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  Dedication

  For my mother Ruby and

  my sisters Debra and Cynthia

  Epigraph

  There is no moral distance between

  the facts of life in San Francisco and

  the facts of life in Birmingham.

  —James Baldwin

  Author’s note: This quote is taken from the film Take This Hammer, a PBS documentary (1963). The program premiered on public television on February 4, 1964 on Northern California’s KQED Channel 9 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The station had produced the film for National Educational Television (NET)—the predecessor of WNET and THIRTEEN in New York City, Baldwin’s home town.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Ships to Halifax

  Part One: Woods Bluff

  Dogtrot Fever

  A Way Out

  The Memory Cabinet

  The Ladies Club

  Omar Platt and the American Nurse

  Honoring Kiendra

  Part Two: New Jamaica

  New Assignments

  The Newcomers

  Black as I Want to Be

  Overdue Lessons

  Only on Nobody’s Acre

  Part Three: Crowing

  Lyons and Crows

  No Colored Rider

  Two Hundred and Forty Months

  The Almost Gone

  Trains to Glace Bay

  Part Four: Sons and Daughters

  Sons of Canada

  The Dilemma

  Colored Enough

  Lucky Peace

  A Betrayal

  Saplings for Jennifer

  Who Is North American?

  Part Five: Tract East 128

  A Northern Aurora on the Bluff

  The New New Confederates

  Zera’s Gift

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Ships to Halifax

  Part One

  Woods Bluff

  Dogtrot Fever

  Nova Scotia, 1918

  Newborns are never afflicted with the malady. The swollen tongue, the reddish throat, the raw cough seem to afflict only babies older than six months. By the spring, in the village situated on a small knuckle-shaped peninsula just north of Halifax, all five of the stricken babies have now developed a high fever.

  Having no luck with sweet milk and lemon bitter, worried mothers administer castor oil mixed with camphor, then a tea of beer’s root steeped with beech ash and clover. When desperate, they even place a few charms under the mattresses of the beds where the stricken babies lie crying.

  Nothing works.

  In mid-April, with three more babies now suffering from the malady, health department nurses visit the village, their faces frozen even before they have examined a single new case. Why our children? several mothers standing in the yard of one house want to know. Hadn’t Halifax already given enough babies in the fire that leveled ten square blocks of the city months before, when the munitions ship exploded in the harbor? Then again, those had been white babies. No colored babies had died in that explosion. Was it now Woods Bluff’s turn to lose infants? And if so, how many—five, ten, all twenty-two?

  The following week, after two of the feverish babies die, the mothers turn to the grandmothers, though many are leery of this option. Already several grandmothers have suggested that since the home remedies haven’t worked, and since neither nurse nor doctor has useful medicines, the afflicted infants must be bad-luck babies.

  It is an expression the mothers haven’t heard since they were children, though the fear of having a bad-luck baby has terrorized mothers on the bluff as far back as 1790. That was the year the first groups of cabins sprang up across the bluff, displacing the foxes, hare, and moose that ran through the thick Christmas ferns and sheep laurel. Back when no medicine could reinvigorate a baby whose body had begun to show the outline of bones, smothering was sometimes recommended. Take no action, and bad luck might infect the entire village. Best to end the child’s suffering midday, when injurious spirits would likely be bedside, feeding on the moisture of a weak baby’s last breaths.

  Yet several mothers are unconvinced the deceased infants are bad-luck babies.

  And even if the now-suffering babies are saddled with bad luck, who’s to say those old tales of smothering are true? Had anyone actually seen a mother place a blanket or pillow over a child’s face? And most important for these new cases: by what evidence will we make the diagnosis?

  The grandmothers have ready answers. For several descendants of the Virginian who came up to Nova Scotia in 1772 as a messenger in the British army, a feverish baby had to be put to sleep if its father had recently had a limb severed above the knee or elbow. Death was also imminent if the baby’s fever came during the same month as the mother’s birthday. For the granddaughter of the Congolese woman who, in 1785, dressed as a man, sailed into Halifax Harbour on a ship out of Lisbon, Portugal, a feverish baby had to be smothered if the newborn was smaller than a man’s hand.

  And for the largest group of grandmothers, those descended from the nearly two hundred Jamaicans who landed in Halifax Harbour in 1788 after being expelled by British soldiers from their island villages for fomenting rebellion, a feverish baby’s fate was sealed if the child coughed up blood during the same month a traveling man arrived on your stoop selling quill turpentine, goat leather, or gunpowder. Hadn’t such a vendor made the rounds in Woods Bluff the month before? Why continue to nurse such a child? Death already had a square toe on the baby’s throat. It was only a matter of days, a week maybe, if the baby were a girl.

  The mothers nod as they listen to the explanations, but over the next weeks only one baby is smothered, although Lovee Mills denies doing it. Near the beginning of May, however, another mother on the bluff seriously considers taking the grandmothers’ advice about ending her baby’s suffering. Her afflicted child is the cousin of the first baby that developed the fever. Adding to the mother’s exasperation are the noisy groups of neighbors that have been gathering outside her home each day at sunset, a few of them knocking on the door and asking outright if the bad-luck baby had been relieved of its worldly suffering.

