Benjamin Drew - The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada

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VOYAGEUR CLASSICS

BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA

NARRATIVES OF
FUGITIVE SLAVES IN CANADA

BENJAMIN DREW

INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

Copyright Dundurn Press Limited, 2008

Introduction by George Elliott Clarke copyright George Elliott Clarke, 2008

Originally published by John P. Jewett & Company in 1856

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll

Copy-editor: Allison Hirst

Design: April Duffy

Printer: Marquis

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Drew, Benjamin, 1812-1903.

The refugee, or, the narratives of fugitive slaves in

Canada / Benjamin Drew

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-55002-801-0

1. Fugitive slaves--United States--Biography. 2. Blacks--Canada--Biography. 3. Slavery--United States--History--19th century. 4. Blacks--Canada--History--19th century. 5. Slaves--United States--Social conditions. 6. Underground Railroad. I. Title. II. Title: Narratives of fugitive slaves in Canada.

1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

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BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

Proudly, we Canadians blame the practice of African slavery in North America on two-faced Americans: those who preached hatred for monarchy and love of freedom, but only for citizens touting white skin, male genitals, and a Bible. We believe our schooling that our settler ancestors, because they did not rebel against the British Crown, evolved a superior social order and liberty to that of the violence-prone, if revolutionary, United States. These half-truths still compel our allegiance, thus inspiring a hint of anti-Americanism in our public dialogues and justifying, painlessly, our ignorance about slavery in colonial Canada and about the persistence of racism in our post-modern, multicultural nation.

Ironically, one reason for our collective disavowal of our slave past and racist present is American author Benjamin Drews A North-Side View of Slavery; The Refugee: or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856),

If, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calculates, The narratives of ex-slaves are, for the literary critic, the very foundation upon which most subsequent Afro-American fictional and non-fictional narrative forms are based (xii), Canadians should consider their centrality to a British imperial and Canadian colonial/ national critique of the ruffian tendencies of the rambunctious Republic. Yet so successfully have we whitewashed our history that we have brainwashed ourselves: we do not notice, even now, the bloodstains and race shadows besmirching our virgin snow. One case in point: the astute critic Richard Almontes sage wager that the slave narrative is a literary genre of the United States (16). Amazingly but in a characteristic Canadian move Almonte alleges that no ex-slaves anywhere outside African America ever scribed their predicament. But this supposition is