When Aminate Diallo sits down to pen the story of her life in London, England, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, she has a world of experience behind her. Abducted from her village in West Africa as an eleven-year-old child and forced to walk for months to the sea and then sold into slaverly in the United States. Eventually, she has the chance to register her name in the "Book of Negroes" a historic British military ledger allowing 3000 Black Loyalists passage on ships sailing from Manhattan to Nova Scotia. This is just the beginning of her journey.