Mrs. Eatten says the scholarship committee would also appreciate reading about Kath Ella’s maternal great-grandfather, Mordechai. He got on at the Wales and London Hotel the same week he arrived in Halifax from Trinidad. For years he rode the coal trucks that rattled day and night up the long hill into the backside of the hotel. By the time Mordechai retired as a hotel steward, he had gotten his daughter Pallis and his granddaughter Shirley jobs in the laundry. Kath Ella wrote about the time she visited the laundry room at the hotel. The noise from the dryers was deafening and every breath she took seemed to burn her lungs. Pallis and Shirley often laughed together in the laundry, until the day the heavy dryer tumblers broke free and knocked Pallis to the floor. After getting out of the hospital, Pallis was transferred to the kitchen. Though her back often gave her trouble, she rarely complained.
But Kath Ella has been having trouble following Mrs. Eatten’s suggestion that she write about how she felt during the months before her grandfather died. She does not want to recall seeing him sweating in a chair on the porch, his body swollen from diabetes. Her failure is obvious in the paragraphs on the second page, where there are more blue corrections than on her earlier attempt.
After a few moments Kath Ella realizes that she has torn a corner of the page. Staring at the small jagged triangle makes her fearful of how much better Betty Addison probably did on the mathematics section of the scholarship exam than she. Earlier, she had seen Mrs. Eatten in the school doorway, offering what seemed like pleasant advice to Betty and several boys who took the scholarship exam. Just how generous are Mrs. Eatten’s new corrections to her composition?
Kath Ella tears off more pieces and soon the whole composition is a pile of paper shards on the bedspread. Good, she thinks, taking two lined pages out of her notebook. Without the distraction of having to look at Mrs. Eatten’s half-hearted notes, it will be easier to start over.
Kath Ella writes the date at the top of the page and then lies back on the bed to gather her thoughts. For this new effort she wants to go back further in the Sebolt family line. But to do a good job she will probably have to interview her father. No way is she stepping into those angry jaws anytime soon. And besides, members of the scholarship committee have probably already read compositions from students whose relatives left the military prison in 1782 to start a life on Woods Bluff.
After working for more than an hour, she has written only three paragraphs. But not one of them does she like. Now she is starting to wonder if it was a good idea to tear up her earlier work. Despite all the blue marks of corrections, Mrs. Eatten had said that her composition was nearly done. Maybe she should have listened.
Kath Ella resumes her writing, hearing the warm greeting her sister is receiving from her parents in the living room as she returns for dinner. Gathering the shards of paper, Kath Ella wonders when she herself will be the good daughter again.
Centervillage, the place on Woods Bluff where Kath Ella’s parents have been hinting she will most likely be working after school, is a bustling area. Nearly half the shops are operated by families of colored men and women from the southern United States who moved to the bluff almost a hundred years ago. They arrived when barely half the houses were occupied. Neither cholera, nor typhus, nor yellow fever caused them to vacate those houses. Those who left the bluff for unknown parts did so as the newcomers had arrived—imprisoned aboard a British ship.
One of Kath Ella’s relatives was among the neighbors who snuck downtown on November 14, 1822, to get a look at HMS Perspicacious and HMS Angel Pequod, two ships anchored in the harbor. A Nova Scotia official had visited the bluff the day before, saying the government of Sierra Leone was finally offering to take in the black residents living on Woods Bluff. Were the two ships really going to Sierra Leone? the men asked one another on the way back to the bluff. Or were the tall sails going to fly the families to another British prison in the Caribbean or the Australia Antilles?
Kath Ella has read an account of the departure of the ships written for the church records. But she does not know the details of the evening before they departed Halifax Harbour. A family story recounts what happened the evening her ancestor, four-year-old Kipbo Sebolt, awoke to find his parents packing.
“Where you going?” Kipbo asked from the floor pallet where he slept.
Kipbo’s father, Ephram, had been moving about the cabin, laying a hand on the furniture he had made with discarded wood from the carpenter’s shop where he was a janitor. He would be leaving behind his favorite items, two rope-seat chairs and a walnut table. Ivy, Kipbo’s mother, was at the bed laying out clothes. Her blue dress with stitched patterns on the front would go with her. So would her yellow hat with the shell comb attached and her high-top shoes. The last thing packed would be her grandmother’s snuff tin, which had remained in Ivy’s possession during the long months in prison.
When Kipbo began asking more questions, his mother gave him a thumb-size portion of dried goose dusted with bee sugar. Kipbo chewed the treat by the hearth, where he played with the wooden animals his father had carved. When he began to nod, his father carried him to the bed, where he fell asleep.
Outside, the bluff was noisy with the sound of soldiers shouting at villagers starting the trek downtown, the grunts of livestock being confiscated, and the hard yelps of dogs being executed with military lances.
Kipbo slept through the commotion. He awoke several hours later and realized he was alone in the cabin. When he began to cry, Vitsay Ovits, a distant aunt and his new guardian, pushed the cabin door open but remained outside looking at the road. “Get up from there, country man,” Vitsay said. “No time for sleeping.”
Because the governor of Halifax had insisted that the Perspicacious and the Angel Pequod also haul away the men in the crowded military prison, a quarter of the residents who had been marched downtown to board the ships returned to their homes. Months later, when no word had come from those who had left the bluff, residents asked military officials, What happened to our families and neighbors? “We’re investigating,” they were told.
“Throw us back in the jailhouse if need be,” one resident said, a year later, when another ship docked in Halifax and two platoons of soldiers arrived on the bluff. “Why should we get on the ship?”
Soldiers whipped the man who had made the threat, and over several days government officials threatened to whip more. Still, no other residents left their homes to board the ships.
Why did you ask Mr. Platt to give me a job?” Kath Ella asks her father this morning, when they are having their sausage and potatoes at the breakfast table. “I don’t want a job there.”
“Nobody wants to go to their job,” George says. “That’s why they call it work.”
No longer afraid of her father’s reactions, Kath Ella rushes past him after breakfast and stands in the living room between him and the front door. “But Mr. Platt’s place is a smelly mess,” she says. “Don’t make me work there.”
“As I remember, you used to love smelly messes,” George replies, stepping around Kath Ella and reaching for his hat.
“But I was a child then.”
“You still are.”
Chevy Platt owns the establishment where Kath Ella will begin her after-school job. He and his wife live in the house of a distant relative who had moved there when the bluff was partially cleared in 1822. The long journey up from the southern United States did not bring Chevy Platt directly to Halifax. He left the south in the fall of 1889, heading for a job in the rich coal country of Cape Breton.
After his long journey up from Mississippi, the first train nineteen-year-old Chevy boarded carried him across Nova Scotia a hundred miles northeast of Halifax to the terminus at Mulgrave Station. There he settled his tired body on the floor of the ferryboat Guysborough as it departed for the three-mile journey across the Canso Strait to the island of Cape Breton. Hard rain beat the wooden roof of the ferry as it tossed in the surf at the pier at Point Tupper. There, Chevy and a hundred or
so other colored men departed the ferry and trudged a quarter mile to catch another train, this one to Glace Bay.
“Last leg,” Chevy said in a rear car at dawn, waving a deck of playing cards, trying to round up a game of Gimme-takeme. “Git up for it, y’all.”
Around him, while the train rumbled farther east, men roused from where they slept on wooden benches or on the floor, their knees or elbows resting on suitcases or canvas bags with the belongings they had brought from Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.
“Your brother done died,” said one of the men who lowered himself to the floor beside Chevy. “Don’t that call for quiet?”
“Quiet ain’t for the living,” Chevy said as he dealt the cards. “And quiet ain’t never brought a man back from glory.”
