Across Canada by Story

by Douglas Gibson

  “Heaven was the word for Canada.” It’s hard to read these words without pride.

  The runaways followed the Drinking Gourd, and knew that they had made it when they crossed “the River Jordan,” that is, the Detroit River. That was the destination for most of the fugitives, although the whole Niagara frontier or the north shore of Lake Erie, anywhere, were also desperately sought. In 1850 a law was passed in the United States to deal with the runaway “problem.” This made it legal to kidnap and take back south any slave who had made it to safety in the “free” states of the North. You won’t be surprised to learn that from then on the flow of slaves going all the way to truly free Canada swelled to a flood, and it took a civil war to stop it.

  The drama of every single runaway’s story speaks for itself. Escape by night, with every stranger a potential enemy who can betray you. Wading through swamps, or tearing through thickets of thorn, pursued by lawmen and bounty hunters with horses and guns, and, in the background, the constant sound of bloodhounds baying. If you’re interested in great stories — and if you’re immersed in this book, the chances that you’re keen on stories are pretty good — there are thousands of such stories to discover. And if you’re a writer, you might find inspiration in the general theme — as Linda Spalding did with her novel of slavery in western Virginia around 1800, The Purchase, which won the Governor General’s Award in 2012.

  There have been many fine books about the subject. One that I can strongly recommend is an old classic, Underground to Canada (1977), by Barbara Smucker (now deceased, and a woman whom I met only briefly). This is for young adults, but is a fine work for readers of all ages. It bravely uses ugly language, realistically, just as it was used by slave-owners. As Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes, puts it in his introduction to the 2013 edition:

  The “N” word is offensive to the extreme by modern standards — as was the institution of slavery, and as was the Holocaust. But writers, teachers and parents do no one a favour by pretending that such things didn’t exist. Much better to acknowledge them, to understand them, and to ensure that our children and grandchildren are even better equipped than we are to learn from the monstrous mistakes in our past.

  Lawrence goes on to tackle the fact that life in Canada was not a bed of roses for the slaves who made it here. “Barbara Smucker is to be credited for acknowledging that life in this country was fraught with difficulties for Black people.” He concludes with the words: “In the meantime, Barbara Smucker has created a sensitive and dramatic story about a young girl’s flight from slavery, and — some three decades after it first appeared in print — Underground to Canada still serves as a wonderful introduction to a vital and fascinating element of Canadian history.”

  And Lawrence, as the author of The Book of Negroes, which has won many prizes and enthralled a million readers (not to mention TV viewers), knows a thing or two about writing compelling books about race. And anyone who wishes to get close to the Underground Railroad experience can always turn off the 401 and head to North Buxton, where a museum and a realistic settler’s cabin records the African American community that settled here, at the end of the railroad.

  Or, as it happens, not quite the end. When Jane and I gave our show in May 2014 much farther north — in Flesherton, way up in Grey County, on “the roof of Ontario” — we were amazed when our hosts, Barry Penhale and Jane (no relation) Gibson, took us to a little burial ground commemorating local African American settlers from these early days.

  A French officer named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Detroit in 1701, bringing French settlers to the area, and giving a great name to a luxury car when the auto industry emerged more than two centuries later. In 1749, the first land grants were given in what is now Windsor, and attracted French settlers from the Lower St. Lawrence … which, when you think of the journey involved, is an amazing story in itself. As in Hugh MacLennan’s Quebec, the land grants ran — in traditional French style — in long, thin strips back from the river. Ever since then (and Windsor boasts of being the oldest European settlement in Ontario) there has been a strong French presence in the area (Belle River!), and Windsor is an officially bilingual area.

  As the auto industry grew, and Detroit came to stand for the car-making industry, Windsor gloried in the colonial title “Auto Capital of the British Empire.” The population accelerated from 21,000 in 1908 to 105,000 in 1928, as the new assembly lines seemed to turn out people as well as cars. Today Windsor is a city of over 200,000, with its own university and art gallery. And midway between them lies Alistair MacLeod’s house.

  I’ve often told the story of my piratical trip to Windsor in 1999 to pry the manuscript of No Great Mischief out of Alistair’s hands. He, in turn, retaliated by describing my entirely helpful and well-intentioned visit as “a home invasion.” But since it all worked out not too badly, I’ve been a welcome visitor at Alistair and Anita’s house since then.

  Alistair MacLeod (1936–2014)

  A word about the family, and the house. It’s a fine, comfortable house (with no distinguishing plaque outside it — yet). But one of the key reasons why Alistair wasn’t free to turn out dozens of books is that he and Anita were kept very busy raising six children there — Alexander, Lewis, Kenneth, Marion, Daniel, and Andrew. And since they are all fine, healthy specimens — with young Andrew the biggest of them all — there must have been times when the house on Curry Avenue was bursting at the seams. Andrew, in fact, recently referred to the inevitable squabbles that came from sharing your space with people you thought you despised, until you realized they mattered more to you than anyone in the world. Now the seams are threatened only at times like Christmas, when returning grandchildren swell the merry throng, or in October 2014, when the Windsor Book Festival’s tribute to the author I called “a great writer and a great man” drew the family together. You’ll be glad to know that I knocked on the door, saying, “I’m Doug Gibson, and I’ve come for a manuscript.”

