Vicent Cucarella Ramón - Benjamin Drew

In keeping with Clarke’s and Sawallisch’s endeavor to revisit slavery from a transnational stance and to contribute to “liberate the Canadian slave narrative” ( Odysseys Home 17), it is interesting to delve into Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery; the Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada as an important source and testimony for its stories are anchored in the cross-border Canadian reality whilst they still reveal a lot about what kind of life refugee slaves could look forward to in this country. The collection is fully inscribed in the aforementioned and current transnational turn in Black Canadian studies since the stories by fugitive slaves included in it establish a sort of genealogy through a multiplicity of Black lineages and create a narrative testimony “of pride and strength of black communities that resisted undoing by slavery or racial prejudice” (Sawallisch 17).

In this vein, this edition of Drew’s book sets out to situate the importance of these stories within the historical, cultural and social background in which they were recorded and projected. In the end, the compilation resolves into an exhibition of the intellectual and idiosyncratic practices at work in the mid-nineteenth century North America. The collection of testimonies is ultimately revealed as a transnational and cross-border exercise of abolitionist propaganda that pictures a somewhat new branch within the slave narrative literary genre that might as well be read as slave narratives. However, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada goes beyond this and also unravels the heterogeneous formation of the origins and establishment of Black Canada and African Canadian identity while, at the same time, shows the way in which these new Black Canadians participated in the creation and birth of the country we nowadays known as Canada.

The Eighteenth Century and Black Canada: Widening the Routes of the Black Atlantic and Transnational Slavery

As mentioned earlier, the first recorded Black slave arrived in Canada in 1628, transported by a British convoy to New France. The boy was from Madagascar, and he was named by his captors as Olivier le Jeune. This was a rare case of a slave coming to the colony at the time ahead of the Black Code, also known as Code Noir or the Royal Edict of 1685, which restricted the activities of free people of color and prescribed the conversion of all enslaved people throughout the empire. The reason for King Louis XIV’s granting the petition from New France to import Black slaves from West Africa lies in the fact that there were 11. 562 people living in the colony, and most were fur traders, missionaries and farmers. With a lack of servants and labourers, the population wanted to import individuals to undertake such tasks. At the time, slavery was prohibited in France but permitted in the colonies out of the desire to have a large labour force to clear and exploit land. In 1721, the king issued an edict in which he prevented minors emancipated from wardship to sell the Black slaves they owned. Already set up as commodities, Blacks could only be considered if they were enslaved. In 1727, the king issued another edict to regulate foreign commerce with the British American colonies, where it was stated that Blacks who were found on vessels trading abroad would be forfeited to the state of New France. Moreover, although the French legislation posed no question of denying the right of asylum, “even when asylum was granted, a Black person remained a slave” (56), as Marcel Trudel informs.

Taking into consideration that the slaves were forbidden to be taught how to read and write, in order to get acquainted with the stories of some of those Black Slaves in New France, “we have to rely on newspapers, letters, trial records, census reports, and other documents rather than on fully articulated narratives” (Siemerling 34). This exercise gives access to their untold stories and validates the literary importance of testimonies and interviews as part of, or a model of, slave narratives, just as we shall see when dealing with Benjamin Drew’s collection. Indeed, one of the most remarkable events that revealed the suffocating and desperate lives of slaves came from recorded data, more specifically from eighteenth-century trial documents. In 1734, when, according to Trudel, “around forty or fifty” (86) Black slaves lived in Québec, Montréal-based slave Marie Joseph Angélique became nationally known when she was hanged for allegedly burning down almost half of the city out of revenge.

Angélique’s story is as astonishing as fascinating and it accounts for the reality that Black slaves had to endure under New France slavery 2. Marie-Joseph Angélique was born around 1705 in Madeira, Portugal. It is possible that she was the first enslaved person in Portugal and a primeval subject under the lucrative transactions of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Angélique was later sold to a Flemish merchant named Nichus Block when she was in her early teens. Block brought Angélique to the New World. There, she lived in New England for one year before being sold in 1725, at the age of 20 to a French businessman from Montréal named Francois Poulin de Francheville. Francheville brought Angélique back to his home town in Montréal to work as a domestic slave. When Francheville died in November of 1733, ownership of Angélique passed down to a Francheville widow. On February 22, 1734, while her mistress was away handling business on her late husband estate, Angélique and her lover Thibault attempted to escape enslavement, but due to bad weather and the frozen river they never made it far, and were finally captured by six militias nearby Chambly.

Angélique was returned to her mistress and started talking back to her and making threats to burn down her home. After learning she was to be sold and separated from the man she devotionally loved, Angélique finally set fire to her owner’s house and escaped. Unfortunately, the fire got out of control and destroyed forty-six buildings, wrecking havoc and propagating horror throughout the streets of Montréal. Only two days after the fire she was interrogated and in the transcription we get to know a short account of her life. Angélique’s confession was not only transcribed but also presented as a type of slave narrative since in these recorded documents she unfolds the events that rank from her birth to her eventual confession. Once convicted and found guilty, she was paraded through the city and finally tortured. On the day of her execution, she was taken through the streets of Montréal and then made to climb a scaffold facing the ruins of the buildings destroyed by the fire she had set. She was then hanged, and her body flung into the fire, so her ashes were scattered in the wind. Marie Joseph Angélique became (and still is) a myth for Black Canadians, and her confession inaugurated, much to her dismay, the Canadian slaves narrative genre.

Even though she never got to write her story due to her illiteracy (Trudel 124), she responded to the questions of the prosecutors and jury and publicly voiced the horrors and tragedies of Black slaves in Canada. The first interrogation sets the tone of her confession and inscribes her testimony within the accounts of slavery: “Stated to be named Marie Joseph, aged twenty-nine years, born in Portugal / And to have been sold to a Flemish man who sold Her to the deceased Sieur de francheville, about nine years ago, where she has remained ever since” (qtd in Siemerling 34). After having consulted all the documents and jurisdiction, Siemerling rightly contends that “[t]hese court documents record the words of the accused slave in the third person, revealing her responses under interrogation” and thus, despite this context, “ the transcriptions of the accused slave’s testimony offer elements of a slave narrative, the most detailed account based on a slave’s statements in eighteenth-century New France that we have” (34). That is, Angélique’s testimony and story have come to represent Canada’s first undisputed slave narrative and, definitely, a direct precursor to Benjamin Dew’s A North-Side View of Slavery because, recorded in 1734 by the authorities of New France, “the narrative anticipated in some of its elements the better known narratives of later fugitive slaves, although these were often elicited under more conductive circumstances by more sympathetic listeners, usually in the service of the cause of abolitionism” (Siemerling 35). 3