Chevy picked up his cards without glancing rearward, as he had often the evening before. Miles behind the train was the field where a pile of stones marked the grave of his brother, Tommy. His brother had also been taken with the words the white man had said to get them to board the train in Jackson, Mississippi: that the coal vein at Collier 8-W in Glace Bay was richer than in any other mine in Canada, that at the end of one large shaft the canopy was big enough for two dozen men to stand under, that he hadn’t seen coal that rich since he was a boy in Scotland, that coal out of 8-W burned cleaner and coughed up less soot than product from any other mine in Cape Breton. Hell, even the residue from Collier 8-W sold for a pretty nickel.
At the mine office at Glace Bay the next morning, Chevy was the first man in line at the supply and requisition hut to sign the IOUs for his work boots, pants, and hard hat. In the weeks that followed, Chevy often approached the mine’s entrance laughing and imitating the blast of the mine horn, the whistle of a far-off train, or the horn of a ship in the bay. He loved how the light struck the tin roof on the engine house, how the coal dust bit his nostrils as he approached the timber arches at the mine entrance, how the hitched-up miniature ponies worked their shoulder muscles before moving forward into the black air. At the end of a twelve-hour day, Chevy even liked the feel of the grime scratching his ankles as he walked down Viceroy Road to the boardinghouse. In the letters home to Mississippi, Chevy said how much he appreciated his job. Work, he wrote, was the best way to cure his homesickness and to honor his buried brother.
A decade later, when the haul at Collier 8-W had plummeted to a tenth of what it had been in 1889, Chevy and his wife moved south to Woods Bluff. There the Platts lived in the back rooms of a cabin and used the front room for a new business, selling handmade brooms and galvanized tin buckets, dishpans, and bathtubs. By the time Kath Ella Sebolt was born, the establishment was doing such brisk business that Chevy Platt moved his family out of the back rooms and offered lodging there as incentive on the advertisement he posted for an employee to mind his store, which was now called Platt’s Hardware Barn.
Kath Ella can no longer stall. Her composition for the VMO scholarship has been approved by Mrs. Eatten and driven downtown. She has taken the last part of the yearlong battery for the French college certification exam. Her final exams are still a month away. Still, Friday, April 14, the day she has reluctantly agreed to begin her job at the Hardware Barn, comes much quicker than she had imagined.
Thankfully she has to work at the store only three days a week. Still, during her first weeks there, she hates the tedious tasks of creating new price tags to put on the refurbished appliances, comparing stacks of IOUs with entries in the business ledgers, and, especially, giving hard glances at loitering visitors.
But to her surprise she enjoys doing inventory. She likes scouring the merchandise to see if any of her grandfather’s old tools are there. She scrutinizes the chairs, carved ducks, and picture frames to see if any bear his etchings. Kath Ella also enjoys gathering similar merchandise in orderly clusters, nesting the tin buckets, arranging small appliances on the shelves, or lining up the used work boots along the sidewall. By the middle of the third week, she no longer curses when her hands are soiled with soot or her skirt brushes against the rusted seed spreader in the back corner.
A continuing irritant, however, are the boys that come to the store with their baseball bats and gloves, looking around, and buying nothing. When she is away at college next fall, she will miss Clemmond Green; the tall Eatten boys; wooly-headed Buddy Taylor, now chasing after Kiendra; Seth and Graham Teakill; Daniel Steptoe; No-Hips Eddie; even that rascal Tristan Griffin. But for now these visitors are only an annoyance, especially the ones claiming Kiendra will be coming home from Wells Bridge any minute. All the news they have passed on about Kiendra has been dead wrong.
With the warmer weather, the next week of school and the afternoons of work seem to drag on. One afternoon, with her upcoming graduation on her mind, Kath Ella is in front of the store lining up the brooms when she spies Kiendra seated between her aunt and uncle in the back seat of M. T. Everson’s jitney as it races by on Dempsey Road. She tries to run after the car, but the road is too muddy.
Was that you I saw today in the back of M. T. Everson’s jitney? Kath Ella writes in the evening to Kiendra. Why didn’t you come by the store or my house to say hello? She mails the letter to Kiendra in Wells Bridge.
