Here is a look behind the scenes at the upcoming mini-series, The Book of Negroes, based on the 2007 novel award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill.
Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle, a string of slaves, Aminata Diallo (Aunjanue Ellis) is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.”
A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction (Ellis), one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her color and her sex.
Check out the interactive site for THE BOOK OF NEGROES
Published around the world, under various titles (The Book of Negroes, Someone Knows My Name and Aminata), the novel won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award, CBC Radio’s Canada Reads and Radio Canada’s Le combat des livres.
The Book of Negroes stars Ellis, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Louis Gossett, Jr.
The six-part television mini-series based on The Book of Negroes, which will appear in early 2015 on CBC TV in Canada and debut on BET on February 16, 2015.
Check out the trailer and the images below:
