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Chapters 1 - 2

• Book One, Chapter 1: "And Now I am Old" opens in London in 1802, with the narrator's line, "I seem to have trouble dying."

• The narrator is an elderly woman who grew up Muslim and recalls balancing her father's Qur'an on her head as a child in Bayo.

• When the narrator was ten or eleven, her family's lives were ripped apart when she was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

• Aminata Diallo, or "the famous Meena Dee," is the narrator of the story and relates that she is kept busy in London and is to meet King George; the abolitionists have brought Aminata to England to help them change history.

• Aminata describes her childhood and her longing for her parents, saying, "Here I am, a broken-down old black woman who has crossed more water than I care to remember, and walked more leagues than a work horse, and the...

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