This guest blog generously provided by George Bancroft – second in a series celebrating Black History Month.

George’s first blog can be found here.  George is a student at the University of Toronto, and works at the Office of Shelley Carroll, a Municipal Councillor for the City of Toronto. Stay tuned to the Indigo Blog for future instalments.

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Underpinnings

I'm a child of the eighties – a good decade to be a kid. My memories are of the Toronto Blue Jays as World Series Champions, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Brian Mulroney, John Chretien, and reruns of Degrassi Junior High.

Summers were by far the best. Bike riding with my friends, swimming with the kids who lived next door - days of wanderlust bookended by the decompression of family in front of the living room T.V.  I remember July and Canada Day fireworks, Heritage Canada commercials, and the underlying feeling that somehow this existence was safe. Canada had achieved something. The trials of previous generations had been made in order that this 'here and now' could be enjoyed, as if some intrinsic quality about this country allowed for the human tensions that existed elsewhere to be left - elsewhere.

Revisiting those years in light of this project, I knew the first part of my journey into the heart of what is Black Canada would be the most difficult. By now, my generation has become well aware of what had been left out of those Heritage commercials. Buxton, Chatham, The Fugitive Slave Act, while Canada was indeed a haven for many Afro-Canadians, this haven was often fraught with a deep and abiding sense of peril. From 1628-1833 slavery did indeed exist in Canada and even after that, the narrative of the Black Canadian experience was often a story of segregation, bigotry, socio-economic disenfranchisement, and isolation.

At times I've tried to make a connection in my mind between myself and that first kid from the African Continent to land on our Atlantic Coast. A nine year old boy from Madagascar – alone - left to fend for himself in the bowels of a privateer’s ship. A child taken from his family on a transatlantic journey forced upon him, sold, baptized, and finally set free only to die alone, a young man, barely out of his twenties.

It's hard to admit that, even though I am black, the attempt to relate comes with more than a bit of guilt. It's a reality I can't imagine. How dare one even try? The struggles of my generation have a soundtrack. We have past heroes to look to, systems of mutual reliance, church communities, and extended families to walk us through the vicissitudes of life. What was this reality thrust upon Madagascar's young son - baptised Olivier Lejeune - stripped bare of an identity he was too young to even know he had. What was the reality thrust upon the 1124 slaves that would follow him into New France?  The reality of black slaves brought here by Loyalists refugees migrating from an America fractured by civil war?

Stark and indelible, were the pangs of this existence. They pierced through into my own – challenging my personal childhood recollection of Canada and the veracity of the national image I held so dear.

As I put pen to paper, I thought of my last blog entry - the focus on the organic connection between the Afro-Canadian Diaspora narrative and that of the broader Pan-Canadian ideal. When held against the weight of what had been a darker side of the Black Canadian experience, would this connection hold?

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Dan Hill Sr. was a name I used to hear around the dinner table a lot. Before I was of an age to pay much attention, discern, or really care what my parents were talking about, I knew the name more like a sound – part of a phoenetical mix of familiarity I would eventually recognize as friends and colleagues my parents knew and spent time with. As I grew up I would learn that he was a close friend of my dad's, in particular someone who he "came up" with - who struggled with him through the lean days of earning their degrees and, eventually, their doctorates.

When I saw Dr. Hill's name beside a book chronicling the early Afro-Canadian experience my trust came from a visceral place. I decided to pick it up.

Dr. Dan Hill Sr.'s The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada opens with the beginnings of slavery in Canada. He takes us through the British and French Regimes and how slavery was introduced and incorporated into the New World by these societies. In each chapter he guides us through the ebb and flow of the transatlantic slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and Black Settlement. Despite Dr. Hill's erudition the book is accessible and an excellent first stop for adolescents or adults looking for a touchstone in understanding the early experience of Blacks in Canada.

As I began Dr. Hill's work, for some reason life of Mary Ann Shadd continually came to mind. Born in 1823 to freed blacks in the United States, Shadd fled to Canada when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 threatened to return her to bondage. Despite a world of tribulation I cannot begin to imagine, Shadd managed to create a racially integrated school, edit a successful political weekly and obtain her legal degree.

As I read Dr. Hill's work I realized that my own recollection of Shadd throughout was not a mistake – the story Dr. Hill was telling was not only that of the slave experience but that of the constant enduring struggle out of that experience. By unearthing a previously untold history of slavery in Canada he was telling a story of hope, defiance, and eventual triumph; a history marked by seminal Afro-Canadian, thinkers, activists and abolitionists seldom heard of. People who, in one way or another, managed to fight their way out of bondage.

A deeper look at history and its methods takes strength. It ruffles feathers, turning up dust many would rather let settle. But such a look can shed light on a nexus of past occurrences that become integral to a knowledge of who we are, what we’ve been through and what we can accomplish. Such was the case with Dr. Hill's work and such was the case, I found, with Afua Cooper's The Hanging of Angelique:  The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal.

In her work, Dr. Cooper tells the story of a bonded woman of Portuguese descent accused and eventually hanged for setting fire to Old Montreal. Dr. Cooper's 15 years of research takes us through the emergence and decline of the Portuguese, Dutch, French and English empires, the birth of slavery in Europe and how it eventually met our shores.

Whether or not Angelique set Montreal ablaze in defiance of her bondage isn't known. But the strength of Dr. Cooper’s work is in that it meets, head on, the roots that the transatlantic slave trade has in Canadian history. It asserts the Canadian struggle out of slavery as beset with obstacles as real and as stark as those faced by blacks in America and preserves them as obstacles that are uniquely Canadian.

Dr. Cooper continues the process of unearthing previously under-expressed perspectives in her contribution to the book of essays entitled, We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull us up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History. The six essays bring together the works of Peggy Bristow, Dianne Brand, Linda Carty, Afua Cooper, Sylvia Hamilton, and Adrienne Shadd to challenge a reading of Canadian history that would omit the first person historical accounts of black women.  The work explores black women's experiences in the underground railroad, in the settlements of Buxton and Chatham, their experiences in the second world war, as well as the writings of Mary Bibb and her ideological differences with Mary Ann Shadd.

Throughout these books, I felt the weight of stories previously untold truly came to bear – sometimes in ways I had anticipated and sometimes not. Sure, a closer look at the earliest experiences of Blacks in Canada broke down myths I had held in my mind as a child, but in so doing, a stronger knowledge of how my reality as a child of the eighties was underpinned – the struggles that had been fought, the pains endured.  This knowledge made me appreciate the significance of how far we all had come and, perhaps more significantly, it made me eager to chart out how far we had left to go.

Dr. Hill, Mary Ann Shadd, and Dr. Cooper teach us that we need not gloss over history – pretending not to see what we'd rather leave unearthed. Histories most difficult periods teach us what we are made of, what we can endure and ultimately what we all in the end can create.

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The Indigo Blog thanks George Bancroft for his second contribution.  Unfortunately, at this time, The Freedom Seekers and We’re Rooted Here are currently not in print.  George is, however, a trusted source – and that being said, any interested readers should keep their eyes open for these two titles.

Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique:  The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal is available in our stores, and online.

For those interested, many more titles can be found in Indigo.ca’s Black History Month shop, here.