Flint and Feather

by Charlotte Gray

  Just as George Johnson moved easily amongst settlers by becoming more British in style than a British immigrant, so Emily wanted her children to outdo in refinement and self-control any other children they met. She hated, recalled Pauline, “hypocrisy, vulgarity, slovenliness, imitations.” This was a high standard to set in the rough-and-tumble society of Upper Canada 150 years ago, where most people were illiterate, a piano in a home was a rarity, and breweries and distilleries outnumbered churches and schools. In neighbouring Brantford, for example, there were 53 liquor outlets for a population of 4,000, and homeowners paid in beer for the services of the volunteer fire brigade. It was easier, the children found, to stick to each other’s company. “As a family,” Eva recorded in her memoirs, “we were clannish and loved to be among our own people, where we were understood. We had all the reserve of the British and the reticence of the Indian.”

  Beverly Johnson was musical and athletic, but painfully shy.

  Beverly and Eva, the two older Johnson children, were particularly affected by their mother’s insistence on correct behaviour. Both were suffocatingly shy; incapable of spontaneity, neither made friends easily. When other children came to visit, the two Johnsons would stand motionless,

  Brantford’s Mohawk Institute was one of the first residential schools for Indian children in Canada: from the start, there were stories of beatings and cruelty.

  staring at the newcomers and refusing to join in their games. Emily Johnson appears to have forgotten how much she had suffered under harsh discipline when she was young. With gritted teeth, she refused to spare a rod or spoil a child. Minor crimes such as stealing apples or telling untruths merited both a whipping and a few hours’ isolation.

  Beverly was sent away to Brantford’s Mohawk Institute, one of the first residential schools set up by the British government to “civilize” native children by immersing them in Christianity and the English language. When the schools were founded, their purpose was regarded as entirely benevolent. Nobody discussed the long-term impact of removing children from their families, languages and cultures. In Westminster, the thinking seems to have been that if boarding schools worked for the elite of Britain, surely they would be of enormous benefit to Imperial subjects elsewhere. In theory, Beverly Johnson should have been able to adapt to the Institute better than most of his fellow students. He was already baptised, he could read and write with ease, and because English was his first language the ban on speaking a native tongue was no hardship for him. But the harsh discipline and the insidious contempt for Indian ways displayed by the Institute’s staff unnerved the sensitive youngster. He ached with homesickness and wept whenever he saw his parents. Nevertheless, Emily and George refused to let him leave until he was in his mid-teens because they felt he should set an example to other children on the reserve whose parents were reluctant.

  Evelyn (Eva) Johnson inherited her mother’s self-discipline and subdued dress sense.

  From the Mohawk Institute, Beverly was sent to Hellmuth Collegiate in London, sixty miles (about ninety-five kilometres) away. At the same time, Eva was enrolled at its counterpart, Hellmuth Ladies’ College. There was none of the us-and-them approach of the Mohawk Institute at these smart private schools. Most students and teachers came from prominent London families, amongst whom Emily was happy to see her own children making friends. When Bev and Eva invited the children of London’s haute bourgeoisie to visit Chiefswood, the young guests brought with them the British habits and loyalties of their parents—reverence for royalty, the ritual of dressing for dinner—which were part of Emily’s own life.

  But the rigour of their upbringing appears to have left Beverly and Eva prisoners of good breeding for the rest of their lives. “Ever correct, dignified, aristocratic,” an acquaintance said of Eva when she was in her sixties. “Even after the strangeness of first acquaintanceship had worn off and warmed, [she] seemed to cling with Indian tenacity to this correctness. Sometimes I could not understand, and felt aggrieved…”

