer people wanted to use a term coined by slave
traders. As Higginbotham argues, Negro fails to establish parity between the people it
connotes and other groups. Black and African-American are analogous to White
or Italian-American, but Negro lacks specicity and stands apart.
Delivering the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X in 1965, the actor and playwright
Ossie Davis said: Nobody knew better than he the power words have over the minds
of men. Malcolm had stopped being a Negro years ago. It had become too small, too
puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become
an Afro-American
It is never satisfying to dene a person by race, and terms that purport to do so are
bound to fail. This is because race itself is an absurd construct that places people of
African heritage at the bottom of a social hierarchy. Yet we continue to innovate with
language. We run in circles trying to do the impossible and nd a term that will work:
Nigger, Negro, colored, Black, Afro-American, African-American
As we lurch forward, grappling with new terms in new contexts, we should at least be
inspired by history.
The Book of Negroes is the best title for a novel and television miniseries about 3,000
people whose names and autobiographical details were entered into a British naval
ledger by the same name. The document itself embraces the history of peoples of
African descent as they moved from Africa to the Americas in slavery, and then threw
o their chains to serve the British wartime eort in every capacity imaginable.

The story of the Black Loyalists is one of survival in

the face of betrayal. Men and women, children in
Top Comment
tow, came to live for years in ragged canvas tents
Good essay. Thanks, Slate. It's not
on the southern tip of Manhattan. After being
like a serious novel like that should
evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, some were
have been titled The Persons-ofenslaved or indentured in Canada. In Nova Scotia,
Coloring-Book. More...
-Mr. T & Sympathy
many were never given the land they had been
promised and were left to freeze or starve to death
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or to be hanged for triing oenses such as stealing
potatoes. The oppression in what should have been Canaan was too much to
stomach: A decade after arriving in Nova Scotia, 1,200 Black Loyalists accepted a
voluntary oer from British abolitionists to sail once more across the Atlantic, this time
traveling free in a otilla of 15 ships to found the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone in
West Africa.
As it turns out, many of these so-called adventurers were not merely going to Africa:
They were returning to the homeland from which they had been stolen at a much
younger age. This astounding narrative of resilience is precisely the sort of story that
we need to remember and lean on, in times good and bad. Largely absent from
American and Canadian history books and classrooms, it deserves study. It deserves
resurrection. Negro may well be an outdated word in contemporary speech, but it and
The Book of Negroes have a central role in history and the fashioning of the narrative
of peoples of the African diaspora who came to America in chains and chose to leave
it, free.
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