Someone Knows My Name

In London in 1804 the jolly abolitionist Sir Stanley Hastings takes Aminata to Sunday service. Hastings stays by her, helping her walk. All sorts of men and women flock toward Aminata for an introduction, asking about the parliamentary committee she is to speak at. She sits in the first row at the service, feeling the eyes of nearly 1,000 congregationists boring into her skin.

Aminata struggles to keep her eyes open and listen to the bishop’s monotone voice. She half dreams of her mother rocking her and lurches in the pew. When the people start singing, she thinks, “No wonder there wasn’t a single solitary man or woman of African extraction in the church. If allowed to come, would they endure this hour of purgatory?” (234). Her weakness worries her, as she needs energy, vigor, and her old passion to speak to the parliamentary committee. She vows to never again visit an Anglican church, preferring the loud hollering of the Baptists of Birchtown and Freetown that kept even the half-dead awake.

The Anglicans sing a melody that is “faintly, distantly, impossibly familiar” (235). She wonders if she heard it in Charles Town or New York—she remembers not the nonsense lyrics but the lift and optimism of the music.