  The younger two children, shielded from their parents by their elder siblings, were more extroverted. Allen was a bumptious little boy who was his father’s favourite because he loved to dress up and play at soldiers. Only Emily’s opposition had prevented George Johnson from naming his elder son after his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, and he always called Allen “Kleber,” after Napoleon’s general. (He also nicknamed Beverly “Boney.”) George roared with laughter when he caught six-year-old Allen stealing out of the front door with his father’s gun, powder and shot bag. But like Beverly, Allen was sent off to the forbidding brick Mohawk Institute, with its freezing dormitories and scratchy grey wool uniforms. Like Beverly, he hated it. Less malleable than his elder brother, Allen ran away to his grandparents’ house on the reserve, knowing that the kindly old couple would let him stay. By now, however, his mother had mellowed slightly; when she discovered him hiding in her mother-in-law’s kitchen, she told him he could come home to Chiefswood.

  Prom an early age, Allen Johnson demonstrated a talent for amateur dramatics.

  Pauline, the baby of the brood, was named by her father after Napoleon’s favourite sister, Pauline Borghese (subsequently Duchess of Guastalla). From birth, Pauline Johnson was her mother’s favourite. Emily was particularly protective of Pauline because her younger daughter’s health was precarious, and because as soon as she began to speak, she demonstrated a taste for poetry. She was four before she finally graduated from the black walnut cradle next to her parents’ bed. Emily, who had watched her sister Eliza’s children die, fretted over every cold and earache. Pauline was indulged in a way the older children never were. Each night her mother sang her to sleep, and she was allowed to keep a pet chipmunk (in a cage), as well as her terrier, Chips, and a kitten called Mitten. There was no question of a residential or boarding school for her. Until she was fourteen, her skimpy education was gleaned from her mother, a couple of non-native governesses (the second, Emily Muirhead, was the daughter of the Mayor of Brantford) and two unsatisfactory years in the little school on the reserve. By this point, Pauline was too far ahead in reading, and too fastidious in her behaviour, to mingle easily with the other Mohawk children. So she came home and worked her way alone through her parents’ library of Milton, Scott, Longfellow, Browning, Tennyson, Keats and Byron. She particularly enjoyed stories about the nobility of Indians written by her favourite authors. In later years, she often recommended to others both Canadian-born John Richardson’s Wacousta, the 1832 novel about an Englishman who assumes Indian identity, and The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow’s epic poem about the mythical Ojibwa peacemaker.

  But Pauline’s fascination with Indian culture and folklore was essentially literary: she saw native myth through the eyes of non-native writers. Her grandmother, Helen Martin Johnson, had died when Pauline was five. George Johnson felt the loss of his mother deeply, both emotionally and politically; she had been an important ally in his role on the reserve. With the loss of the clan matriarch, his own family had begun to drift away from their Mohawk relatives. Increasingly, the only link was George’s father, John Johnson, who spent long periods at Chiefswood. The old man had plenty of time for his grandchildren, and he was always happy to take Pauline’s hand and walk down to the river with her. If she pressed him, he would tell her stories out of his own past and the Iroquois legends that his mother had told him. But Pauline was still too young to pay much attention, particularly if Chips had raced off into the undergrowth after a squirrel.

  The Johnsons enjoyed a standard of living that was unusually high amongst both Indians and settlers. They were sufficiently well-off to employ two or three servants when Pauline was young, so the children were expected to perform only “character-training” chores. A quarter of a century after she left Chiefswood, Pauline remembered that, for thirty minutes each morning before lessons with the governess, Eva had to clean the oil lamps, and that she had to sweep the stairs. “How endless those stairs were!” she recalled. “I can count them yet
—nineteen horrors, with mahogany coloured velvet carpet, so difficult to

  John “Smoke” Johnson, Pauline’s grandfather, passed on the Iroquois legends he had learnt as a child.

  dust, a strip of linen in the centre, so gloriously easy to slide over, and broad, polished brass rods, perfect demons for holding the ‘fluff’ from the velvet.” The little girl would frequently give up around the tenth stair and wait with a woebegone face, hoping that Milly the nurse or Jane the cook would relieve her of the stiff brush and finish the job. But her mother rarely let her get away with such behaviour: finishing the job was “something whereby you can help Milly and Jane.” Noblesse oblige required Pauline to reach the bottom stair.