The next week Kath Ella receives a reply. I’ll be home for a visit before you can spell Newfundland, Kiendra writes. I promise, I promise.
For the rest of May, if Kiendra does visit, Kath Ella does not see her. At the beginning of June, Kath Ella writes Kiendra with the good news that Shirley has been rehired at the Wales and London. Thank God, she writes. Now I can quit this job soon.
But a few days before graduation, Shirley announces she has asked Chevy Platt to keep Kath Ella at the store all summer. I can’t wait to get off to college, Kath Ella writes to Kiendra. I cannot tell you how happy I will be to get away from Shirley. I hate her.
So where did the two ships that left Nova Scotia in 1822 finally drop anchor? For years Kath Ella’s great-grandfather Kipbo Sebolt asked Vitsay Ovits that question. Before she died in 1843, Vitsay had written letters to Ottawa, to London, and to the governor in Freetown, Sierra Leone, trying to get an answer. The Angel Pequod had probably drifted off course in a storm, Kipbo learned, and was never heard from. HMS Perspicacious had run aground, but was close enough to the shore of Sierra Leone that passengers had waded in. But did the Jamaicans on board then travel north or south along the Pepper Coast? Or did they go into the interior?
On a spring day in 1858, Kipbo Sebolt left his cabin on the bluff carrying a letter he hoped would reach someone who could give him answers. He was nearing forty and typhus had taken his wife; cholera, all three of his teenage children. The letter had been written by his future bride, seventeen-year-old Jubilee. She often read to him the article in the Colored Freeman about a Christian mission in northeast Sierra Leone. Near the mission was a village where a number of residents claimed to have had relatives who had emigrated from the Province of Canada. But the Province of Canada is big country, Kipbo thought, riding into town on a mule-drawn wagon to mail the letter. Would any person in Sierra Leone know the whereabouts of his parents?
Kipbo’s letter also mentioned several other family names written in the big ledger book stored near the altar at Basinview Baptist. The Ovitses, the Taylors, and the Cauldens. With a child on the way, Kipbo left the post office convinced that knowing the whereabouts of even one former neighbor would lift his heart.
Several months later, Kipbo sat near the hearth of his cabin, unable to believe he was holding a reply from the mission in Sierra Leone. But the letter was thin and weightless. He ran the tip of his boning knife along the top of the envelope, fearing another disappointment.
His wife, Jubilee, asleep on the bed, had agreed to marry him after he promised to lay a wood floor in the cabin. His father had wanted to lay a floor himself. But wood was scarce on the bluff back then. And any wood his father obtained was used to make furniture to sell or to do repairs on the houses of neighbors.
Kipbo unfolded the lette
r, fearing the thin paper might crumble in his shaking hands. In nearly half a century, he hadn’t heard a word from abroad about a Sebolt or a Gordonell, his mother’s family. As far as he knew, he was alone in the world. Holding the letter closer to the flame of the whale-oil lamp, Kipbo stared at the first two lines. He had heard his father also lacked the patience to sit while the woman he loved tried to teach him to read the Bible. He himself had learned to recognize only a phrase or two. After scanning the letter, his eyes went back to the top. There, in the first few lines, were two words he understood: so sorry.
Kipbo laid the letter over the smoldering coals in the hearth and stretched out on the woven-grass rug. As a small boy he had hated his mother, Ivy, for making him sleep on the dirt floor. But now the hard ridges were a soothing reminder of his boyhood. Drifting off to sleep, he wondered if Jubilee was correct that the child riding low in her belly was a boy. If her prediction were true he would name the child George. True, it was the name of the king who ordered all those villages burned on Jamaica. But it was also the name of the last Sebolt male to have been buried on Jamaican soil. His grandfather. There was good history in the name, too.
Kipbo did not sleep well that evening. And he woke hating the dirt floor again. Still, it took months of Jubilee’s begging before he began gathering wood for a new floor. He had gotten a letter from another mission in Sierra Leone. Again there was no mention of Sebolts, but the letter said some of the names in Kipbo’s letter were familiar in that part of the country.
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