The Last Best Place (5 page)

The Acadians came back. To me that was the amazing thing. It would be patently stupid to make any parallels between their return and my coming back 250 years later. But at some level we felt the same pull. They arrived in leaky, decrepit boats or on foot from as far away as Massachusetts, walking all the way up through Maine and New Brunswick. This time most of them agreed to take the British oath of allegiance, allowing them to stay. But only in small groups, in designated areas, far from their original lush lands, which had been given away to the English. And never would they forget.

One day in Moncton, N.B., just a few miles’ drive from the Nova Scotia border, I went to something called the World Acadian Congress on the campus of the Université de Moncton. I walked around and looked at the historical displays, listened to some Acadian music, both bouncy and mournful, and spent some time in a gymnasium looking at huge family trees taped to the walls. Then I went outside to stand in the sunlight amongst all the thousands of happy, proud people wearing nametags that identified them as Daigles, Theriaults, Arsenaults, Doucets, Savoies, Bastaraches, Chiassons, Maillets, Michauds, Cormiers and LeBlancs. A celebration of survival. At one point I sidled over to a big tent where a tubby guy stirred a pot of gumbo with wide circles of his thick,
hairy arm. Petite Cliff LeBlanc was a chef down in Abbeville, La., near where his folk had settled after the diaspora.

“We got them bluish-green eyes that sparkle,” he drawled. “That’s how I tell who my people are. We all come from the same place, we’re all Acadians.”

That spirit, more resolute than ever after all this time. I marvel at it as I move along the southwest shore of Nova Scotia, through the township of Clare with Rev. Al Green blasting on the stereo. Off to the right are low trees and some rolling hills, and on the other side, the Atlantic Ocean, blue as the Mediterranean. Somewhere along the road things begin to change. Brilliantly painted homes, far more colourful than the ones owned by English, break the view. Acadian flags—red for courage, white for purity, blue for the sea with a yellow star for the Virgin Mary, patron saint of the Acadians—ripple in the breeze. I pass church after church, big granite things that break the sky with their steeples. The French shore is really one main street, thirty miles long, populated on each side by the descendants of those lively, resilient souls. Cap Ste-Marie becomes St. Alphonse, Meteghan becomes Saulnierville, Comeauville segues into Little Brook, Grosses Coques slides into Beliveaus Cove, and St. Bernard becomes New Edinburgh, despite its name still a French settlement.

Longing to be part of this vibrant, tough culture—literally to taste it—I pull into a roadside takeout spot advertising rappie pie, the local delicacy. Now this is a new one for me, even though I fancy myself a connoisseur of road eats, a person who feels eminently qualified to nominate the club sandwich as Nova Scotia’s official
dish, it being the one thing you can safely order in the most forlorn eatery in the least-travelled back road and still stay clear of the emergency ward. I can immediately tell that rappie pie, or at least this version of it, does not come with that guarantee. I explore with my plastic fork, testing the semi-gelatinous consistency, take another bite and notice that it has no discernible taste, drive over by the garbage can, roll down the car window and toss the whole thing.

Maybe it travels well and held the Acadians over on their biblical exodus back. Around here few things are only what they seem and just about everything seems to have deeper resonance. It is so hard to avoid traces of history. Nova Scotia is lousy with museums, replicas of famous forts, ships and habitations and plaques to commemorate some long-dead person who did who knows what, God knows when. There’s a curiously egalitarian view of the past that treats all events with the same gravity.

Don’t take my word for it. Along the South Shore you pass the home of Phil Scott, the world’s champion log roller, the signs announcing authentic woollen mills, lighthouses, “the oldest non-conformist church in Canada” and “the home of the Cape Islander lobster fishing boat” amidst the signs for bingo and “access to the Internet.” I mean, how is a person to know whether the Archelaus Smith Museum on Cape Sable Island is important or whether time would be better spent having a look at Port La Tour, named after the Huguenot nobleman who founded the place four hundred years ago and fought a decades-long war against a commercial and political rival that cost him his wife and his empire?

There is no way of knowing. Just as there is no way of knowing that the simple sign a couple of clicks south of Shelburne that states “Birchtown, site of the black Loyalist landing in 1783” commemorates something truly special. Birchtown is not a village or a settlement; it is a sign with a few smallish houses and a population of about two dozen, a number of whom are black. That in itself is not unusual; Nova Scotia has a large black population. That so few of the residents of Birchtown are black is what is really odd. Once, when this was the first settlement of free blacks outside Africa, there were black people living there named Robert George Bridges, Boston King, Nathaniel Snowball, Isabel Gibbins, Cesar Perth, Cato Perkins and Moses Wilkinson. Once among their people were ship carpenters, boat builders, caulkers, anchorsmiths, sail-makers, labourers and rope makers; sawyers, millers, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, tanners and skinners; carpenters, painters, gardeners, farmers, fishermen, pilots, sailors, seamen, bakers, tailors and chimney sweeps; a seamstress, a clothier, a milliner, a coachman, a carman and a doctor. They had skills, schools for their children, and their own churches, including one ministered by David George, a Baptist minister who had founded the first black church in America a decade earlier. Most of all they had freedom, or at least a piece of paper saying they were free.

Before that they were servants and slaves in the American South. Then came the Revolutionary War. No definitive record exists of how many served on either side in the conflict. But it is safe to say that more fought with the Loyalists, who promised them land,
rations and independence, than stuck with the continental army. They fought valiantly for freedom, then landed in New York during the final days of the Revolution. The British were showing worrisome signs of reneging on their promises and handing the slaves back to the rebels. A commission was set up to sort out the conflicting claims. But Yankee slave owners took matters into their own hands. Wrote an anguished black refugee named Boston King: “We saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” George Washington insisted all the slaves be returned. Guy Carleton, the British governor-in-chief of North America, refused, agreeing only to compile a list of numbers so that compensation could be paid to the former owners. When the ships left New York harbour fully 2,775 of the 3,000 free black Loyalists selected for immigration headed for Nova Scotia and a place named Port Roseway.