  I’ve often told the story of my horror when, in the course of my original manuscript-grabbing visit, I saw the blood-chilling MacLeod clan motto, “Hold Fast,” framed above the piano. In a subsequent visit I’ve joined the crowd around that piano, as Marion (now a distinguished academic with a string of degrees in the field of music) played traditional songs that we all roared out with the greatest enthusiasm. A MacLeod family ceilidh in Windsor is a ­wonderful thing.

  Outside the house, in the wider world of Windsor, Alistair was very popular, like a walking, smiling civic monument that everyone knew and admired. I’ve seen this at public events in his honour, and I’ve seen it on the street, where his many years of teaching at the university, and his decades as an involved parent at sporting and school events, made him a very popular man in the community. Add to this the fact that Windsor is proud to have this internationally famous author as their best-known writer, and you see why to be in Alistair’s company was a great thing.

  In 2011 I was a guest at the annual Book Fest Windsor event, held at the art gallery. Two things stand out from that show. First, I found myself talking about my list of distinguished Canadian authors in the Canadian gallery, which meant that I was flanked by superb Group of Seven paintings showing Ontario’s North Country. Now, if only I could take them with me, as part of the travelling show’s backdrop …

  Second, as I neared the end, Alistair slipped in, having fulfilled a conflicting appointment. It was a very pleasing experience to adapt my talk (“Here’s what I’ve been saying about you behind your back!”) and speak affectionately about Alistair in his presence.

  Alistair’s life in Windsor slowed dramatically in the sad winter of 2014. I was in constant touch, so I knew about the hard stroke that felled him and left him bedridden in January. (And many people in the Windsor media knew about it, too, but because the family wanted it kept private, they maintained a respectful silence — which I find wonderful.) We talked by phone, altho
ugh talking became harder for him. At the end of February Jane and I went down to see a University of Windsor presentation of the play No Great Mischief. But we really went to see Alistair.

  Anita said that he was pleased to hear that we were coming. And, sure enough, although his right side was paralyzed, and speaking was hard, he had prepared a joke for us in greeting. Had we, he wanted to know, “been dancing in Scotsville recently?” This was a good private joke, a reminder of the time eighteen months ­earlier when a summer visit to Cape Breton had led to him and Anita inviting us to join in a square dancing evening in Scotsville. A fine evening, with wonderful memories.

  That whole final visit — and we all suspected that it would be the final one — was cheerful, fond, and full of good memories. When the time came, my friend and I shook hands left-handed, and his handshake was significantly long and strong, and his brown-eyed gaze direct and meaningful. At this moment of dumbstruck high emotion, I remembered the MacLeod family motto above the piano at his home. “Hold fast,” I blurted out.

  Alistair made a farewell gesture between a wave and a thumbs-up sign. “All right,” he said, and nodded. I like to think that it was more than a casual response. I like to believe that in fact it was the considered view of a fond husband and a father of six fine children who knew that all things considered, including a few million admiring readers, his life, now drawing to a close, had gone all right.

  After his death I went by train to the first visitation in Windsor. It began at the funeral home at 7 p.m., and I was there right on time to avoid the crowd. Not a chance. By 7 there were already fifty or sixty people in the line to sign the book, file past the coffin and greet Anita and the children. As we inched forward I muttered to the man ahead of me, “You never know what to say.” But when I reached Anita, and we hugged, and she held me out at arm’s-length, no doubt remembering our regular calls over the past weeks, miraculously, I found that I did know what to say. I said, “Aren’t we lucky?”

  She instantly understood the unspoken words “lucky to have had this wonderful man play a part in our lives,” and we hugged again.

  Three weeks later Jane drove us down to Windsor for the funeral mass that was held in Our Lady of the Assumption Church. It lies near the river, literally in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge, on the University of Windsor campus where Alistair taught. Hundreds of people turned out to pay their respects. When Alistair’s old friend Rev. Joseph Quinn was delayed in his homily by a technical mix-up, he noted that he was certain that Alistair was looking down and laughing at him. It was a good touch.

  Perhaps the best part of the reception afterwards was when Lewis remembered his father. As a Windsor student, at the end of the day Lewis would sometimes come to his father’s English department office, in the hope of a ride that would save him the twenty-minute walk home. Lewis found that usually no time was saved, as his father’s walk along the department corridor involved constant office drop-ins, with friendly greetings and little stories. He remembered that even a janitor changing the light bulbs in the hall would be greeted with the affectionate joke: “You are the light of my life.” And I remembered that in his role as silly grandpa, Alistair would bid his grandchildren goodbye, saying, outrageously, “See you later … crocodile.”

  A lovely man. I’m very lucky.

  At the end of his long and distinguished political career, Paul Martin Sr. (for many years the MP for Windsor’s Essex East constituents) was Canada’s High Commissioner in London. He became famous for asking any group of visiting Canadians, “Is there anybody here from Windsor?” Once a politician, always …

  His son Paul Martin, our former prime minister, published his memoirs, Hell or High Water, with me in 2008. It gives a memorable picture of the Windsor he knew as a boy growing up there and in Ottawa.