  Except for that one morning chore, the children were free to roam over the Chiefswood grounds, exploring the ravines, gathering morel mushrooms and picking anemones, violets and tiger lilies. In the spring, they watched a tenant farmer plough and plant the land between the house and the road. In the summer, they were enthusiastic spectators for the pickup lacrosse games that boys from the reserve organized on the grassy flats near the river. In the fall, they gathered butternuts, walnuts and hickory nuts. In the winter, they helped their father cut ice from the river. The two girls took turns riding Marengo, a little black pony that their father had named after Napoleon’s favourite horse.

  In family photographs, the Johnsons appear the epitome of Victorian respectability as they sit, straight and silent, before the lens. Small boys all over the British Empire played with drums similar to the one on which Allen Johnson’s feet rest. The pattern for Eva’s dress, with pretty bows on the sleeves, probably came from an illustration in a British magazine. In their black button boots and starched petticoats, the children could be the offspring of any moderately prosperous churchgoing family in Montreal, Manchester or Melbourne. The olive skin and dark eyes suggest a different parentage, but it is a subtle difference. The boys’ hair is brown, not black, and only Allen has inherited his father’s swarthiness.

  The two Johnson boys were good athletes, the stars of local lacrosse teams. But there were no such physical outlets for the girls; even the newly popular game of tennis, considered a suitable activity for ladies, was banned from Chiefswood by Emily Johnson. Emily passed on to her daughters her own phobia about social intimacy. Visitors were never allowed to kiss the little girls; by the time she was three, Pauline had learned to bestow only distant handshakes on boys and men. Since kissing games were popular in this period, Pauline was quickly branded as standoffish. In later years she recalled an incident in the summer that she was eight, when some children from Brantford came to visit a Chiefswood neighbour:

  A laughing-eyed boy of nine or ten suddenly developed a teasing tendency. “I’ll kiss all you girls and make you cry!” he shouted, waving his arms like a windmill, and rushing toward the biggest girl, who took to her heels, screaming with laughter and calling back: “Georgie, porgie, pudding and pie, kiss the girls and make them cry.” Of course, he caught her, kissing her a half-dozen times; then he chased and captured several others, and finally made a rush for where I stood, my little back fortified against a tree trunk, my face sullen and sulky. “Run, he’ll catch you!” shouted the others, but I never stirred, only stood and glowered at him, and with all the indignation my eight years could muster, I shouted at him. “Don’t you dare insult me, sir!” The “sir” was added to chill him and it did.

  On this occasion, and all subsequent ones, she was left alone.

  Both Eva and Pauline appeared to recall their childhood with nostalgia, but theirs was an upbringing that was stiflingly inflexible by today’s standards. There wasn’t a dainty rule of conduct that Emily Johnson didn’t enforce. Never reach in front of a person, but ask for what you want. Don’t make a noise with your lips when you are taking soup. Never say a person is sick; say he is ill. At dinner always break your bread, never bite it. Always put your hand over your mouth whenever it is necessary to sneeze, cough or yawn. Never tip your soup plate to get the last of the contents or drink the last of a cup of beverage; always leave a little at the bottom of a cup…Sometimes the catalogue seemed endless. The children were never permitted to eat in the kitchen, or to take a slice of bread and butter or cake unless they were sitting properly with a plate and napkin in front of them. And gossip was never permitted, no matter how much Pauline longed to discuss with her sister the rumour that a local clergyman was too fond of a tipple.

