Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jewelry maker and a midwife, is kidnapped at age 11 from her village of Bayo, near Segu in West Africa. She, along with hundreds of strangers and some fellow villagers, is forced to walk for days on a chain, as far as the sea. After several grueling months across the Atlantic, she arrives in South Carolina, where she begins a new life as a slave and where her name is Anglicized to Meena Dee. Due to her youth and intelligence, she quickly learns English and a fellow slave Mamet, secretly teaches her to read and write and tells her that like his mother, she is a Muslim...