Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
What inspired you to write Done with Slavery, and Black Then?
The short answer is, not what but who: my eldest daughter, who is black. This is especially true of Black Then, the earlier book, which is a collection of stories. If you had asked me what sparked my interest in the distant black past in the first place, that would be a longer story. In early February 2001, my daughter, who was then working with troubled children, found herself in a pinch: here it was Black History Month and no one on the staff where she worked had prepared for it. Knowing of my historical interests and research, she asked me to write something, anything, about blacks – and quickly. I wrote “The Truth about Rose” for her, and enjoyed the experience so much that I went on to write the other short pieces about incidents in the lives of black Montrealers that make up Black Then. Believing that the stories would appeal first and foremost to a black readership – from young teens to older adults – I linked black figures to local places, landmarks, events, etc., in the hope that these readers would realize and remember that Montreal’s past is not as all-white or as alien to them as it often seems, that flesh-and-blood black men, women and children lived it, made it, and moved through it, and we can know who they were. Much the same idea lies behind Done with Slavery, but that book was addressed more to readers who might be interested not only in the information but in the sources of information – students, historians, other researchers and the like.
What challenges did you encounter in writing these books?
In both the research and the writing, the first challenge was my own ignorance. I quickly realized that to overcome it, to learn who were the blacks of the time and how to present them in a book (without pretending to speak for blacks), would require method, some madness, and a little serendipity, all of which posed their own challenges. In the research, for example, method meant poring over whole collections of basic documents – church registers; notarial deeds; newspapers; prison records; criminal court records; some civil court, cemetery and hospital records, etc. – piece by piece, page by page. The worst days were the ones on which I had a sense that a particular, voluminous set of documents probably contained no pertinent information, but I felt obliged to go through them to make absolutely sure. There was no great feeling of satisfaction to find, after several days of trying to prove a negative, that I was right: there was nothing there. I had a day job and a family: sticking to my purpose, through the research and the writing, required some madness. My social life went to the dogs, where it remains.
Two observations come to mind that may be of interest to academics. One is that not being an academic, I write books that are not the fruit of years of teaching and discussing a subject with likeminded people, but of asking myself questions about a topic and trying to answer them. It’s a closed-circuit process. There were times in the course of preparing Done with Slavery when I wished it wasn’t, that I was an academic working in this field, able to test and exchange ideas with colleagues. The second observation is that few if any postgraduate students, within the time generally allowed to produce a thesis, could have covered the ground I did. This is not to boast, but to suggest one of the many possible reasons why so little academic work has been done in this area: the legwork can take ages. I must say, as much as I missed the opportunity that universities offer for batting around ideas, I was glad not to be facing the time constraints that students do.
What has surprised you most in your research?
Perhaps the most notable surprise, certainly one of the earliest, was that Marcel Trudel’s classic 1960 work on slavery, L’esclavage aux Canada français, was never translated into English. There is a translation in the works now – more than half a century after its appearance. (Trudel himself won’t see it: he died on January 11th at the age of 93.) Historians and students of history are an educated lot, no doubt, but I can’t believe that all in English Canada or elsewhere who should have read it, managed to read it in French. There is another aspect of the treatment accorded Trudel’s book that surprised me, and still does: It was what we could call a “seminal” work, except that the seed produced no flower, no fruit, in Quebec. No other historian published a follow-up, whether expanding on some aspect of Trudel’s broad survey, verifying his findings, challenging some of them, offering a different view, etc. This is part of a more general surprise: how little historical research has been done and published on blacks in Quebec.
What was one of your more unexpected findings in regards to the justice system and the black experience?
One of the more unexpected findings, certainly for the period covered by Done with Slavery (1760-1840) is that while there was widespread discrimination against blacks, it does not seem to have operated in the treatment of those who were before the courts, whether as plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses. Many times in reading through the records of criminal cases in which the accused was black, I thought that his or her goose was cooked – only to find that the case ended in an acquittal. You might suppose that judges, members of the elite, were responsible for this. But it was members of the public, serving on all-male, all-white juries, who pronounced many of these verdicts. There were no black jurors at this time. That came later, in the 1850s. And one of the more unexpected features of that later time is to find fugitive American slaves, within a year or two of their reaching Montreal, being called to serve on petty juries (grand juries remained white preserves).
In Done With Slavery you ask whether it is “wise to judge the people of more than two hundred years ago by today’s standards and to strip all those who abetted slavery of any claim to our esteem?” What was your conclusion?
