Читать книгу Benjamin Drew - Vicent Cucarella Ramón - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIndeed, central to Drew’s intellectual plan to counteract slavery was to show how fugitives were performing as free people in Canada. Cognizant that for some American leaders the representatives of fugitive slaves who had started to write their personal accounts, were simply a minor representation of the ex-fugitive slaves who had been granted freedom, Drew started to muse about his own project. He was driven to overcome the suspicions that revolved around prominent exslaves like Frederick Douglass or Josiah Hensen. The mistrust came from the exceptional lives that slave narratives narrated and “the polemical quality of abolitionists and their literature,” since it could mean that “any account published under their auspices could be judged untrustworthy” and “necessarily reflecting their strong biases and projecting their propaganda” (Edelstein xx).
In view of this, Drew opted to change the perception of the slave narratives by recording the testimony of more than one hundred fugitive slaves, who, with the exception of Harriet Tubman, were totally unknown to the public. A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada includes the testimonies, in a first-person narrative style, of Black men and women from fourteen Canadian communities who had been previously free or enslaved in the U.S. south. Drew transcribed their statements after visiting their communities in St Catharines, Toronto, London, Chatham, Buxton, Dresden/Dawn, Windsor, Sandwich, and Amherstburg. These Black fugitives that peopled the collection had had a vast range of occupations, and they had worked as house slaves, coopers, field hands, blacksmiths or storekeppers among others.
Another impressive characteristic that can be drawn from the book is the multiple opinions and arguments that these Black people offer. We can listen to a polyphony of voices that see slavery, racism, and discrimination from heterogeneous points of view: some feel resentful against their masters while some others are grateful to them; some wish to remain in Canada and some want to get back to the U.S. when slavery is abolished; some praise the Canadian benevolence whilst some denounce its racist practices and protest against the suspicions they arise. Yet, the most important thing, and the most interesting one, is that Drew lets them speak their minds, have their say, and in this way, we get to learn their own, and highly diverse, points of view. This is what probably gives entity to the book and serves as an underlying characteristic that allows for a redefinition of the slave narrative as a genre.
In truth, the definition of the book has stirred some problems since its polyphonic nature and the multiplicity of opinions it contains has made it difficult to determine it in literary terms. Those who have mentioned the collection’s problems with authenticity link it though, albeit indirectly, to the slave narrative tradition. Winfried Siemerling considers that “[l]ike most transcribers of slave narratives, Drew sought to maximize the impression of authenticity conveyed by his ethnographic transpositions from orality to writing” (122), but this does not necessarily mean that he refuses to acknowledge the book’s unquestionable importance. In fact, he defends that, regardless of the legitimate criticism, the collection “not only was a systematic portrayal of the black settlements and especially the conditions of the black population in Canada West, but also offered the most extensive anthology that we possess of slave narratives recorded in Canada” (Siemerling 123). For his part, George Elliott Clarke argues in the same direction and ponders that refusing to consider these types of narratives as Canadian slave narratives implies accepting that “no ex-slaves anywhere outside African America ever scribed their predicament,” and accepting this, when the history of Black Canada has been ripped open “is insupportable” (11). Besides, Clarkes also notes, these testimonies represent a vivid example of Canadian slave narratives since Drew himself refers to them as “coloured Canadians” which demonstrates that, “as much as fugitive slaves (and free blacks) were counted as African Americans as they fled across the Niagara frontier or the Great Lakes and into British North America, they were Canadians when they agreed to speak to Drew” (Clarke, “Introduction” 11). In this way, Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada adheres to the genre of the slave narrative but offering not an isolated view, but a plethora of voices.
Frederick Black rightly expresses that “[m]uch of the value of The Refugee derives from its inclusion of the testimony of many ex-slaves who would have remained unknown in American circles but for Drew’s book. In addition, information is presented on a fascinating variety of unique types of personalities and experiences” (284). Black’s reference to the visibility of the fugitives’ voices and experiences couches Drew’s collection within the frame of slave narratives but with a distinct touch. Certainly, the fact that these cited critics point to the spoken testimonies places A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada in a singular position within the canon of slave narratives as they have been studied. In fact, the heterogeneous cross-border nature of the collection problematizes its inclusion in the canon of slave narratives. In this respect, George Elliott Clarke’s groundbreaking article “‘This is No Hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives” is fundamental to keep on conceptualizing and establishing a Canadian slave narrative tradition. Clarke argues against the Americanness of the genre and claims that those critics who have considered the slave narratives as solely American, blatantly omit other texts about captivity and enslavement that would prove them wrong. As an example, he refers to Henry Louis Gates’s appropriation of these narratives and his authorized statement that “the African person’s enslavement in the New World” are represented by the “black slaves in the United States,” which leads to the acceptance, Clarke laments, that “the African itself is conflated with American” (9).
