The story begins when Animata is a young girl living with her parents in an African village called Bayo. From a young age, Aminata has learned from and helped her mother in midwifery, and it was on one of these journeys to help her mother deliver a new baby that they are set upon by slave traders. Her mother is killed in the conflict, but Aminata and the village slave (who had accompanied them for protection) are captured and yoked in line with a several other captives. After a gruelling three-month journey to the coast, they are put on a slave ship. Aminata's mother was from another village before she married, so was able to teach her daughter the language from her home town. This bilinguality, as well as the fact that she was able to serve as a midwife, earned Aminata some distinction with the ship's captain. For a time she was spared some of the horrors found below deck, that's not to say she did not still witness horrifying things.
When the boat lands, Aminata is auctioned off to an indigo grower in the southern US. Here she meets several people who teach her various things, including the very scandalous act of reading. She also reconnects with a boy who she had met during her capture and eventually marries and has a child with him, but both she and her child are sold to different owners once the plantation owner learns of the child's birth. Animata is then sold to a Jewish indigo inspector who greatly advances her reading ability and uses her to keep his books, all the while using her previous skills to get her by. She eventually ends up going to various other locals, gains her freedom, and constantly seeks to reconnect with her loved ones, further establish her independence. Meanwhile, she must constantly battle oppression, racism, poverty, and heartache.
What I really enjoyed about this novel was its attempt at telling the story it had to tell without demonizing anyone, and all around sparing the reader of a pity party. That is not to say that the events in the novel were trivialized or excused, but rather that the heroine never took the time to whine about her situation, she just kept pushing forward. At one point she even states that she's not an emotional person and I think that helped with the authenticity of the storytelling. It was more as though she was bearing witness, but she was still very present in the storytelling process. The author made a point to not paint a black and white (so to speak) picture of the situation. Aminata and her family were muslim, which varies from the rest of her village, and from what the average reader would expect. This also hints at a previous cultural interaction and exchange. The idea of racism and slavery is also blurred a bit. In Aminata's village, there a village slave who plays a small role in the book, which also speaks to the fact that slavery was not invented with the black slave trade and that slavery in fact may have existed within Africa by the very people who later became slaves themselves. Also, when Aminata becomes a slave of the Jewish man, and even how the slaves born in America view the African-born slaves complicates the idea of discrimination in the book.
Aminata was a very strong heroine. Even though she was faced with extreme hardship and faced countless struggles, she not only never gave into despair, she proactively used her skills and intelligence to survive and progress. She gave herself purpose and constantly strove to better her situation.
