The Tale of Ida Jane and George: Murder, Miscegenation, and Bastardy in 1893 Raleigh, Ontario

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 The Tale of Ida Jane and George: Murder, Miscegenation, and Bastardy in 1893 Raleigh, Ontario Barrington Walker Introduction In late-nineteenth-century Raleigh, Ontario, the attention of a whole town was riveted to the spectacle of an entire black family on trial. Seven members of the Freeman family , Cecilia, Jeremiah, Lemuel, William Henry, George, Elizabeth, and Alexander, stood in the court docket for the murder of a white constable while a packed courtroom savoured the salacious details of the trial. The tale of the Freeman family case engendered much commentary, played out on many different levels, and had all the elements of high drama: murder, bastardy, and miscegenation.1 In undertaking the task of reading this trial, it is also important to note the welldocumented broader historical, cultural, social, political, and legal contexts within which this trial was contested. Historically, in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Ontario, as well as in the rest of Canada, there has been a myriad of legal and extra-legal mechanisms through which the black body has been regulated. Slavery; immigration restrictions; white supremacist taboos around miscegenation ; racist representations of blackness in reservoirs of popular culture such as newspapers, literature, and theatre; discrimination in employment and housing; the deployment of methods preventing blacks from exercising their legal rights, ranging from subtle discrimination to mob violence; and the intellectual ascendancy and currency of racist pseudo-scientific discourses—all mark methods in and through which blackness has been disenfranchised, dispossessed, and disavowed in Canada.2 The story of the Freemans and the events leading up to the trial illustrates in dramatic fashion the porous nature of the boundaries between the legal and extralegal mechanisms through which blackness has been regulated in Canada. While the Freeman murder trial is indeed the subject of a riveting tale, I seek to do more here than simply spin a good yarn. I also do not think it is enough to pretend that Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 212 theorizing the relationship between the constructs of race and the law merely consists of reading the outcome of the case against some predetermined idea of what “should” or “should not” have happened. Rather, I will attempt to use this narrative (or, more accurately, set of competing narratives) as a point of interrogation—via a phenomenological or Geertzian methodological framework of “thick description”—from which to critically read the construction of racialized subaltern subjectivities. Through the prism of this case, I want to explore the mutability and malleability of blackness as discourse. Borrowing heavily from the methodological and epistemic insights of cultural theorists and critical race theorists, I want to shed critical light on how “blackness” is articulated, constructed, deployed, contested, imagined, and re-imagined in juridical discourse. Moreover, I want to suggest that we perhaps move beyond the limiting paradigm that has characterized much of the work of race in Canada to date—particularly much of the work on the history of race and criminal justice. Racial disadvantage, racial subordination, and discriminatory practice (de jure and de facto) are, as a handful of prominent writers have recently shown us, very important areas of concern for any scholar interested in the study of “race” or “racism” in Canada.3 However, one of my central contentions (on which I hope to shed light in my analysis of this trial) is that we must continue to expand the boundaries of critical race scholarship beyond what can often be a rather dreary paradigm.4 Homi Bhabha’s work speaks powerfully to, and critically of, what I see as one of the current methodological and epistemic limitations which mark much of the recent work on race and the law in Canada. As Bhabha writes, stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection metaphoric and metonymic strategies , displacement overdetermination, guilt, agressivity, the masking and splitting of “official” and phantasmic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositionalities of racist discourse…. (104) Indeed, this “splitting” of “phantasmic knowledges” of the Other is what Bhabha theorizes as...