Conversely, the Black Canadian scholar directs his standpoint to the crossborder and transnational turn in North American studies and counters this assumption by asserting the sheer existence of a Canadian slave narrative tradition that “is ignored as a genre of Victorian-era Canadian literature (1837-1901)” (“This is No Hearsay” 7). This recognition debunks the assumption that this body of texts is simply a “species of Americana” (“This is No Hearsay” 7) since this thought has precisely misplaced Canada from this tradition. Clarke criticizes the U.S. monopoly of the genre whilst also holds Canadian scholarly responsible for outsourcing slave narratives as “American and alien” (“This is No Hearsay” 11). Moreover, he dug into the history of nineteenth-century British North American literary production and invites to recognize “the host of slave narratives, written or spoken and transcribed, and sometimes published, in Canada, dating to pre-andpost U.S. Civil War periods, that are (or, rather, should be), therefore, integral to conceptions of the canon of Victorian Canadian literature” (“This is No Hearsay” 14). He goes as far as to provide a list of eighteen narratives printed between 1838 and 1901, half of which were published in Canada, which constitute a proof that these slaves narratives were a part of Canadian writing and publishing, and that they also act as a cultural remainder of the importance of these texts for the Canadian literary production.11 In this list of distinctly “Canadian” slave narratives (“This is No Hearsay” 18), Clarke includes Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada.
Considering Henry Louis Gates remarks that narratives penned by slaves were fundamentally created “to testify against their captors and to bear witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate and accorded all the ‘rights of man’” (xi), Benjamin Drew’s volume’s uniqueness attests to the refugees’ unusual accounts of life during and after slavery through their related experiences and offer a wider and more acute picture of slavery and post-slavery life. Therefore, when it comes to define Drew’s book it is interesting to turn to Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finseth’s musings on the nature of slave narratives. They maintain that considering the “fundamental diversity” of slave testimonies and life accounts across the Black Atlantic routes, there should be an extension of the genre label, which they deem restrictive. For Aljoe and Finseth, there are plenty of slave testimonies that differ in form and message and that are, either way, subsumed under the label of “slave narrative”. Following this contention, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson propose to shift the term “slave narratives” to focus the attention not on the slaves’ condition but on their experiences and thus proffer the denomination “life narratives” (3), aiming to lay emphasis on personal accounts of slaves that are not isolated or exceptional but rather put forth a “communal discourse of multiple identity” (104). Drew’s collection adheres to this definition and, in so doing, challenges what had thus far been understood as slave narratives and expands their meaning by putting into words complex and wrapped up life stories. In consequence, the book constitutes a “distinct set of settler narratives” (Clarke, “Introduction” 11) shaped as a branch that grows in the same trunk that slave narratives or, in this case, Canadian slave narratives.
That Drew himself transcribed the interviews, and out of this procedure the voices of the refugees or ex-slaves appear mediated and edited by the interviewer, seems to complicate the honesty of the testimonies, and opens the door to question the purpose of the collection. As Clarke openly states, “Drew’s anthology of African American testimony is, to put it plainly, propaganda” (“Introduction” 10). Along similar lines, Edelstein perceives an ideologically based withdrawal, which is admittedly typical of slave narratives, that hints at Drew’s editing move, and warns us that “there are some sensitive issues to northern public opinion that remain either absent or disguised”, citing as examples how “the book does not candidly treat marriage, sexual promiscuity, and miscegenation” (xxii). Surprisingly, they seem to overlook that what lies underneath these political strategies is the way to overcome the distrust of the reader. Most early Black autobiographical narratives were indeed dictated to a white amanuensis or editor who selected and arranged the slave’s oral report, nuanced the style and wording, and provided an interpretive context in the preface and in the choice of metaphors that gave shape and meaning to the former slave’s story mindful of the readership it was about to encounter. Consequently, as William L. Andrews has pointed out, in much early African American autobiography and slave narratives, it is often impossible to separate the voice of the Black autobiographical subject from that of the white abolitionist recording and interpreting the story (vii-xx).
