Down Home

“Don’t you be holding me back now. I’m late for church and preacher gonna be some mad at me barging in after the start.”

“Mama Carver, you won’t be letting no pastor down. Seaview hasn’t been there for years,” I say as I gently try to steer my grandma back up Charles St. back towards Creighton. She’s nowhere near yet to the deserted park that was once her home. Our family’s home. Our community. But she’s managed to get far enough out this time to give me more than a bit of a scare.

“And for Lord’s sake, it’s Tuesday,” I mutter under my breath. Not that the day of the week matters in her mind anymore. She’s barely noticed it’s winter for chrissake. Coaxing her back to the house when it is 20 below and the winds feel like they could peel your skin is painful and frightening. What if we fail to see that she’s wandered one time? What if we wait too long and instead of guiding her back, we find her stiff on the ground with a fussed expression about holy tardiness iced to her face. Or what if she gets all the way down to the water, slips on some icy rocks and ends up floating face down in the harbour? A 97-year-old woman, even one as sturdy as Mama Carver, is no match alone for a Nova Scotia winter.

Mama C is still an impressive woman. “Black don’t crack,” she would proudly say. Pushing a hundred now, there are some laugh lines around her eyes and mouth, but her loss and pain isn’t etched there like you might expect. There’s still some pepper in her white hair, perfectly styled weekly at the salon, currently with a purple rosette felt hat pinned on top.  How did we miss in the house her digging out her Sunday hat and peacoat? Small mercies at least she thought to do that.

Her frame has only shrunk a bit. Her body not diminishing as much as her memory. This woman raised six children and then helped with at least twice that many grandbabies. She still looks like she could take a shoe to any one of them. I’m one of those grandchildren and I’ve felt that wallop too. Funny, I’ve never called her ‘grandma’ – she’s Mama Carver - or “Mama C” for short - to me, same as she was to pretty much all 500 souls around Africville before it was torn apart. A good Christian woman. A pillar of the Seaview Baptist Church. “A negress from the slums,” according to the oh-so-very-good white Halifax residents of the times. ‘An Unfortunate’ in need of rescue and relocation, according to the upstanding city aldermen who robbed her of her heritage.

All that is left now of Africville and the beloved church where she believes she’s headed is a stupid plaque and some empty mumbles about maybe some restitution down the road. But there’s never enough budget – just like there was never any funds for sewage lines or paved roads or clean water for the area despite all the property taxes we paid. Well, the adults payed. I was only seven when we were moved out. Never enough will or contrition for the wrongs done. “The taxpayers of today can’t be held financially responsible for something that happened more than 30 years ago,” they say. “We aren’t the ones who took your homes.”

They took so much more than just a collection of houses. Africville was a refuge. A 150-year-old settlement dating back to the 1840’s; predating the Emancipation Proclamation and the US Civil War by decades. People generally think of Canada as mainly white. A sea-to-shining-sea of varied shades of pale. But the reality is far more complicated and often at odds with the nice, polite Canadian image.

Once upon a time, Nova Scotia was supposed to be a haven for freed and fleeing slaves from America. Thousands of Maroons and Black Loyalists during the American Revolution came with the promise of freedom, land, and opportunity. Half of them left again, back to Africa to found Freetown in Sierra Leone when the opportunity part didn’t quite pan out. Half of them that survived that is. Those that weren’t starved or frozen out from the crap lands where Black folks were expected to scratch out a living, far away from those solid white settlers.

Wars kept going. Slavery kept going. More former slaves kept coming to the East Coast. But they never really had a welcoming community until they moved out to the edges of the city where no one else wanted to be and made Africville home. It was still crap land, but it was ours. For generations. I know our history even if they never talk about it or teach it in school to anyone else. Mama Carver made sure of that.

My cousin Ivy pulls up beside us and rolls down her window. “Come on now Mama C, I’ll give you a lift,” she calls out, winking over at me. Ivy scraped and cleared the snow from the car while I ran after our wayward charge here. From the kitchen, we’d felt the whoosh of cold from the front opening and heard the door clap. Took some inventory of who was coming and going, shared that look as we realized who had headed out. We knew where she thought she was going. Home.  

“So as you get to services in time,” I add, nudging her towards Ivy’s 10 year old Saturn. Is lying to a confused person about a non-existent church a sin? Lord, I don’t know but it’s freezing out here. I barely had time to grab boots and a coat. We’ll all perish if we don’t get inside soon. I guide Mama Carver carefully over the snow piled by the curb, holding her arm tight and testing the footholds as we go. She has her Sunday shoes on. How she made it this far without sliding is almost a miracle, praise Jesus. I’ll have to set her up by the wood stove with a hot water bottle to thaw out those toes.

“Mind where you step, Mama C, almost there…” I slide her into the back seat, settle her like a queen in the blankets Ivy has ready to receive her. I scramble into the front where the seatbelt attempts to strangle me. Damn car wants to finish the job the bitter cold started. Ivy shakes her head with a half-smile on her face and turns the car to head back to the grey, wood shingled, row house that has been the family stronghold since 1970.

Mama Carver used to be the one to keep us in line, Ivy and me. We were born in Africville in 1962, two months apart, to the two daughters of Mama C who were closest in age.  Middle of the pack girls among the six kids. The two who had married local men and stayed in Africville. We were inseparable and the picture of trouble.