  Emily Johnson’s strictures worked. The reputation of the Johnsons as a model Victorian family rippled throughout Brantford and beyond, as did the renown of Chiefswood as a home of refinement. George Henry Johnson and Emily Howells Johnson were themselves the kind of attractive couple of whom everybody wanted to believe the best. Both were slim and good-looking, and fastidious dressers. Whether George Johnson was dressed up in buckskin as an Indian chief or wearing his everyday starched collar and broadcloth jacket, he made sure that his buckles shone and his dark hair was oiled smooth. Daytime callers at Chiefswood always met Emily in an immaculate afternoon dress, with freshly laundered lace collar and cuffs, her side curls neatly pinned up. The Johnsons entertained frequently. There were musical evenings, with family and friends grouped around the piano. There were games of croquet on the lawns. There were lavish Sunday teas, at which the best linen, silver and china were set out, and Emily gracefully received local dignitaries.

  George Johnson’s reputation as a skilful mediator between Indian and European interests was also spreading. Thanks to his dual responsibilities as both George Johnson, government interpreter for the Six Nations, and Onwanonsyshon, member of the Six Nations Band Council, he found himself the reserve’s de facto chief executive officer. He was simultaneously paid by the government in Ottawa to enact its laws and empowered by the Council to enforce its rules and regulations. He often found himself in a difficult position, straddling two systems of government and uncertain how secure his position was with either of them. This balancing act was a source of stress and, at times, danger.

  Trouble first erupted one evening in January 1865, when Pauline was only four. Emily was just lighting the parlour lamps when George lurched through the door with blood pouring from his head and mouth. The children stared in horror at him until their mother shooed them upstairs and sent the stableman to Brantford for the doctor. George stammered that he had been attacked in a local village by two men while walking home; then he passed out. When the doctor arrived, he quickly ascertained that both George’s jaws were broken and his head wound was serious. He and the stableman carried the injured man upstairs, while the terrified children peeped out from behind their bedroom doors. For three weeks, Emily scarcely left her husband’s side as he lay in bed, at first delirious with fever, then rigid with pain.

  The attack on George had been perpetrated by two non-native bootleggers, infuriated by his efforts to stop Indians illegally selling reserve timber in return for rotgut whiskey. For several months, George Johnson and the Indian Superintendent, Lieutenant Colonel Gilkison, had pursued the illicit whiskey traders with prosecutions, fines and imprisonment. Johnson’s zeal had made him a marked man. Now he was scarred by the wounds, which had been inflicted by a heavy lead ball on a piece of elastic, and for the rest of his life he suffered bouts of neuralgia. His children never forgot the sight of their father covered in blood, or the sound of his groans.

  George and Emily were determined to carry on as if nothing had happened. The underlying stress remained, but the incident was rarely mentioned; George continued to combine the jobs of Council member and government interpreter. His enjoyment of ceremonial occasions was undiminished. It was George Johnson, alongside his father, John “Smoke” Johnson, who stood beside Arthur, Duke of Connaught, on a momentous occasion in October 1869. In an elaborate ceremony, Queen Victoria’s third son stood on a scarlet blanket and was inducted as a chief of the Six Nations. Soon George was styling himself the “Warden of the Reserve” and receiving invitations to address both the provincia
l assembly in Toronto and the Dominion Parliament in Ottawa.

  One day, a tall young engineer whom George had met in Brantford came to call. Alexander Graham Bell had arrived with his elderly parents from Scotland in 1870, after the family had suffered a double tragedy: the deaths from tuberculosis of both Alexander’s brothers. Throughout the nineteenth century, Canada was promoted in Britain as a land of good health, and the Bells had decided that they must flee Edinburgh’s germs. Alexander’s mother was very deaf, and the children were fascinated by her ear trumpet. Pauline was even more intrigued when Alexander, asked to say grace before the meal, said the prayer in sign language.

  The Bells were so impressed with the Johnson ménage that a few days later, they returned the invitation. In later years Pauline loved to tell the story (an anecdote that also signalled to her audience the prestige of her family’s friends) of her father’s visit to Tutelo Heights, the Bells’ sprawling home with its lacy gingerbread trim outside Brantford. George Johnson was invited to help test a new invention. He found Alexander Bell walking towards the house, tacking stovepipe wire to