Consequently, slave narratives, aided by the editing activity of abolitionists and their idiosyncratic viewpoint, told slaves’ stories by erasing the most ideologically problematic issues in such a way that the readers did not turn away but rather decided to step into the story to “hear” what the author was saying. This literary and ideological move served a twofold purpose: to facilitate the passing on of their stories and to visualize the abolitionist propaganda attached to them. As a (Canadian) slave narrative, Drew’s book is no exception to this exercise and exemplifies this literary ventriloquism. Being a mediated text in which the slaves were previously interviewed to, later on, find their stories published, the writing of the book has raised some objections. The fugitives’ voice is heard through Drew’s interviews although the voice of the abolitionist is omitted in the text so that the only message conveyed is that of the ex-slave. Although this literary exercise has been used to question the validity of Drew’s book, the little biographies he offered acquire a worthy literary dimension if read using Foucault’s critique to the Barthesian scriptor. Rather than considering that caught under the weight of his immense vocabulary, the scriptor, without words he can call his own, may well be unable to be held accountable for the meaning he inscribes, Foucault vindicates the notion of writing as “transpos[ing] the empirical characteristics of the author” (104), who works ideologically even if traces of the author himself are absent. To put it in another way, Foucault thereby moves from the Barthean scriptor as that which conditions readings to the author as a production of the reader and evinces that, even if the author functions to limit the text, it is nevertheless the reader who actively creates that limit and fills its whole meaning. In this manner, the author cannot bear the responsibility for the present and/or absent meaning a writing can convey. This is precisely what Drew’s text upholds.
A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada should not be read having in mind solely the transcriber but taking into consideration the ex-slaves’ messages and stories that, in a Foucaultian fashion, reveal and withdraw the ideological tensions of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the volume abides by the ideologies that allowed ninteenth-century slave narratives to be published, and therefore exposes the limitations but also the identifications of the life accounts of fugitive slaves with the religious politics of domesticity. This is truly how the biographic narratives were not only accepted but also publicly legitimized, and this sets the stage through which we need to read and understand Drew’s transcription and edition of the brief biographies of the fugitive slaves he interviewed.
As a slave narrative compendium, the collection opens with a paratextual advertisement that defines the book as “original in design and scope, and has been executed with the most conscientious care and fidelity,” and forewarns readers that “[n]owhere else can be found such a mass of direct and unimpeachable testimony as to the true character of the Peculiar Institution, by witnesses who have had the best opportunities of knowing its nature, and who occupy a point of view from which its characteristic lineaments can be most distinctly discerned”. By stressing both the veracity and verisimilitude of the testimonies, the text is advertised as a non-fiction account of slavery. It also prepares and induces the readers to trust the messages that will be found throughout. Right after the advertisement, Benjamin Drew writes his Author’s Preface which emphasizes again the honesty of those pieces of autobiography and states the transnational nature of the volume. The author alludes to the fugitive slaves as “colored Canadians” and therefore inscribes his slave narrative as a “cross-border experience” (Kang 443). This is underlined once more when the trajectories of the escapees cross the geographical but also ontological border that differentiates the two states: “while held in bondage in their native land, shed a peculiar lustre on the Institution of the South. They reveal the hideousness of the sin, which, while calling on the North to fall down and worship it, almost equals the tempter himself in the felicity of scriptural quotations”.
Drew’s transnational slave narrative, though, banks on the classical tropes of the genre: the dreadful experience of racist violence, family separation, and the fear of being sold south. The catalogue of infamous mistreatment and coercions are told in the current sentimental tone to appeal directly to the white reader’s compassion. George Johnson tells Drew that “the slaves were always afraid of being sold South” and also speaks of the mistreatment of a fellow-slave who “received five hundred and fifty lashes for striking the overseer … two months after, I saw him lying on his face, unable to turn over or help himself.” James Adams recounts that: “I was not used so badly as some even younger than myself, who were kicked, cuffed, and whipped very badly for little or nothing”. William Johnson also remarks the violence inflicted upon him: “I used to have rheumatism, and could not always do so much work as those who were well,– then I would sometimes be whipped” and Henry Banks horribly exposes how
N–‘s overseer whipped me often – stripped me, and tied me up when he did it, and generally drew blood,– sometimes he would not be so severe as at others, but I have frequently had to pull my shirt from my back with a good deal of misery, on account of its sticking in the blood where I had been lashed. Let daybreak catch me in the house, instead of currying the horses, that was as good for a flogging as any thing else,– if caught standing at the plough, instead of moving, that was good for fifty lashes more or less,– the least of any thing would provoke it. I was whipped once because the overseer said I looked mad.