Immigration didn’t live up to expectations, not by a long shot. Most of the black Loyalists received no land at all. Instead they were left to work the rocky, barren soil near their shanty town or to work as servants to the white Loyalists at the nearby settlement of Shelburne, for wages as low as fifty or sixty dollars a year. “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life,” King recounted in his autobiography. “When they were parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets
through hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.” In Shelburne, the indentured black servants were cheated of their rations, shackled and whipped for being idle or stubborn, and jailed merely for attending a “negro frolick” or dance. Trifling crimes were punished with brutal severity: a woman named Dianna, convicted for two petty larcenies (a theft under twelve pence) was sentenced to 200 lashes at high noon for the first offence and 150 lashes for the other; a man named Light Horse Jack was given 100 lashes at the hands of the common hangman—20 lashes in front of the jail, 20 lashes at the corner of King St., 20 at the corner of St. John’s St. and 20 each at the corners of Ann and St. George’s Streets; a man named Thomas stole two pieces of pork from a docked ship and was sentenced to two months of jail and hard labour and 12 lashes.

Unable to work the boulder-strewn land, their services no longer in demand by Shelburne’s rapidly dwindling white population, the people of Birchtown sank into squalor and despair. The hapless whites in Shelburne claimed that the blacks had devalued their wages with cheap labour and blamed them for their own sorry lot. One summer day in 1784 hundreds of club-carrying whites ran the blacks into Birchtown, pulled down a bunch of their houses, then went home with that feeling of satisfaction that comes from a good day’s work. Visiting Birchtown a few years later, an aide to Prince William Henry (later King William IV) wrote back home that the place was “beyond description wretched, situated on the coast in the middle of barren rocks, and partly surrounded
by a thick impenetrable wood. Their huts too miserable to guard against the inclemency of a Nova Scotia winter, and their existence almost depending on what they could lay up in summer … I think I never saw wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and the countenance of the human species as in these miserable outcasts.”

Thomas Peters was fifty-three, an old man by the day’s standards. He escaped slavery in North Carolina during the Revolution, joined the British forces, rose to sergeant in a black regiment and sailed as a freeman with the first wave of Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia. Peters was uneducated, but possessed charisma and enough righteous indignation to speak for all the blacks who escaped from their rebel masters and came to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia expecting Britain to keep its promises. Between 1784 and 1790 Peters petitioned the crown three times for land on behalf of the blacks who settled in New Brunswick. When that got nowhere he organized a fourth petition on behalf of black families in the two provinces and made his way to London, where he planned to present it to the authorities in person.

He landed in London at an ideal moment: liberal guilt over the slave trade was sweeping England; a group of British abolitionists had pooled their resources and obtained a grant of land to establish a free colony of blacks in Sierra Leone. Then Peters arrived with his disturbing accounts of the suffering and disappointment endured by the Loyalist blacks in Nova Scotia. The British Home Office decreed that agents be appointed to provide the dissatisfied
black Loyalists with three options: stay in Canada and receive a comfortable settlement for their hardships; join the black army corps in the West Indies or accept free passage to Sierra Leone.

Back in Nova Scotia, Peters and John Clarkson, the main recruiter for the Sierra Leone Company, met self-interested politicians, businessmen who concocted false debts to try to hold on to their cheap labour pool, and free blacks convinced that Sierra Leone was more delusion than opportunity. Ultimately the present was too awful, the future too alluring. By the new year, 600 blacks from Shelburne and Birchtown, 200 from Preston, near Halifax, 180 from the Annapolis Royal–Digby area and 200 from New Brunswick gathered in Halifax. At the insistence of Clarkson, the shipowners gave each captain written instructions to treat the blacks with the respect due all paying customers. One January day in 1792 he was rowed out to each of the fifteen vessels anchored in Halifax harbour to hand the black families assembled on deck signed certificates entitling them to Sierra Leone land. Five days later a favourable wind rose, and the convoy left behind the country that never showed them a moment’s decency.

The voyage lasted nearly two months; sixty-five died in the crossing. Clarkson, who lay helpless for a month with a raging fever, almost joined them, then rebounded enough to make landfall. In wilting heat the boats continued up the broad estuary of the Sierra Leone River. They saw the low coastline, the crescendo of hills rising to, in Clarkson’s words, “lofty mountains crowned with perpetual verdure.” Finally, home. Yet there they met more frustration
over land grants. Fearful of reliving the Birchtown experience, they took up arms. But the riot was quelled and the Nova Scotian influence waned in the new colony. Until, that is, 1992, when gunfire again rang through the streets of Freetown, and Valentine Strasser, a Creole descended from the Nova Scotians, became Sierra Leone’s president.

Out of curiosity one day I called on Elizabeth Cromwell, who lived in Birchtown, and asked what had happened to the blacks who stayed behind. She told me the last of the elders had died a decade earlier. But since then a few descendants of the settlers had trickled back. Four black families in Birchtown could trace their roots to the great drama. They are the backbone of the local historical society, which pushed the province for the highway sign. They are the ones who cajoled the government into putting up the money for an archaeological survey of the site. It is our history, she explained.

And it is mine too, even though I’m a white boy who grew up in the city. I hold on to the story of Birchtown, the ones who left, the ones who came back, for the same reason I hold on to the story of the Acadians and the other peoples who are patently not me. For in Nova Scotia there is history that exists in the air, floating high above our mundane existence of day-care, sinus headaches and the Goods and Services Tax. Forming us, becoming part of us. It is why we hear despair in the waves pounding the headland. And laughter in the wind.