Maged Soleman volunteered his time to organize the genealogical chart and to provide initial ideas and designs for the book cover.
Denys Giguère, Dan Hill, Karen Hill, Irène Léger, Bert Simpson, and Oakland Ross made detailed comments on early drafts. Mary Lynn O’Shea and Ruth Idler offered valuable advice, and Stephen Dixon and Paul Quarrington helped in many ways throughout this writing project.
I wish to thank my editor, Iris Tupholme, whose striking insights and suggestions made the final editing process pleasurable and exciting.
About the Author
LAWRENCE HILL is the author of several novels and works of non-fi ction, including The Book of Negroes, which won the commonwealth writers’ Prize, the rogers writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and cbc’s canada reads; Some Great Thing; and Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. he lives in hamilton, ontario. Visit him online at www.lawrencehill.com.
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PRAISE FOR Any Known Blood:
“Any Known Blood is a remarkable achievement. Here is an immensely readable novel, populated with sympathetic yet realistic characters. It deals sensitively, yet often humorously, with one of the most compelling issues of our time in North America—the ever-shifting, ever-problematic relationship between the races. Lawrence Hill is a wonderfully talented writer, and Any Known Blood will be one of the talk-of novels of the year.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Almost unique in Canadian fiction, this is a black family chronicle…. Any Known Blood is a strong, brave book, one alive to the full complexities of any life.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
“In this ground-breaking novel, the author plows a shrewd furrow between the minefields of history, commerce and art.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“The novel, based on actual events and real people, is filled with humour, insight and intelligence.”
—The London Free Press
“A considerable achievement in which an intelligent, compassionate writer manages to achieve what American feminist poet Adrienne Rich calls the ‘imaginative transformation of reality.’ That he manages to do so with such grace and humour is a tribute to Hill’s maturity as both a writer and a human being.”
—The Ottawa Citizen
“Any Known Blood is a witty, wry, well-crafted story told on a Dickensian scale.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Outstanding—Hill’s narrative is consistently compelling and readable, and his characters are wonderfully drawn.”
—Quill & Quire
“Lawrence Hill masterfully threads the history of the five generations … into an engaging commentary of changing times…. Colourful dialogue and rich flashes of subtle humour abound.”
—Toronto Star
“Lawrence Hill is on to something new: a literary examination of psyche and bones and flesh. History and the imagination of this young author surge vibrantly to define, over generations, the true meaning of life. Any Known Blood becomes more than a history of lives that might normally be lost, and is instead its new interpretation.”
—Austin Clarke
“This is what novels were meant to be—harrowing, hilarious, hugely inventive and utterly convincing, the kind of book you’ll live inside and never want to leave. Any Known Blood spans oceans, continents and generations—from West Africa to Virginia to the north shore of Lake Ontario—and maps them all in the contours of a single human heart.”
—Oakland Ross
“Any Known Blood is all about love. It is a large and large-hearted novel full of tragedy and hope, and sadness and laughter. Lawrence Hill truly captivates the reader in this wonderfully boisterous account of five generations of a black family.”
—Paul Quarrington
A Word About History
JOHN BROWN AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS, who played major roles in the American anti-slavery movement, are minor characters in this book. Their actual words appear in this novel in four places:
• when Douglass says, “John Brown’s zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine — it was the burning sun to my taper light”;
• when Douglass says, “I could live for the slave but he [Brown] could die for them”;
• when Brown urges Douglass to join the raid and says, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them”;
• and when Brown says, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.”
Also, Shields Green — one of the Harpers Ferry raiders — uttered this line when asked to join Brown’s raid: “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” These words, too, have been revived in the novel.
I have attempted to provide a generally faithful rendering of Brown and Douglass, and of their involvement in the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. However, I have taken many fictional liberties. Brown brought just one daughter (Annie) to the Kennedy Farm in Maryland to help prepare for the raid; this novel has him bringing Annie and a fictional daughter, Diana. In search of men for his raid, Brown did travel in 1858 to Chatham, Ontario, but to my knowledge he never made it to Oakville.
Hayward Shepherd, a free black man and an innocent bystander, was the first person to die in the raid. Words attributed to Shepherd in this novel are fictional. I don’t know which raider actually killed Shepherd, so the task fell to the fictional Albert Hastings. To enhance the novel’s historical flavor, I have used the real names of a few other raiders, but their fleeting words in this book are imagined. Langston Cane’s involvement in the raid is entirely fictional.
In Chapter 11, Benjamin Curley, general secretary of the Central Committee of Negro College Men, encourages black Americans to enlist in an officers’ training camp for World War I. His words, as well as details about officers’ pay, are drawn from Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, written and published by Emmett J. Scott in 1919.
As for Canada, a schooner captain named Robert Wilson did help fugitive slaves slip across Lake Ontario to freedom in Oakville. In this novel, specific events, dialogue, and diary entries involving Wilson are invented. On February 28, 1930, the Ku Klux Klan (led by W. A. Phillips of Hamilton, Ontario) burned a cross in Oakville as a warning to Ira Johnson, a black man who planned to marry Isabella Jones, a white woman. That event inspired a fictional scene in this novel.
Copyright
Any Known Blood
Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Hill.
P.S. section © 2007 by Lawrence Hill.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-1-554-68657-5
Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in hardcover: 1997
First HarperCollins Publishers Ltd trade paperback edition: 1998
First Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2007
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2011
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
HarperCollins Canada
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Map of Oakville appears courtesy of the National Archives of Canada, Document # NMC 4226. Reproduced from a water-colour drawing by Edward B. Palmer.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request
ISBN 978-1-44340-910-0
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Lawrence Hill, Any Known Blood
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