These examples, among others that proliferate throughout the text, attest to the central role that violence played in maintaining the institution of American slavery and link Drew’s book with the abolitionist crusade against the brutality of slavery. This is best summarised in Harriet Tubman’s lapidary sentence: “I think slavery is the next thing to hell”. Exposing the mistreatment of slave subjects acquires a different meaning here to that one that abounds in classical slave narratives, for, as we shall see, these episodes are strenuously contraposed by the freedom that the ex-slaves relish in Canada. As a good example of abolitionist literature, here the slave never strikes back but rather endures this infamous behavior with patience, determination, and faith. One of the most appalling stories is that of Isaac Williams, who confesses how disturbed he felt when his master forced him to leave his wife’s bed so that he could take the slave’s place. Although it can be inferred that a rape took place, no word about this is mentioned. Williams only voices the way in which he was sold afterwards, showcasing his inability to strike back nor his wish to behave unmorally: “She was crying, you see. He took me to his bedroom, and chained me by one leg to his bedpost, and kept me there, handcuffs on, all night. He slept in the bed. Next morning, he took me in a wagon and carried me to Fredericksburg, and sold me into a slave-pen to George Ayler, for ten hundred and fifty dollars”. With this episode, William reverses the stereotype of the Black salacious man and of the danger his freedom should pose to society and, though with a shortage of words and rather in a subtle way, he demonstrates that the real danger lies in slavery and the masters that embody its practices. In this way, the white readership is presented with the gracious virtues of the Black self against the cruelty of the white masters and overseers. Thus, and despite the catalogue of little biographies that somehow changes the structure of a slave narrative as it were, the collection is modelled following the classic abolitionist genre and serves to open the white readership’s eyes to the America and Canada’s capital sin.
Nonetheless, although this recollection of U.S. ex-slaves has not been granted the necessary critical acknowledgement, some scholarly and historical voices have fittingly pointed to its ideological blemishes. In his reading of Drew’s book, Frank Black centers on the ideology that permeate the transcriptions and, more concretely, on the sentimental strategies and the politics of domesticity. He believes that “[p]erhaps more genuinely troublesome than the number of marriages recorded by Drew is the strength of marital ties suggested by the proportion of fugitive couples who escaped bondage together” (287). Marriage was not only central to religious creed and civil mandates of the nineteenth-century North America, but it was also a crucial issue around the limitations of the slave’s humanity and sexuality.
In the nineteenth century, the tenets of family law held that marriage and family were natural, sacred, and morally compelled. This law was deemed to be based both on God’s plan and command, and on natural law which is but itself a reflection of divine law and of morally accepted behavior. If ex-slaves wanted to be humanly recognized creatures of God, they needed to be consistent with the values of the legal system and, accordingly, marriage became a form of social respectability and attachment. In Drew’s book, the discourse on marriage and domesticity follows the accepted prospects of acceptability. That is why out of the twenty-five male fugitives indicating they were married at the time of their escape, ten fled with their wives, and six others became reunited with their wives in Canada. And to put things even clearer, two of those who left their wives in bondage had already been separated from them. Thus, the marriage discourse bespeaks the legitimation of the personhood of the male and female ex-slave. Most possibly, as Black astutely realizes, “Drew was attracted or directed to those Canadian fugitives who approximated most closely that conduct and family composition consistent with what abolitionists hoped to find among slaves and former slaves” (288). In fact, when, due to the cruelties of slavery, families were ripped apart, Drew resorts to sentimentality to exonerate the slave’s solitude and to explain why there is no possibility to harbor familial values. For example, when the fugitive Henry Atkinson describes his desolation for reluctantly leaving his wife behind, Drew inserts a parenthetical comment so that it can be read by the white readership:
At last, I found an opportunity to escape, after studying upon it a long time. But it went hard to leave my wife; it was like taking my heart’s blood: but I could not help it – I expected to be taken away where I should never see her again, and so I concluded that it would be right to leave her. [Here Atkinson’s eyes filled with tears.] I never expect to see her again in this world – nor our child.
Throughout the collection we read about mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers living in different places but feeling close to one another, of male slaves with free wives but also of slaves reared by aunts and grandmothers that cultivate familial values and follow the Christian precepts needed to acquire subjecthood. In this sense, Drew’s abolitionist agenda when composing the testimony of the fugitives draws from an assemblage of techniques used in popular novels and sentimental fiction of the nineteenth century that were ideologically employed to shape up the slave narratives as melodramatic in tone, but at the same time didactic in their appeal to commonly held moral values. In this regard, Edelstein also senses the author’s constraints and concludes that, “when faced by the complexities of slave family relationships, he simplified them and thereby distorted the testimony by making all slave families correspond to the norms of nineteenth-century white society” (xxv). Taking into consideration the abolitionists’ political agenda, Drew performs a kind of literary ventriloquism to display a strong appeal to the religious values of their white audiences, as well as to argue that slavery dehumanized the masters as well as degraded the slaves. Thus, the edition of these narratives sought to expose the slaveholding ideology as religious hypocrisy, and to recognize the slave as the true spiritual pilgrim that needs to be nationally redeemed. Moreover, by appealing to the religious and political values of the white readers, Drew’s slave narratives are turned into arguments that evidence the humanity and agency of Black people.
