In Honor of Black History Month - Nomi's Pic

Naomi Weisman is a Canadian, Australian and mother of three, who loves to ramble with her dog, cook for family and friends, and laugh whenever possible.

In honor of Black History month, I want to focus on two books: Any Known Blood, by Lawrence Hill and The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.

I studied History and Literature at University. It was an exciting combination of degrees because they often intersected. My favorite combination of courses was American History and African American Literature.

Books can change me and shift how I see the world. We read many books in the African American lit course that affected such a change. One of the books that distinctly impacted me was The Classic Slave Narratives by Henry Louis Gates Jr., an American literary critic and host of Finding Your Roots on PBS. 

There are many common threads within each of these narratives. There are two that stand out related to the two novels that I have chosen to review. One is the escape to freedom, and another is the idea of identity and community.

Lawrence Hill is a Canadian author most famous for his book The Book of Negroes, known as Someone Knows My Name in the United States. Ten years before that book was written, Hill published Any Known Blood in 1997.

The book's protagonist is Langston Cane V, a troubled man going through a divorce and an identity crisis. Growing up in Oakville, Ontario as a biracial man and the son of an influential doctor, who can trace his lineage back more than five generations in the African-American and African-Canadian communities, Cane is adrift with feelings of inadequacy. 

One day he stumbles upon a box belonging to his aunt that is filled with papers related to the Cane family. Langston is a born researcher and begins digging deeper into his history and the four Langston Canes that came before him. He discovers why his family came to live in Oakville, the end of the Underground Railroad.

This book moves back and forth from the present day to different points in American and Canadian history. It is filled with intriguing characters, troubled history, and provocative questions about what defines one as a person of color and the perennial subject of identity. It flows easily and is a page-turner. You will feel invested in the characters almost immediately.

Colson Whitehead is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, not once but twice! His novel, The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is one of those winners.

Modeled after the structure of Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which is noted to be the first piece of travel fiction in three parts, he takes the figurative idea of the Underground Railroad and creates a literal one. Like Gulliver’s Travels, Whitehead creates a science fiction feel with Cora’s odyssey on the railroad system to freedom in three parts.

This fantastic piece of fiction will turn you upside down with its character development, use of history as social commentary, emotional depth, and creativity. I have read many of Whitehead’s novels, and they are often challenging to navigate. I find myself having to read passages over and over to discover the meaning that I’ve missed. 

This book is no different in that there are references to history and social commentary on every page, but somehow it just flows. If you are interested in the African American experience both in the present day and historically (they are inextricably linked), this book should be on your TBR (to be read) list!

As a final note, I’ve grown up in Toronto, Ontario. We did not learn much about the Underground Railroad when I was in school in the 70s and 80s, but there was a restaurant my parents took me to on special occasions called The Underground Railroad. It had the most fantastic soul food; the ribs and cornbread were my favorites. 

However, what was most memorable about it was what they taught me. On the walls and placemats were biographies about people who worked on the Underground Railroad escape route to freedom—people like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. 

My little mind soaked up the names and stories of these people, and I never lost my passion for the subject. My shelves are filled with great African- American/Canadian literature, and my heart and mind swell at the stories and commentary within those pages.

If you have read either of these books or are going to, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.