Read Online The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley - Free Book Online Page B

asked if he would give it a try. The kids were between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, serving long terms, and they could read, just wouldn’t. Other interventions had failed, but Hill succeeded after getting together with the boys once a week over lunch in the prison library.
    â€œHow did you do it?” I asked.
    â€œI gave them books individually,” Hill told me. “I figured out what a kid would like after talking to him for a couple of hours.” It was never a book from the prison library—too uncool. The books were gifts from him—personal recommendations. Sometimes it was a father-son memoir, sometimes a story written by a famous prisoner, sometimes one of Hill’s own book proposals. “They were really interested in how I was pitching it and they were speculating about whether I’d find a publisher,” he said. “It was full of drama for them.” They would come back sometimes complaining that they had hated a book he’d given them. “They hated the beginning, where the character did this, the climax where the character did that, and the ending that was so unsatisfying,” he recalled. In other words, they’d read the book.
    Two days later, Book Clubs for Inmates held its first fundraiser on Amherst Island. Lawrence Hill was the guest of honour and my fellow volunteer Derek engaged him in an interview for the audience of local residents, who had paid twenty dollars a head to be there. It was early June, and the little island situated on the migratory flyway was at its most glorious. There were birds nesting in every low-lying notch, oriental poppies nodding their heads and old-growth lilac bushes and irises blooming in profusion. Incredibly, a robin had made its nest in the wreath on Carol’s front door and each time she opened the door she had to be careful not to disturb the three blue eggs. A mourning dove sat demurely on her nest in Carol’s bird feeder.
    Hill talked about the title of The Book of Negroes . Publishers in the U.S. and some other English-speaking countries sold it under the title Someone Knows My Name because of concern that readers would find the word Negroes offensive. Hill told the people at the fundraiser that although he initially fought the idea of publishing under a different title, he came to understand why the publishers felt so strongly. “I mean if you use the term ‘Negro’ in Canada, most people will look at you as though you are a bit outdated and you haven’t read a newspaper in fifteen years, but try using the word ‘Negro’ in Brooklyn, you’ll get your nose broken. It’s a serious, fighting word and the American publishers were concerned it would be so alienating to readers they wouldn’t pick up the book. The word is now mostly a derogatory word, meaning someone who has no self-respect or self-pride as a black person, so it’s a very cutting term inside black culture.”
    By the time Carol and I were back together again with the men in the Collins Bay Book Club three weeks later to discuss the novel Such a Long Journey , the whole question of The Book of Negroes title had taken an ugly turn. Just before Hill came to visit our book club, he had been in the Netherlands, where he had spoken to various audiences. An attendee at one of those events was now threatening to burn the book to protest the use of the word Negroes in the Dutch title, Het Negerboek . On the very morning of our book club meeting, the Dutch group, known as the Foundation to Honour and Restore Payments to Victims of Slavery in Suriname, partially carried out their threat by burning the book’s cover. When asked by the media about his reaction, Hill said that the book’s title was designed to focus attention on an obscure historical document and he condemned the threat of book burning as a form of intimidation against those who valued the freedom to write and read.
    Carol and I were keen to