The morality attached to these new African Canadian subjects is also divulged when they value, and nurture, the exclusion of alcohol in Black communities. Definitely, temperance was a much-valued political issue for these ex-slaves as part of their own nineteenth-century political plan. Both before and after the American Civil War, whites associated alcohol and drugs with Blackness and enslavement. The white supremacist fear of African American freedom manifested itself in the circulation of stereotypes of Blacks as drunkards or violent individuals. As Carole Lynn Stewart expounds, “[w]hile that association is a product of the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of a ‘black Atlantic,’ the revolutionary and antebellum periods in the United States were formative in conflating inebriety with enslaved Africans” (7). Hence, during slavery, “theories of ‘black savagery’ and the predisposition to lust and intemperance were commonly associated with African people” (Stewart 7). The association of Black skin with disease as well as the link between alcohol and poverty bears similarities, as does chattel slavery and the metaphors of slavery with the bottle. Both chattel slavery and alcoholism were states of defeat and humiliation for a society that was at the outset of developing highly individualist and white supremacist ideologies. The traffic of slaves and the beginning of the rum and distilled alcohol trade bore a direct and ideological connection. The intertwined nature of African bodies as commodities and materials like sugar and rum “also undergirds the meaning of freedom for numerous American temperance reformers who understood temperance as coeval with actual political and social freedom” (Stewart 10).
The temperance movement, born out of the “Protestant asceticism and its work ethic” (Stewart 7), unfolded, then, as concerned with the inculcation of Protestant values and the regulation of work and society, and got established as one of the most important reform movements of the nineteenth century in North America. Temperance evolved from a zealous, religious movement into a more worldly concern as it was considered that alcohol altered social factors such as labour, behavior and even the economy. Nevertheless, controlling individuals became more problematic when the United States became a slave society, which led to the assumption that metaphors of enslavement began to permeate temperance along the nineteenth century. Sooner than later, temperance and abolitionism joined forces and ideologies. Both became international movements with roots in Protestant evangelism and reform that sought to eradicate such social evils from society. In fact, temperance joined abolitionism and women’s rights as “the most prominent reform movement in the nineteenth century – and it was intertwined with both movements as the foundation of either moral or civil behavior” (Stewart 8). Thus, the abolitionist movement assumed the fight for temperance as a part of their intellectual and social concern and, more particularly, they thoughtfully focused on the removal of the purported intemperance drive of Black slaves.
By the time fugitive slaves arrived in Canada West, escaping from slavery and in search of an opportunity to create settlements and permanent homes, temperance became a fundamental shield of character. Mary Ann Shadd’s plea for a temperance boarding house in Chatham, Ontario, exemplifies this movement and testifies to the importance of this pivotal issue for the legitimate recognition of Black people both as humans and as Canadian citizens. As she openly harangued: “The planned black settlements in the province either required or recommended temperance. In communities throughout Canada West, local blacks formed societies, like the African Temperance Society of St. Catharines, to promote abstinence from intoxicating beverages” (qtd. in Stewart 46). Shadd is one of the members of the Black temperance movement who also sought to inculcate the anti-alcohol ideology upon the newly located African Canadians. African American leaders and members of the temperance movement in the antebellum period, among which Shadd figures prominently, recognized the problems that alcohol posed for the poor and the enslaved, and therefore they linked abstinence with abolition, that is, with freedom.
These temperance movements strove for the universalist ambitions of individual sovereignty, restraint, and enlightened freedom, which were the hallmarks of civil society and public space, promoted in pursuit of an equal and virtuous society. The new freed Black people faced considerable problems such as poverty as well as a potential alcohol abuse that in the short run hindered the possibility of fostering social transnational connections. The Black temperance movement also took shape in Canada, especially after the fugitive slaves fled to the north still holding a highly vulnerable position. Lorene Bridgen explains in her pioneer article on Black Canadian temperance movement titled “On Their Own Terms: Temperance in Southern Ontario’s Black Community (1830-1860)”, that “the temperance movement […] played a major role in the African Canadian community’s struggle for equality and respect,” because “Black temperance advocates sought to improve the lives and reputations of their fellow community members” (64). For Bridgen, “temperance was a critical issue to African Canadians as well, mainly because temperance offered them a way to take control of their lives in a country without slavery. This is a key point that scholars have ignored” (64).
