Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s-1880s (review)

Popular historian Frank Mackey chronicles, in Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s–1880s, the remarkable adventures and misadventures of representative and notable African persons in colonial and post-Confederation Montreal. Mackey pens these narratives in an accessible, journalistic, and lightly humourous style, thus rendering them invitingly educational for a wide range of readers, from high school level on up. While his thirty stories (these little histories are, really, truthful tales) are easily digestible 'entertainments' in a Graham Greene mode, they also correct ignorance about the early history of Montreal's black community.

Black Then is a fresh contribution to African-Canadian and Afro-Québécois letters because it recovers many unknown personages and uncovers many ignored documents, while opening up their narratives to a lay readership. By scouring Quebec court documents and newspaper pages (especially those of the Gazette), Mackey turns up notable instances of slavery, liberation, fraud, skullduggery, and licentiousness. But Mackey's research also allows him to resurrect a vivid parade of characters, heroes, heroines, and scoundrels (white and black). Thus, Black Then establishes the abiding presence of blacks in Montreal as well as the persistent (but not indefatigable) racism to which they have been subjected.

Finely conducted research and masterful writing blend to introduce readers to memorable black Montréalais like Caesar Johonnot, an ex-slave from Boston, who, in 1789, became the manager of the city's first distillery. Although the literate Johonnot served to establish Montreal as a liquor capital of North America, his name has been lost to us until now. Mackey notes, 'You'd think there'd be a monument [for him], a plaque somewhere, a street name, a brand of whisky, a word slipped in a book, something, anything.' But there is nothing; or, rather, there was nothing, until Mackey discovered this history.

Other important 'finds' include the slave narrative of Lavina Wormeny, published in the Gazette, in 1861, under the heading 'Narrative of the Escape of a Poor Negro Woman from Slavery.' Wormeny escaped from a particularly brutal plantation in Texas, gave birth in the wilderness, slipped out of handcuffs, swam a river full of alligators, and eventually arrived in Montreal by train. Mackey also recovers abolitionist writings by Paola Brown (1832), Alexander Grant (1834), and the tricky Israel Lewis (1846). Thus, Mackey has single-handedly enlarged the canon of early African-Canadian literature.

Black Then tells us much that we simply have not known before about black life in colonial Montreal. Mackey omits, deliberately, because it is has been discussed by other historians, the story of the torture and execution of Marie-Josèphe Angélique, in 1734, for having allegedly torched a good swath of Montreal. However, the omission is noticeable.

More problematic is Mackey's failure to examine his historical methodology. He does not consider, though he should, the ramifications of Prince Edward Island historian Jim Hornby's argument in Black Islanders (1991) that reliance on court documents, while necessary to obtain a sense of black life in colonial Canada, may result in a skewed vision of their reality because of the biases inherent in prosecutions and in testimony itself Although Mackey exercises due diligence and expresses doubt, where necessary, scrupulously, he should have interrogated, openly, his own approach to the once-hidden histories he relates.

Other books treat les Montéalais noirs, especially Dorothy Williams's scholarly work The Road to Now (1997), a twentieth-century-oriented history. In addition, Mairuth Sarsfield's novel No Crystal Stair (1997) recalls life in black community Montreal between roughly 1925 and 1945. Uniquely, however, Mackey's work offers a 'novelization' of a century of obscure – but intensely fascinating – history.

Black Then may be read, profitably, by everyone – from high school students to doctorate-wielding researchers. It is 'Canadiana'; it is 'Black Studies'; it is excellent writing. The general reader will find this work as compelling and strangely moving as will a 'professional' student of literature and history.