Did Champlain commission an environmental assessment before chopping down trees left and right? What would happen today if a judge, playing Solomon in a knotty custody case, were to suggest cutting a child in half? Of course, it is not wise for us to judge Champlain or Solomon, or any other historical figure, by our laws, rules of behaviour, social conventions, etc., any more than it would be for someone today to abide strictly by their standards. It is not wise to hold yesterday’s players to the rules of the modern game, and vice-versa. But damn wisdom and the torpedoes, and let’s do it anyway: we can’t wholly suspend our sense of right and wrong. What I was trying to say in the book is that the yardstick we use to measure people’s worth changes over time. As regards slavery, a practice so deeply repulsive to us, we can’t go so far as to drag all its abettors into court posthumously to have them formally declared guilty of crimes against humanity, but we must be aware that, actively or passively, they upheld the practice, and take that into account in weighing their merits and in trying to understand where they were coming from, what they did, their influence on the course of events, and to what extent they contributed to shaping who we are. There is no harm in shining a modern light on the dark roots of racism.
You found that “black history” was paradoxically fuelling racism. How so?
Is there a “white history”? A “yellow history”? The label itself is rooted in racism, a constant reminder that its subjects are people linked by no more than the colour of their skin, and that, really, their different ethnic, national and cultural origins and differences were, and to some extent continue to be, of little concern. It was white prejudice and mistreatment long ago that created “blacks.” And we are stuck with that. If you want to talk about a black perspective on history, that’s fine. But a “black history”? The term seems particularly inappropriate in the Canadian context because historically the proportion of blacks in the population was always so slight that whites and blacks were in it together, so to speak, and “black history” was just (or should have been) part of that “history” that has long monopolized by whites. “White history” traditionally has excluded blacks, ignored them or paid them token attention. On the other hand, little, if anything, in the “black history” of colonial Canada does not involve whites in an important way. It’s time the two histories realized that they are twins separated at birth, that they joined hands and traded stories. As it is, the label “black history” lets “white history” off the hook: it doesn’t have to deal with blacks because they’re part of that other history.
There are other peculiar ways in which “Black history” fuels racism. For instance, trying a little too hard to replace “Eurocentrism” with “Afrocentrism” rubs some people the wrong way and stiffens their back. There are also whites who will impatiently query why we should focus on blacks more than anyone else? What’s so special about blacks? You hope they come to see that blacks became “special” ages ago when whites made them so by according them “special” status, typically of the negative kind. Stop doing that, and blacks will cease to be a “special” concern.
Do you believe “black history” is succeeding in writing itself out of existence?
“Black history is so rooted in racism that it could not exist without it,” I wrote, suggesting that the ultimate, unspoken goal of black history is to write itself out of existence. “Eradicate racism and black history becomes history, period.” Well, no, I don’t think black history is close to achieving its goal. But it hasn’t given up, it is still trying. A little help would be welcome. It would be nice if “history” cooperated.
How was the black experience different in Montreal versus the rest of North America?
In Done with Slavery, I steered clear of any detailed comparison of the state of blacks in Montreal with the condition of those living elsewhere, focusing on giving an account of some of the people of Montreal and their experiences. That was a necessary first step, to my mind; Step 2, comparisons, could wait. Besides, readers knowledgeable about the condition of blacks elsewhere could begin to draw their own conclusions about similarities and differences. I mean, if you know that slavery in the southern United States ended in 1865 and I tell you it ended in Montreal in 1803, there’s a difference. If you know from your reading or research that at one time, the number of slaves in South Carolina exceeded the white population, that most slaves in the Southern states were field slaves kept in line by an overseer, that slave marriages were not recognized, that this state did not allow blacks to testify against whites in court, that that one forbid freed slaves to live within its boundaries, and pretty well all states, North and South, at one time or another adopted laws forbidding black-and-white marriages, there are some obvious differences.
The first problem in embarking on a comparative study is deciding what to compare. Certainly, you could look at how Montreal stacked up against various American cities and find some marked contrasts in terms of population size and mix, social dynamics, occupations, religion, black churches, associations, clubs, etc. The contrasts would be less stark if you restricted yourself to a comparative study of blacks in British North America. Still you would find, for example, that the Prince Edward Island law of 1781, An Act, declaring that Baptism of Slaves shall not exempt them from Bondage, had no equivalent in Quebec.
But before looking far afield, maybe we should begin by comparing Montreal with the rest of Quebec. In the 1780s-1790s, for example, there were several instances when Montreal slaves fled to Quebec City; in one case, the slave of a Jewish master was advised by a sympathetic, slightly anti-Semitic military officer, to “Sett out for Quebec, where he would be at the head of the fountain of money, where the Sons of Israel could not or darest not Seize upon him by Violence.” Was there really much difference between Montreal and Quebec, where black slaves were concerned? These cases suggest that there may have been some difference, real or perceived. It may have been nothing more than that it was easier to hop a ship in Quebec, but even that is saying something.
Frank Mackey is the author of Steamboat Connections: Montreal to Upper Canada, 1816-1843, Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s-1880s, and Done With Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal (shortlisted for the 2010 QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction).
No comments yet.