The relationship between the fugitive slaves, and later African Canadian citizens, and the temperance movement became intrinsically attached since it was a legitimate way toward achieving a personhood. In this respect, Bridgen confirms that, “although Canadian Blacks were legally free after 1834, Whites still saw them as economically and socially inferior. Black leaders believed that remaining temperate would prove to Whites that they were a moral people, who deserved their freedom” (64). Put briefly, under the influence of the temperance movement, the vast majority of “African Canadians hoped that temperance would lead to respectability” (Bridgen 67). It is only logical then that the practice of temperance appears throughout Benjamin Drew’s collection. As a proper abolitionist-driven narrative, Black reverends as well as Black men and women who were fugitive slaves recount and muse about the unwholesome consequences of alcohol. Rev. R.S.W. Sorrick recalls his time under slavery in the U.S. and feels horrifed for the consumption of alohol and the moral corruption it brought to enslaved people: “I never saw so much spirit consumed by the colored people as at that time, but most of those who were among the vicious, are dead and gone. Now the evil of drinking is comparatively slight, pretty much done away, and those who have come in within a few years, are generally well behaved and industrious”. This denunciation of the pernicious nature of spirits is also addressed to masters and overseers. For instance, in John Holmes’ recollection the overseers appear as ill-mannered and doomed due to drinking: “Another brother was very hard toward his wife, his slaves, and everybody else. His name was B–J–. He was so bad he could n’t live any longer – he killed himself by drinking a quart of brandy from a case-bottle – a case-bottle full. Next morning he was dead”. Holmes’s image of the evil U.S. slaveholders is contraposed to the Canadian benevolences: “The colored people are mostly given to hard work: for the time we have been here, we have made great progress in this country”.
Other ex-fugitives like Mrs. John Little or Thomas Jones communicate their terrible experiences with alcohol in an attempt to condemn its destructive nature and reclaim their morally accepted and acceptable selves in Canada. They also make clear the difference between the corrupted and alcoholized U.S. and the welcoming Canada, best summoned in Mrs. John Little’s own words: “I now enjoy my life very well – I have nothing to complain of”. Bridgen precisely informs that “an additional reason for practising temperance was to fight prejudice. African Canadians constantly faced racist thinking that judged an entire group by the behaviour of individuals” (72). For his part, William Grose acknowledges that “as a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the States”. On these positions, Afua Cooper declares that “among Blacks, like whites, allegiance to temperance signified middle-class respectability and good moral character” (“Doing Battle in Freedom’s Cause” 288). Through their attachment to the temperance ideals, the ex-slave’s testimonies put forth their own legitimizing message that accentuates the moral and social differences between a condemned U.S. and a merciful Canada.
In sum, temperance and anti-alcohol behavior legitimized the new African Canadians’ sense of place and also allowed them to present themselves as not only respectable but also as Canadian citizens in their own right. Eager to gain respect, advance economically and battle prejudice, ex-slaves embraced temperance as Black Canadians, whether as individuals or as voluntary members of a society. With this move, they imagined and created a more rooted version of civil society for the refugees of American chattel slavery. William Lyons’s conditioned praise of his new country is nothing but a proof of this when he intentionally avows: “there is less whiskey drinking by colored people here, than in any place I know of”.
Even if the Black fugitives’ efforts to become proper Canadians is undeniable, it also recognisable that, regardless of their intention to live by the idiosyncrasy of British North America, their testimonies in A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada remain surprisingly oblivious of the concern of political equality for the new African Canadian inhabitants. The ex-slaves eloquently voice various forms of racial discrimination, with special attention to the school segregation in Canada, but are silent over their supposed right to vote. Contrarily, there appears a great effort to expose the exslaves’ economic progress in Canada, that results in another central concern of Drew’s volume. Again, William Grose’s testimony exemplifies this view when he comments
I have been through both Upper and Lower Canada, and I have found the colored people keeping stores, farming, etc., and doing well. I have made more money since I came here, than I made in the United States. I know several colored people who have become wealthy by industry – owning horses and carriages, – one who was a fellowservant of mine, now owns two span of horses, and two as fine carriages as there are on the bank. As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the States: there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon. Here they have something to do with their money, and put it to a good purpose.
Other testimonies that are very prolific in praising Canada against the tyranny of a slavery-based U.S. are the words by William Howard, who claims: “[After I escaped] I stopped a while in the free States, but came here on account of my friends being here…Canada is the best place tthat ever I saw; I can make more money here than anywhere else I know of”. John A Hunter: “I feel more like a man – I feel that I am a man a great deal more than I did a year ago. A year ago I was in bondage…A great many slaves know nothing of Canada – they don’t know that there is such a country”. Henry Williamson: “I heard when I was coming that Canada was a cold and dreary country; but it is as healthy a place as a man can find. The colored people tell me the climate agrees with them, and I do know it is so”. The now African Canadian citizens choose to glorify Canada since, regardless of the suspicious consideration of British North American citizens, it is a country that has granted them the chance to escape from the hell of slavery.
