Lenoir - Hardcover

Starting with Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, going right up through Beloved and Middle Passage, much literature has been devoted to the issue of slavery in America. In Lenoir, Ken Greenhall takes a look at the same subject from the other side of the Atlantic. Set in 17th-century Amsterdam, the novel features a black narrator who has been taken from his native Africa and sold as a bond-servant in the Netherlands. His first impression is, predictably, not good: "They are deranged. They are pale, their country is flat and wet, and they have no souls. I believe they are being punished for having only one god.... They buy and sell many things--including African people like me."

Nevertheless, Mbatgha, renamed Lenoir by his captors, makes the best of his situation, learning the language of his white masters and using his own personal beauty to his advantage, posing for the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens. It is the central conceit of the novel, in fact, that Lenoir is the model for Reubens's famous Four Heads of a Negro. But Greenhall is interested in more than just revealing the life of a slave; by moving his character from place to place, he also provides an eyewitness commentary on the strange doings of 17th-century Europeans, from a transvestite British sailor to a troupe of Italian actors. Imagine an African Samuel Pickwick caroming from one adventure to the next armed with an oppressed person's clear-eyed understanding of his oppressors, and you'll have a sense of Lenoir, both the character and the book.

Ken Greenhall has served on the staff of the Encyclopedia Americana and the Columbia Encyclopedia.