  Windsor was a multi-ethnic boomtown in the shadow of the United States. … A border town that was proud of its racy legacy from the era of Prohibition. I remember my mother pointing out a house near the cottage that had once been a “blind pig” — or speakeasy — and I remember the implication that she had been an occasional customer. According to legend, freighters would show up at the Hiram Walker distillery on Monday to be loaded for Cuba only to be back two days later to reload.

  Young Paul also remembered attending the opening of a new post office at Belle River. As the local MP who had made this happen, his father was the subject of much oratorical praise, and there were many speeches “about how important the building was — the greatest human achievement since St. Peter’s in Rome, it was generally agreed.” A day or two later he attended a session of the United Nations in New York. “I sat with the Canadian delegation and heard my father praised by country after country in speeches from the podium. When it was all over, someone asked me what I thought of all these people saying what a great man Dad was, to which I was heard to reply: ‘Well, it wasn’t bad, but the speeches were better in Belle River!’”

  As you can see, Paul Martin tells a very good story, and I greatly enjoyed working with him. Here’s a final Windsor story that will be familiar to readers of my earlier book, but is worth repeating. On the very day in 1993 that Paul was sworn in as Jean Chrétien’s minister of finance (traditionally a career-limiting post for potential prime ministers), his mother was rushed to Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor. He flew from Ottawa to join his sister Mary Anne and a family group huddled beside her bed. She looked up at the faces around her, and asked, “Why?”

  Thinking she was wondering why we were all at her bedside, Mary Anne told her we had come because she was ill, and then she slipped back to sleep. A few minutes later, she woke up and asked again, “Why?”

  I told her, “Mother, we’ve explained to you. You’ve been sick, and we’re all here to make sure you get better.” And then she said, “No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean, why Finance? Why would you want to be minister of finance?”

  We didn’t drive out of Windsor via Belle River, to see the famous post office, but took the southern route. To be precise, we headed for “Canada’s South Coast.” The shore of Lake Erie just east of Leamington is indeed shown on the map as “Canada’s South Coast.”

  Leamington may be known to most of us as the town that gave us canned tomatoes and ketchup. But Leamington is famous in the Canadian literary world for having something unique — a superb novel about what it was like to grow up in an Italian-Canadian community. Toronto, with its huge Italian population — including its fair share of interesting writers — has yet to produce such a book.

  The author, of course, is Nino Ricci, who was born there in 1959, and lived in the town while growing up. Leamington, however, played absolutely no part in the setting of his first novel, which catapulted the young man to instant fame in 1990. Lives of the Saints won the Governor General’s Award, the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel prize, and several other distinguished prizes. The book, entirely set in Italy, tells the story of young Vittorio Innocente and his mother, Cristina, in the Valle del Sole in the Apeninnes. It made waves in many places, was shortlisted for awards in Quebec and Los Angeles, and was published all over the world.

  The book was well-launched in Canada by its risk-taking publisher, Cormorant, a small Ontario house. Then I, in the shameless role of Big, Rich Publisher, proceeded to elbow them aside (literary agents tend to favour the Big and the Rich) and acquired for M&S the next two books in Nino’s trilogy, In a Glass House (1993) and Where She Has Gone (1997). In a case of cosmic justice, neither of these books had the sensational success of his Lives of the Saints.

  Which was too bad, because In a Glass House was a superb picture of Leamington, or, as the opening words have it, “the town of Mersea.” With its many greenhouses (that’s where the title comes from, and that’s where so many Italian families settle and work, and socialize — “Como stai, paesano?”), the countryside outside town is distinctive. To a young immigrant from Italy, it seemed split by
concession roads that “came off Highway 76 with a Euclidean regularity, as if some giant had merely taken a great pencil and ruler in hand and divided the wilderness into a tidy grid. In Italy the roads had snaked and curved to the rhythm of the land like a part of it, but here it seemed as if the battle against nature had been fiercer, the stakes higher, the need to dominate more complete.”

  Nino’s book is a fine portrait of hard labour, in the fields and the glass houses, and one Leamington friend tells me that he even got the smells right, from the downtown canning plant aroma to the close-up distinctive smell of peat as the plantings begin. And as Vittorio (now Victor) survives bullying on the bus to school, grows up, starts dating, and goes off to university in Toronto (Nino himself went to York), and has pool-room scuffles, and smokes pot (Nino himself, surely, had no contact with any such illegal activity), most of us will recognize the stages in his life.

  Nino Ricci (1959– )

  I was very pleased to publish the book (and then the third in the trilogy) because it introduced me to Nino, a fine writer who was clearly going places. In the years since (after he moved on without any hard feelings to another publisher), he has roamed around as a professional writer and teacher, and is now based in tomato-free Toronto, where he lives with his wife, the writer Erika de Vasconcelos. I’ve been delighted to follow the subsequent career of this charming, gentle, big man as he won many prizes (including another Governor General’s Award). It’s instructive that even such a successful fiction writer as Nino has had to patch together a career of university teacher here, writer-in-residence there, and performer at this festival or that library. That’s the life of a Canadian writer.