Canada is equally lauded for its racial integration in churches and schools, as it appears in the collection when it is affirmed that “colored youths are attending lectures in the University”. This is by no means just another political move for these Blacks ex-fugitives. Education, the act of reading and writing, became crucial in slavery times for the ontological birth of the African slave. Acquiring the skills of literacy granted the enslaved freedom but also the epistemological drive to become thinking citizens and, therefore, to fully participate as active agents in the construction of a more egalitarian, fair, and free society. That Canada grants the new Black Canadians the opportunity to get an education is much more than an act of inclusion. In fact, it represents the yearned acknowledgement of their citizenship and their humanity. Therefore, a large number of the testimonies in Drew’s collection revolve around the question of education and their gratitude over it. J. C. Brown emphasizes: “Our children growing up in this country [Canada] and not having the fear of any white man, and being taught to read write, will grow up entirely different from their fathers – of more benefit to themselves, or more benefit to the government, and will be more able to set good examples to the rising generation”. In a similar vein, we also find the accounts of Phillip Younger: “Before I came here, I resided in the free States. I came here in consequence of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. It was a hardship at first; but I feel better here – more like a man I know I am – than in the States. I suffer from want of education. I manage by skill and experience and industry – but it’s as if feeling my way in the dark”. Or that of Isaac Riley: “I went to St. Catharines and got fifty cents a day. By and by, I heard of Mr. King’s settlement – I came here and have got along well. My children can get good learning here”.
The active participation of the African Canadians ex-slaves is also corroborated in 1852, with the arrival of the Great Western Railway and what it represented as a – takeoff moment for Canada West. In his ethnographic endeavor and his interviews, Drew was particularly impressed by the Black self-help “True Band” associations that so desired to improve schools, provide for the sick and impoverished, and thereby work against the “begging” system. This is another important aspect to take into account, since by rejecting the “begging” system, the Black citizens were showing their capability to provide for their new country and to eagerly demonstrate their attachment to the ethical values of hard-work and responsibility, which were fundamental in the Anglo-Canadian religious ethics. This is also the living proof of the Black Canadians’ truthful effort to be considered and be part of their new country, as has been explained above.
Not surprisingly, A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada eschews a topic that was also present in the new reality of Black Canadians when they arrived in the country: racism and prejudice. Even if the fugitive slaves were welcomed with mixed feelings of acceptance and racism, Drew’s testimonies wished to overlook this thorny issue fearing that it could stain their ultimate goal: to picture an image of the U.S. as a slavery-based and racist society versus the benevolent and desirable Canada, which should be finally chosen as the new place to be for free Black people. Thomas Hedgebeth’s testimony can be singled out as one of the scarce moments in which we can read a negative racist-driven image of Canada: “In regard to Canada, I like the country, the soil, as well as any country I ever saw. I like the laws, which leave a man as much freedom as a man can have, – still there is prejudice here. The colored people are trying to remove this by improving and educating themselves, and by industry, to show that they are a people who have minds, and that all they want is cultivating”. And the honest view of R. van Branken is also worth bringing up: “Among some people here, there is as much prejudice as in the States, but they cannot carry it out as they do in the States: the law makes the difference” (305).
However, despite these minimal episodes of reality, Canada appears as an honest land of liberty and acceptance opposing the United States. This view, that permeates the collection, is epitomized in Reverend Alexander Hemsley’s powerful statement: “Now I am a regular Britisher. My American blood has been scourged out of me; I have lost my American tastes”. This view is further enhanced when William Grose issues a declaration that, as George Elliott Clarke appropriately notes, “engenders a nascent sociology of African Canadian life that asserts Canadian nationalism” (“Introduction” 15): “As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the States: there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon. Here they have something to do with their money and put it to a good purpose”. Interestingly, this attachment to the Canadian land and the way they resort to their own sense of nationalism through their difference and their new sense of what a Black person is once in freedom, may well represent Clarke’s African Canadianité avant la lettre.
In his critical study of African Canadian literary history, Clarke has noted how “European Canadians imagined African Canadians as once-and-always Americans” (Odysseys Home 71). Though admitting the heterogeneous nature of Black Canadian history, Clarke contends that “it is impossible to conceive of Black Canada without the sobering boundary that the United States supplies” (Odysseys Home 28). For the Canadian scholar, there is no doubt that “African American blackness has been and is a model blackness, a way of conceiving and organizing African Canadian existence” (Odysseys Home 28). Yet, to contest the view that “African American scholars have tended to regard African Canadians as a failed version of themselves” (Odysseys Home 34), Clarke defends a Black Canadian cultural nationalism that he terms African Canadianité, which consists of a type of Black Canadian identity practiced upon African American and European models but one that reads African Canadians as “not just ‘black’ and Canadian, but also adherents to a region” (Odysseys Home 40). Clarke also express that “African Canadianité marks the hegemony of heterogeneity, an attribute that African Canadians share with the other communities in Canada” (Odysseys Home 48). In other words, the attachment of Black Canadians to the land and their country bespeaks their sense of being Canadian alongside other communities and different realities. This is what we also find in Drew’s collections through the testimonies of Black Canadians like that of Sophia Pooley, a Queen’s Bush resident whose narrative presents an insight into Native, African and European colonial relationships:
Canada was then filling up with white people. And after Brant went to England, and kissed the queen’s hand, he was made a colonel. Then there began to be laws in Canada. Brant was only half Indian: his mother was a squaw – I saw her when I came to this country. She was an old body; her hair was quite white. Brant was a good looking man – quite portly. He was as big as Jim Douglass who lived here in the bush, and weighed two hundred pounds. He lived in an Indian village – white men came among them and they intermarried. They had an English schoolmaster, an English preacher, and an English blacksmith.
