Storytelling is the framing device of the entire novel. In the opening chapter, the elder Aminata looks back on her life and tells her story. Threaded throughout the narrative is her determination to control the telling of her story, and her realization of the redemptive quality of this act: doing so will give her purpose, and it will give her life meaning. The very first chapter opens with storytelling, as a little white girl asks her for a “ghost story,” and instead, Aminata tells her own story (4).

On the ocean voyage across the Atlantic, Aminata yearns to be the honored “djeli” or village storyteller, an inherited position. Then, she decides she can become a djeli who bears witness to the atrocities on the ship. She tells herself to “see and remember” (64), and later she will recount these horrors during her testimony to the British Parliament, thus directly aiding in the abolitionist cause. At the novel’s end, she insists to the abolitionists that only she can tell her story, and she wins that battle of wills. Later, she also insists upon publishing her own story, in defiance of the abolitionists. May helps her mother win this battle as well, with May’s fiancé serving as publisher of the memoirs.