Free The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

ask the men how they had reacted to the title. “Let’s name the elephant in the room,” said Carol, to open the discussion. “It’s race.” There she went again—so blunt! But they looked at her approvingly. She asked them what percentage of the prison was black. Dread, who was black, estimated only 15 to 20 percent. Graham, who was white, said it was more like 40 to 50 percent. Everyone jumped in with their estimate, talking over one another.
    But, Carol wanted to know, in the men’s opinion, was the title insulting? “If you went past a bookstore and there were twenty books in the window and one of them was The Book of Negroes , what do you think?”
    â€œThe majority might take offence,” said Dread.
    But, Ben said, “I might want to read it.” Dread rolled his eyes.
    Stan said there was a new edition of Huckleberry Finn inserting the word slave to replace “the N-word ” and that he’d seen some of the discourse in the media. “There was this one highly educated black man from Harvard or whatever and he was saying leave the word in,” he said, “because it teaches kids what that word meant to people.”
    The conversation veered into discussions of mistreatment of other racial or ethnic groups in history, including the Irish, First Nations people and Jews. But Dread argued forcefully that slavery’s duration over four hundred years had caused the disintegration of family structure among black people. “It’s way way way way worse,” he said. I cast my mind back to Lawrence Hill’s character Aminata in the book and how the slave owners robbed her of her children.
    At least one of the white inmates in the room cast his mind back as well. “It happened hundreds of years ago but the resentment gets passed on from generation to generation,” said Stan. “Here’s a white man,” he said, referring to himself. “And I gotta look at it as someone that made it happen. It’s disgusting.”
    â€œI agree with you, Stan,” said Carol. “Because I felt as I read The Book of Negroes a sort of collective sin or guilt that it was white people such as me who did what they did.”
    But then Rick, the guy who’d done time in the Southeast Asian prison, brought an end to the white liberal sentiments. “Myself, I don’t feel that. Whatever happened, happened. My heart breaks. What are you going to do? You can’t be judged based on what somebody else has done, just because you’re white. I don’t feel I’m part of the collective sin.”
    Others simply expressed their feeling that slavery was wrong. Graham wondered aloud: “What in the world made people think that they had the right to get on a ship and go to the other side of the ocean, grab a bunch of people, enslave them and bring them back?”And Frank made the point that various African populations enslaved each other on their own continent.
    I looked around the room. The fact that we were having this conversation at all was remarkable. As Graham had said in a letter to Carol two months earlier, prison was a very divided place and he was surprised by how the book club “totally knocked down” the barriers between the racial, ethnic and gang-affiliated groups in the prison.
    â€œI’ll take your comments back to Larry,” said Carol. She was now on familiar terms with Lawrence Hill. “What shall I say—it was a lively discussion. I’ll tell him to keep the faith.”
    Hill himself took an opportunity to document the Netherlands incident and his reaction to it in a lecture that he delivered some months later. Now published as a thirty-three-page book, it is titled Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: Anatomy of a Book Burning .
    First Three Cups of Tea and then The Book of Negroes was in the news. Reading a book that was newsworthy gave the men a sense of participating in something