The ex-slaves’ African Canadianité as practiced in Drew’s volume also signals the new African Canadians’ wish and efforts to become part of their new country. In so doing, they will, albeit without their knowledge, open the way for a new and heterogeneous representation of Blackness in Canada.12 Drew’s collection evinces thus the multiple ways in which the new citizens of the welcoming country contribute to the increasing of settlements and, therefore, turn into Black settlers within the Canadian realm. In this manner, these recent African Canadian testimonies join other literary accounts in a cultural bid to reshape Canada as a country, precisely on the eve of its birth as a nation. This is so because, as Ana María Fraile-Marcos clarifies, “the Canadian nation emerges in the nineteenth century as a self-willing effort at narrating itself. Literature plays an instrumental role in the creation of a system of cultural signification” (“National Identity” 116). Hence, Drew’s volume plays its role in this endeavor in which “from its inception […] literature was called in as an indispensable element to confer cohesion, unity, and character to an emergent sense of Canadian identity” (Fraile-Marcos, “National Identity” 117).
A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada emerges thus as more than “Anglo-Canadian anti-American and pro-British propaganda” (Clarke, “Introduction” 14), and resolves into a compendium of the transnational abolitionist movement’s political agenda containing the cultural and ideological preoccupations of the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, by anchoring its messages in the brand new African Canadian reality and testimony, the collection plays an important and active part in the literary movement that pushed forth towards the recognition of a Canadian identity and the eventual creation of the nation-state.
Tellingly, the collection of testimonies was aimed to look at the future for it provided evidence to those concerned and wary of the African Americans’ emancipation, economic opportunity and racial acceptance. This was ratified when a sequel to Drew’s book was published in 1864 when the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission issued the Canadian report soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. The Commission was intent in investigating the conditions of emancipated African Americans simply to cater for their possible needs. The result was the appearance of Refugees from Slavery in Canada West that very same year, which revolved around the themes that Drew had already tackled in his book. A few years earlier, in 1859, another book similar to, if not based upon, Drew’s appeared. It was titled The Roving Editor or Talking With Slaves in the Southern States and followed the same procedure that Drew utilized in his oral recollection.
Those examples testify to the importance and impact of Benjamin Drew’s volume as an invaluable depiction of the life of fugitive slaves in Canada. The compilation, however, unfolds as more than a collection of narratives and eventually grows into a compendium of the social, cultural, historical and ideological practices of the mid-nineteenth-century North America. Whilst emerging as a transnational branch of slave narratives, that is, a Canadian slave narrative, it also serves to witness the blossom of African Canadian identity and reality along the frontier, which, as Afua Cooper puts, exemplifies the identitybuilding process of Black Canadians, a groundwork act that is necessarily “negotiated in border zones” (“Fluid Frontier” 131). Interestingly, this exercise will be ingrained in Black Canada to the extent that it has served as a model for contemporary African Canadian writers that keep on negotiating their own identity working on and through the border zone. Probably the most renowned example is Lawrence Hill’s acclaimed novel Any Known Blood (1997). Apart from these important aspects, the appeal of Drew’s book lingers on and is still worth considering for it participates, and is inscribed, in the “transnational turn” in Black Canadian studies through its cross-border approach to transnational abolitionism and African Canadian writing. As Nele Sawalisch argues, “the autobiographies here emphasize the ambiguous – somewhat elusive, or fugitive – meaning of the border for the authors, and yet show how much the borderland was shaped by black individuals and their writing” (29).
This cross-border collection stands as “the most extensive anthology that we possess of slave narratives recorded in Canada” (Siemerling 123). It actively contributes to the recently coined “trope of the borderless text” (Knag 435) within the transnational turn. This means that Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada shall be noted as foundational text of (African) Canadian literature but also that it attains a new meaning when read through the lens of contemporary Black Canadian criticism since it shows that such testimonies by cross-border Black Canadians that underwent multi-directional migrations insert themselves in a transnational source of textual production. In so doing, these new African Canadians began to reconfigure new meanings of Blackness in Canada, set out the foundations of a Black Canadian sense of attachment, or African Canadianité, whilst they additionally helped to reshape North America and to contribute to the birth of the Canadian nation-state since, in the end, what it is undeniable and makes A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada a classic compilation is that “in reading Drew’s narratives, one hears the definite Canadian voice” (Clarke, “Introduction” 19).
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