Her youngest child, my Uncle Daniel, still lived at home too. But he didn’t really count. He was the late baby – only one born after Papa C came back from The War. Daniel was born right about the same time Viola Desmond was getting arrested for making her stand in that movie theatre. Mama C always thought that connection was a sign that Daniel’s life would be different. That he was entering a changing world that would be a better place for all of us. In 1969, he was a young buck in his 20’s, spending nights all flashy at The Arrows Club. As kids, we thought Uncle Daniel was a god. He mighta thought that a bit too. Not that we’d say anything like that out loud. Mama C would whack us with her Bible for that kind of blasphemy. She wasn’t too shy about swatting Daniel either when he rolled in pickled in the morning. But he still got away with a lot from her, being her baby and all. And on account that they lost his father when he was only about 10. Mama C always made allowances for that.

Warm air blasts out of the car’s heater. Loose Yourself pumps away from the radio and I drift in thought about where we’ve come from.  Cold like this didn’t bother us as much when we were kids. Our houses weren’t pretty, but we thought they were mostly solid against the elements. Tarred up to keep the heat in from the wood stoves. Trouble was, for even those with oil heating, delivery wasn’t reliable. Tanks would end up empty and the trucks would balk at coming out to area, not wanting to go to the Black neighbourhood or claiming they were afraid the bill wouldn’t get paid. So the woodstoves had to do the whole place. We still had to go outside to the outhouse for our business, and then haul water back in to be boiled before we could drink it. Not that it was like that anywhere else in Halifax. This was the 1960’s – not the 1860’s. It’s not like drinkable water and an indoor toilet were much to ask.

The city managed the money to build a dump, a prison, and an infectious disease hospital all around our community. Somehow the finished road stopped like 100 feet from the entrance and could never be managed a foot more. A dump on our back doorstep and they couldn’t even collect our trash. Halifax denied the area basic services, collected our money, and when they thought they’d do better with the area opening it for industry, they just plotted to take it. They got away with it too.

We knew our lives were different from the white folks in other neighbourhoods, but Ivy and I didn’t really care. There were always cousins and friends to play with. In winter, we went coasting down the hills. In summer, we had our own beach, swimming in the Bedford Basin. For the adults, Africville was still the same refuge it had been for more than a century. Out in the rest of the city, they had to watch what they said and did; how they acted and reacted; be wary of the looks and attitudes of the white folks. Most of those in Africville could trace their history in the area back generations more than most of the so-called Old School Canadians. Yet it was us Black people who were treated like outsiders. Not in Africville. There, people could relax and be. Pass down and celebrate our history. Tell the stories that never made it to the official books.  

“Mama C, we’re here,” I say as I reach around the seat and place my hand on her cocooned knee. I shake her gently and she snorts awake. It’s only been a minute up the street – Eminem is barely done loosing himself in the moment - but she’s exhausted from her little jig down Creighton. I get out and open her door. Ivy opens the back door on the other side and starts tipping her more towards me. “Donna, lift her feet out the bottom so she can get her footing,” she tells me. It’s a tight squeeze in the laneway parking spot, but we get her righted and walk her arm-in-arm, up the front steps and into the house.

Mama C bought this place with her settlement from the city when Council voted to appropriate their properties. She was one of the lucky ones. Papa C’s family had clear paperwork and title to their land and Mama had inherited the proof. Some of the neighbours who had lived five generations in those houses got barely $500 in the deal. Ivy’s parents got nothing.  Mama C moved their family in here with her. My family stayed close but got a small post-war clapboard place further up the street. Ivy and I have been close as mittens to this day. All our own kids freely move between our homes and have free-range of the cupboards.

Of all of it – the city leaving Africville to crumble and then claiming it was unsafe in order to steal it; the way we were forced to accept a fraction of the land’s value and moved with all our stuff dumped in the back of garbage trucks; the fracturing of our community – it was all bad. But Seaview Baptist was the one thing that truly broke Mama C’s heart. The city came in like thugs in the middle of the night and bulldozed that church to the ground. They didn’t even own the building yet, although they tried to lie about that later. A hundred years it sounded with the songs and prayers of Africville. It fortified us for the outside world. It held our hearts and our family records. They cut it down like it had never meant nothing at all.

I remember, clear as day, the cold Fall morning after they knocked it to the ground. Most of the community stood in shock and anger, crying and praying over the ruins.  Mama C stood up on a crate, held her Bible high, and recited from Psalms “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when EVIL MEN succeed in their ways, when they carry out their WICKED SCHEMES.” She believed justice would be done. She trusted God to see her through. Two years later, we were all moved on to our new spots on Creighton St. Thirty-three years on, her mind still returns to that church and her body tries to follow. We run to bring her back. To keep her safe.

And we wait for justice.

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We apologize for the heartache experienced at the loss of the Seaview United Baptist Church, the spiritual heart of the community, removed in the middle of the night. We acknowledge the tremendous importance the church had, both for the congregation and the community as a whole. We realize words cannot undo what has been done, but we are profoundly sorry and apologize to all the former residents and their descendants.

— Peter Kelly, Halifax Mayor; Africville Apology, February 24, 2010

Ivy and I walked over to the cemetery today, out again in the freezing cold on a mission for Mama C.

“Mama Carver, we have something to read to you,” Ivy said, her voice breaking, tears hardening on both our cheeks.

We held hands over her grave, read out the letter from the city, repenting their wicked schemes. We told her about the money and how there are plans to rebuild Seaview.

We will come together again to pray and sing and remember.

*Author’s Note: This story is based on the true story of Africville and the people for whom it was home. The characters and their actions are fictionalized versions based on an amalgamation of the historical accounts and documentaries. As a Nova Scotian, this story is only barley a bit of mine to tell. I am not a descendant of the residents of Africville. I encourage everyone to learn more about Africville and the Black population of Nova Scotia and to hear those voices directly.