  By now the malady has a name. It refers to the style of cabin where the woman and her extended family live. A dogtrot cabin’s construction—two rooms connected by a short breezeway in the middle—had confounded the villagers for years. Some suspected the man who built the cabin wanted a reminder of his home in Virginia. But a breezeway in a dwelling in Nova Scotia? Pure stupidity.

  And now living in the cabin has caused two babies to get sick. Many blame the parents and the other members of the large extended family that lives there. Tight living made sense in 1782, they say, but this is 1918. If parents, grown children, and grandchildren are going to continue to jungle up in quarters that tight, what was the use of leaving prison? Even in the best families, sleeping foot to head too long breeds animosity. And if lies, jealousy, and ill will erupt easily in close quarters, why not a virulent fever?

  “Will she do it?” someone in the crowd that has arrived at the dogtrot cabin this evening asks.

  “If you mean smother the child, she had better,” another replies. “Or else one of us will.”

  The cabin’s odd construction had also puzzled several of the rebellious Jamaicans who arrived in Halifax Harbour in 1788. Of course, by the time they first saw the odd dwelling, their minds had been addled by two years of confinement in the military prison on the western edge of Halifax. It took that long before Canadian military commanders believed they had sorted out which of the prisoners were combatants or abettors, and which were
mere residents of the Jamaican villages torched by British soldiers.

  The wait had been a horror in the cramped underground magazine and provisions spaces.

  Eighty-two prisoners were moved to cells aboveground. From this group, squads of men were conscripted to repair damaged sections of the Citadel, help guard the city against French soldiers raiding its perimeter, and do road repair. One warm October day, a group of men on a road detail snuck off to walk the foot trails of Woods Bluff.

  Most of the men had heard by then that the money being sent from London and Jamaica to house the prisoners had slowed to a trickle. With no firm offer yet from the government of Sierra Leone to accept them and their families, the men walked the trails looking for the cabin where military officials said a few families would soon be offered housing.

  The first two families released from prison and driven by mule wagon out to the bluff never learned what happened to the family from Virginia that had lived there. But with the almanac predicting a heavy snowstorm within the week, they set about gathering dried grass and mud and fieldstones to repair the roof, chink the gaps in the logs, and mend the chimney. The men and women had their freedom. But they were facing a winter on their own in a cold, unfamiliar place. To them, this oddly built cabin seemed a present from God.

  With the fever threatening another baby, villagers in 1918 have a different view of the dogtrot cabin. After hearing that the infant suffering inside the dwelling was not smothered but died on its own, they want nothing more to do with the cabin. Fearful that it is harboring bad air that might kill another baby, they chase out the families living there and set the cabin ablaze.

  But what had their actions accomplished, the villagers wonder one afternoon in June, when word spreads that little Kath Ella Sebolt, who lives at 68 Dempsey Road, has developed the fever.

  By now seven babies have died.

  Fearing her daughter might be the eighth child to die of the fever, Kath Ella Sebolt’s mother, Shirley, goes in search of the handmade dolls she had purchased the previous winter. All ten of the dolls made by the neighborhood leatherworker were imitations of the Lucky Beatrice doll that had been fought over by a platoon of fathers in a pistol-shooting contest at the most recent Pictou County Exposition. What can it hurt, Shirley Sebolt figures, to slide her daughter’s doll under the bed where her daughter suffers?

  That evening Kath Ella’s fever breaks. The next morning Shirley carries the doll to a house down the road. The next afternoon, similar dolls are slipped under other beds all across the village.

  “Could be the fever just tired itself out,” George Sebolt tells a neighbor visiting with the news that his previously ailing infant has sucked down a full bottle of milk. “And maybe the nurses are bringing better medicine.”

  “No,” Shirley insists. “That lucky doll under the bed did the trick.”

  Kath Ella Sebolt’s doll is made of dark-brown nettle-cloth and has whalebone-button eyes. Its hair is fashioned from the tassels of a freemason’s cap. Its burgundy dress matches burgundy shoes made from the leather upholstery of discarded car seats excavated from the municipal dump, which by the eve of Kath Ella’s tenth birthday has nearly reached the southwestern edge of Woods Bluff.

  It becomes customary for Woods Bluff girls reaching their tenth birthday to present their handmade dolls to a younger girl in the neighborhood. A gesture of thanks, mothers tell their daughters, because you dodged a death with the fever. The evening before Kath Ella’s birthday party, she puts new ribbons in her doll’s hair and dresses the doll in its freshly washed jumper. But several hours before the party, the doll goes missing.

  “Fine if you don’t want to give it away,” Shirley says after retrieving the doll from under the mattress of Kath Ella’s bed. “But I won’t let you hide it.”

  With that, Shirley places the doll on the shelf beside Kath Ella’s bed.

  Several years later, on this warm spring afternoon of Friday, March 17, 1933, Kath Ella lies across her bed surrounded by her schoolbooks, while Kiendra Penncampbell, who lives down the road, sits on the floor with the doll in her lap.

  “Didn’t you hear me talking to you just now?” Kiendra says.

  “Didn’t you see me writing just now?” Kath Ella replies.

