She has not been called Aminata Diallo for a long time now. Nicknamed an easier to pronounce name, Meena Dee, she records the story of her life, on that took place during one of the most horrific times in human history. As by eleven years old her village was taken into slavery by the white men they called toubab. Her village, Bayo, was what Meena long to return to, convince that the village survived the attack is thriving. Both her parents were killed by the toubab, leaving Meena alone to begin the walk to the ocean in a coffle, neck strapped in leather, feet chained to the person in front of her. There was one thing that made Meena stand out from her village, besides her exotic beauty with two crescent moons carved into each cheek, was the …show more content…
A Canadian author, this book won the Caned Reads in 2009 and is one of the 150 books of Influence in Nova Scotia. Hill tells the story of Aminata Diallo, a girl stolen from her village at age eleven, forced to work in a plantation, who them escapes her master in New York, gains liberty and travels to Nova Scotia as a black loyalist, then to create a new community in Sierra Leone, and then to London where she decides to tell her story. Heart wrenching tragic is the story Hill writes, because no good can come to Meena’s life. The story takes place from the years 1745 to 1802, divided into four books and goes through Meena life from her wins and the loses. The passage Hill wrote in the novel of when Meena thinks of the United States, the land she was brought to as a labor source, as a place of freedom as during her time in New York, Americas were getting ready to break off all their ties with the British (thus why Meena left to Nova Scotia as a British Loyalist) in which Hill wrote: “I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. there was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains” (311). Slavery is a topic that can never get too much media as it is a dark passage in human history, one that should be