Review: Lawrence Hill Reminds Us that Blood is Still Thicker than Water
By: Cassandra Veney
If you enjoy a historical read, please do not let the page length keep you from reading this novel. Lawrence Hill has written a wonderfully funny, sensitive, and historically accurate novel that centers on one family—the Canes. Hill weaves the history of the Cane family through their migrations from the United States to where the family settled in Canada.
The main character, Langston Cane V, begins his search for his family’s history after he loses his job. His life is in shambles after he finds himself unemployed, divorced, and childless, never feeling like he lived up to his father’s high standards. I think it is worth noting the title of the novel and how it relates to Langton Cane V who is bi-racial as his father is an African descended man and his mother is white. Any Known Blood, of course, speaks to the one-drop rule that began when slavery was codified into law in colonial America in an effort to increase the slave population.
The Cane family is well-known and respected as Dr. Cane treated patients regardless of their race for decades in the small Canadian town where the family lived. Dr. Cane retired and with his wife moved to Oakville to spend their golden years enjoying their grandchildren. However, the older son, Langston, has not fulfilled their dreams. Simply put, when Langston begins his search for his roots, he is at a crossroads in life.
The novel is about the Cane family’s history, lives, and experiences in both Canada and the United States, however, it is about an African descended Canadian man who needs to make sense of his positionality in his country of birth, Canada, and his family’s struggles and plight in the United States.
One of the most interesting characters in the book and Langston’s ally, his aunt Millicent or Aunt Mill, who severed ties with her brother, his uncle, years ago. Aunt Mill lives in Baltimore and has a checkered past. Her brother never forgave her for becoming a prostitute. In turn, she never forgave him for marrying a white woman. Aunt Mill wholeheartedly assists Langston in finding documents concerning his family’s history. It is her way of getting back at her brother for his inability to accept the decisions she made in her life.
The entire novel is interesting and it will keep the attention of the reader as Hill goes back and forth from Canada to the United States in an effort to discover what undergirds the Cane family’s relationships. For the parts in Baltimore, the reader can visualize this Black man in neighborhoods in Baltimore that are totally out of character for Dr. Cane’s son.
The church scenes are vivid, along with the Sunday dinners at Aunt Mill’s apartment. His friendship with Yoyo the Cameroonian writer, who cleans houses to earn money when it becomes too insecure for him to sell barbeque on the streets of Baltimore, is a manifestation of the interactions between the historic and contemporary African Diasporas. Yoyo is a brilliant display of Hill’s nod to the relationships between African Americans and African immigrants. The food, laughter, and his relationship with Annette, who he meets in Baltimore, are heartfelt. Aunt Mill, Annette, and Yoyo join him on his journey to not only unearth his past and history, but they allow him to feel comfortable in his own skin as the man who he is.
What makes this novel different and unique is Hill’s ability not just to tell a story but to incorporate and integrate the history of African Americans into a novel based in Canada and the United States. In addition, even if readers are unaware of the presence and contributions of people of African descent from the United States in Canada, they will be after reading this novel. In other words, readers will learn history without even considering it a history lesson because Hill disperses history throughout the novel through funny dialogues, scenes, and characters that make learning enjoyable and easy.
In the end, Langston, Aunt Mill, Annette, and Yoyo all end up at the Canadian border. I will not spoil it for the reader by revealing if this was a trip to see Niagara Falls, a return to Canada for Aunt Mill who vowed never to see her brother again or to step foot in Canada, an opportunity for Yoyo to seek asylum or an elopement for Langston and Annette. But I highly recommend it.
Any known blood. Lawrence Hill.
1997. Harper/CollinsPublishers Ltd: 512 pages. Hardcover $ 12.98
Cassandra Rachel Veney is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is a political scientist by training and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of International Relations at the United States International University-Africa. She has published non-fiction scholarship on forced migration in Eastern Africa, human rights in Africa, gender in Africa, and US refugee and immigration policies on African and African descended refugees and immigrants.