  “You always get the highest marks. Why are you studying French?”

  “I’m not studying French. I’m using the book to hold my paper while I write this.”

  “That looks like a letter. Are you writing to some boy?” Kiendra frowns. “Is it Omar Platt? It better not be.”

  “I am not writing to Omar Platt. I am writing a composition Mrs. Eatten says I have to write for the ladies who give the VMO scholarships.” Kath Ella holds up the page. “See?”

  Kiendra rises to her knees, leans forward, and stares at the page. Several shades of brown darker than Kath Ella, she wears two long braids that reach to her shoulders. Her school outfits, hand-me-downs her mother gets from the women whose houses she cleans, are always well coordinated. No plaids or prints or stripes, she only wears solid colors. She arrived at school several days last week wearing the same blue skirt, but with a different blue blouse. The green dress she wears this afternoon is faded and threadbare, the loud green socks too thick for the warm weather.

  “We don’t have school for a whole week,” Kiendra says, sitting back down. “You have plenty of time to write to the committee. Have some fun today, why don’t you?”

  “I will. Just give me a few minutes of quiet, pretty please.”

  Kath Ella writes with her brow furrowed, hoping Kiendra will get the hint. She ignored the tapping at the window earlier, suspecting Kiendra had come over to show off some trashy thing she had picked up on Cornhead Beach or at the municipal dump, where she often scavenges with her brother. Or else Kiendra was there to show off some new rock she found. Why the girl litters her room with rocks in a village where stones are plentiful is anybody’s guess. At the window, Kiendra must have seen that Kath Ella was working. Still, she lifted the window higher and climbed inside.

  Kiendra is right that Kath Ella has plenty of time to complete her composition. Although Mrs. Eatten is making the whole class of seniors write a composition, everyone knows that only the students who do well in the interviews will be asked to submit their compositions to the scholarship committee of the Victorian Maternal Order.

  For the last three years, with money dried up all over Canada, no student graduating from Woods Bluff Elementary and Secondary has gone off to a residential college. Word this year is that three students might get a scholarship. Imagining herself dressed in a wool skirt walking the leafy campus of Saint Agnes Rectory or Halifax College makes Kath Ella beam with joy. But what she wants badly is to attend the Teachers Seminary in Toronto. Her father, George, says it makes him tired as a bull-ox to imagine his daughter as a traveling gal, like the ones she reads about in books. With relatives who uprooted themselves from Jamaica and Trinidad, not to mention those who left Halifax for unknown parts in 1822, why would a Sebolt child want to travel far from home?

  The first paragraphs of Kath Ella’s composition for the scholarship are her attempt to answer that question. But the task has not been as easy as writing about whether she prefers spearmint or peppermint wax candies, or which prime ministers of Canada she admires the most. This question is personal. She does not like revealing herself to strangers, especially people who do not live on the bluff. The ladies at the VMO already know that she is poor. Why else would she want the scholarship? She suspects they would like to hear how getting far from Woods Bluff would be beneficial to her life. Her father should understand that, too. Talking with other neighborhood men who are also angry about the municipal dump expanding toward Woods Bluff, George says it is not always the air from the municipal dump that people smell. He says though his neighbors may be hardworking, the bluff itself sometimes stinks badly of poverty.

  “What I was asking you just now,” Kiendra says, undoing the last of the doll’s four hair bra
ids, “is whether you are going to the jamboree tomorrow.”

  “Of course, silly,” Kath Ella says. “I’m helping Mr. Ovits judge the tumbling contests.”

  “The girls will be happy. They are sick of you winning most of the blue ribbons.”

  “If I didn’t volunteer, I probably wouldn’t go.”

  “I’ll bet you would go, if only to see what prank the boys do this year. Remember last year when they glued a whole ream of colored construction paper on Mr. Geedish’s Ford?”

  Kath Ella laughs. “The man yelled so loud, I was afraid he was going to burst a throat vein.”

  “I don’t know why he was so torn up. The car cleaned up nicely.” Kiendra scoots closer to the bed. “I have an idea.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “How about this year the girls do a prank?”

  “Halt the bus right there. I am getting off.”

  “But wait. Let me finish.”

  “Halt the bus, I said. You are finished.”

  Kath Ella begins another paragraph, hoping the soothing task of combing the doll’s horsehair tresses will keep Kiendra’s grumbling from escalating into a full-on hissy fit, like the one she threw in her yard last Sunday before church. The trouble was that Kiendra had just learned that she had to spend all five days of the school vacation helping her mother, Rosa, clean houses. Given the shrieking Kiendra did, it is clear that shrill noises still do not bother her like they do several other teenagers on the bluff who survived the fever.

  The malady raged longest in Kiendra, but she also does not suffer the occasional headaches that plague Kath Ella. Her doctor says, however, that her fever may have harmed her brain in other ways. Kiendra’s mother disagrees. Rosa says her daughter has a sound brain, but sometimes doesn’t use it properly. “Starting all this mess out here in your father’s yard is a waste of time,” Rosa had said as she jerked Kiendra’s arm and directed her toward the road. “Hard work next week will keep you out of devilment.”