OWEN SOUND–Bonita Johnson-de Matteis tells this story. She's not sure of all the details, or even how much to believe, but the tale of how her family came to Ontario is an integral part of Canadian black history.
Some 150 years ago, two Johnson brothers escaped slavery in Maryland, made their way north to Detroit and were stopped by the difficulties of finding passage across the river and the border into Canada.
A Detroit businessman offered to help them if they agreed to work for him for a year. So they willingly put themselves back in bondage, in a free state, for a chance at freedom. A year came and went and the businessman went back on his word – so the two men made a run for it.
This is where the details get vague. The two brothers may have killed the man to escape, or he died pursuing them. "Either way, he ended up dead and they got away," Johnson-deMatteis says.
As black men in the 1850s, and escaped slaves at that, the two spoke little of the incident. They knew they would be blamed for the death whatever the truth. In time, the sharp details of their escape were rounded as the story was passed through the generations.
And so it is with some of the oldest and richest black history in Canada. Fearful of persecution and being sent back into slavery, early black settlers kept largely to themselves, rarely telling anyone their personal histories.
Even their children would be kept in the dark until they were old enough to be trusted with the truth.
These fears were well founded.
John Hall was a black man born free in Ontario but he, his mother and 11 siblings were abducted one night and sent into slavery in Kentucky. He escaped and made his way to Owen Sound. His story is a cautionary tale about lying low.
Through the generations, this secrecy born of self-preservation became part of the culture, reflected in an insularity in the community, a distrust of others and an aversion to doing anything that draws attention.
"Even with your closest friends growing up, you wondered how much to tell," Johnson-deMatteis remembers, sitting at the kitchen table of a friend from her school days, Terri Jackson, a white woman who grew up in the black neighbourhood of east Owen Sound.
It's now time to break the silence, the two women agree. They volunteer with the local genealogical society compiling the local black history into a book to be published this spring. They expect it to be a valuable resource for both amateur genealogists and academics.
"If our generation doesn't do this, it'll all be lost," says past chairman of the society Art Harvey, who got the project going.
The group is going through family journals, scrapbooks and photo albums, talking to older residents and others who have moved away, stitching together tales passed through the generations.
Without the pictures and clippings saved by these families, the three agree, telling their story now would be impossible.
"These people had the presence of mind to sit down and have their picture taken," Johnson-deMatteis says, looking at a family photo taken in 1924, after the funeral of her great-grandfather.
At the centre is her great-grandmother, Sarah, a white woman who married into the family and by the late 1950s was its matriarch. Disowned by her own family, Johnson-deMatteis remembers, Sarah proudly told people she was a "white black woman."
The history project reflects a growing recognition of the often overlooked black history of rural Ontario. A cairn has been erected in Owen Sound's main park to commemorate the Underground Railroad that brought slaves north, and a museum was built nearby. Each summer, the city hosts an Emancipation Picnic.
The three local historians fear, however, that too much has already been lost. Johnson-deMatteis once asked her uncle David Earll if he knew the details of the two brothers' escape, but he couldn't help. As a child, he wasn't trusted with the story, and by the time he became old enough, his priorities were elsewhere. "He said he was too busy as a young man just trying to make it in a white man's world," Johnson-de Matteis says, and details of the escape were lost with the previous generation.
That's what spurs her on in the work, she says, but confesses that the old instincts of secrecy sometimes get the better of her – and she pulls away from the project from time to time.
"I go two steps forward and one step back, but that's just me still working all this through."
In the end, she says, her own aversion to attention takes a back seat to reminding people that black history is not just an American or an urban thing. It is also a rural thing interwoven with European settlement of Ontario.
In fact, she says, a century before Toronto began to think of itself as a multicultural centre, small towns like Owen Sound, Dresden and Chatham were already dealing with issues of race and ethnic tension.
A decade after Confederation, Jackson says, nearly a third of Owen Sound was black, many of them escaped slaves. Their stories are piling up in the books and papers collecting in Jackson's home office, and in the very buildings of this Georgian Bay port.
On the main street, the grand Buchan Manor backs onto the Sydenham River. Legend has it, the first owner, industrialist and fervent abolitionist Walter Buchan, installed a tunnel from the river so escaped slaves could get to his home, where they were housed until they found a job and a place to live.
Up the street, at Coulson's British Hotel, hotelier J.P. Coulson ran one of the finer establishments in town, with 80 rooms, stables, dining rooms, a bar, a women's parlour and, it is believed, a secret staircase behind a secret door with a trick lock leading to a room where escaped slaves found shelter.
"Even if you knew where the door was, you couldn't open it," Jackson says.
Any hard evidence of the secrets of the hotel, now converted to apartments, are lost, a fate the three local historians are working hard to ensure does not befall any more of the area's rich black history.
Each photo, newspaper clipping or story handed down through the generations adds to the bigger picture, Johnson-deMatteis says.
"These are all the little things you pull together, knit together and try to make sense of your life."
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