Part 4

I needed to spell everything out in a way that I was not capable of when I was young, in a way that the Prairies and all of Canada — all of North America — is not capable of, but has always inherently had the capacity for, from its soil composition, to its vegetation, to the swirl of grasses that rollick its contours, to the living beings that graze those grasses, to the patterns of swirls they follow, to the trails of purpose we echo, to the language of that echo we emblazon in our dreams.

In following one particular trail of purpose, society has erased Black history on the Prairies. The history of Black cowboys has been removed from our consciousness. Because Blackness has flattened the possibility of a livable, ongoing tomorrow, and, paradoxically, because we live in a future tense that is so far removed from the cowboy period, it is hard to imagine any connections between the two. Everything about the Black cowboy’s existence was lived in the body. They lived physical realities out in natural surroundings, where they were continuously in congregation with the herds of their concern. Almost all of the descriptions of John Ware and Green Walters and others focused on their physicality: whether it was their superhuman strength (Ware) or their subhuman proportions (Walters), or their numinous animality, the fact of their Blackness itself was defining. Today, we live lives that are removed from our physical surroundings; rather, we deny the physicality of our surroundings, often measuring success in our ability to exceed or manipulate the limits of our physicality. We built cities conceived apart from nature. We raised buildings into the sky. We shifted the value of production from manufacturing to service to information. The trajectory continues in the technological economies of our society. Entire universes exist in our handheld devices; we continue our denial of the physical by turning more and more inward, barely noticing the world around us. At the same time, many of us feel more connected to the world, the wider world that was inaccessible to us pre-internet. We access music from anywhere in the world at any time we want at a tap of the finger. There is no need to visit a record store and withstand the scrutinizing disdain of the salespeople working there. We receive news notifications constantly at all hours of the day. We send cunning emojis to people we know the moment they cross our minds, just because they crossed our minds. The virtual world has become our world.

The virtual world is like an imagined world that is instantly and always accessible to us. Imagination, though, is about possibility, and possibility beckons to tomorrow. Since the tendency is to keep Blackness contained in a tomorrowless state, unsurprisingly, history has nothing to say about the imaginative capacity of Black folks. But the imaginations of Black cowboys still persist. Their impossible returns still beckon. Indeed, our main media apparatus remains the same as Black cowboys’. Everything we access today that seems so much more real and vital than a century ago, when we were up against the physical world, from our social media to our yoga apps, is done with the same baseline medium: text. Without getting too lost in the weeds of Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist semiotics, text today can still be understood as a system of signs that emit and resist meaning at the same time. So, what if we think of cattle brands of Black cowboys and ranchers as text? This is fitting since Blackness itself is the sign of opacity that does precisely this: signifies and obscures. What if then, instead of only imagining these marks as text, we literally reimagine these marks into text? What if instead of the usual, conventional text gracing our screens, we had the very marks that these forgotten engineers of the cattle trail invented as expressions of their own impossible returns? As marks of identity, of mastery and expertise, of acumen. Of presence. To usher these designs back into everyday life, bypassing the abyss of over a century of forgetting, to land them into our technological future, would be nothing short of an impossible return. And, certainly, the return would be impossible.

In what could be seen as this book’s parent or grandparent, or maybe cousin or (evil?) stepsister, My Works, Ye Mighty by Christian Bök (my predecessor as writer in residence at Athabasca University), the notion of Derrida’s mark is referenced as one of the endless chain of meaning-makers that Bök guides us through. From Derrida to Borges, Bök questions what the basic element of meaning is. For Borges, at the far end of the scale, it was the archive of all archives. For Derrida, it was simply the mark. For Derrida, though, the mark was as elusive as it was meaningful. Many scholars have reconsidered his notion of the mark in terms of race. Most meaningful to me are Stuart Hall, for whom race is the mark of difference and acts as a signifier without fixed meaning; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for whom Blackness is a rhetorical mark within Western discourse; and many others for whom deconstruction and poststructuralist approaches are elucidated and challenged by concepts of race and Blackness in particular.35 Truly, though, many of those scholars do not sit neatly on either side of the elucidation/challenge divide, but incorporate and involve both. Palimpsestic Blackness, which in my formulating could certainly be understood similarly, is re-covered through the marks of Black cattle brands. The mark (and language in general) creates meaning and resists meaning; it gestures beyond itself but refers only to itself. Because palimpsestic Blackness was imposed on us, I would like to return the favour by gifting everyone with a font that is created from the marks of Black cowboys. In this way, the resisting meanings of those brands will invest everyday texts with the history of forgotten cowboys. At the same time, the secret language of our cattle brands is always bound by the Double Yoke. The resistant sign cannot mean clearly and that, too, is what will be invested in your everyday texts. In this sense, my Black cowboys will be returned, but what exactly can be returned when the mark itself is so unsettled? I suppose, only impossibility.

My pathway was clear: I would return the designs of Black cowboys to the technological future by creating a font that was directly based on their cattle brands. In many cases, this would be straightforward. After all, a lot of brands are simply letters. Take Benjamin Washington, for example. Though his parents were American, Washington was born in the U.K. in roughly 1876 (his D.O.B. ranges in documents from 1874–77). Very little is known of his early life, other than it contains so much tantalizing possibility. How and why did his parents make the journey to the U.K.? Had either of them ever been enslaved at some point? (The name Washington was popularly chosen by formerly enslaved Africans, though not exclusively.) Like so much of Black history, and as we saw with the poetic stratigraphy of John Ware’s brand, the answers to these questions are mainly captive to the unknown. What is certainly known is that Washington emigrated to Canada as a young man, and, after stops in Winnipeg and Edmonton, settled himself in Northern Alberta, near the town of Grouard, where he homesteaded for a number of years and kept a small ranch. In 1915, he registered a cattle brand in his name. Here it is:

If the most basic brand mark is a simple bar produced by a running iron, then it might be said that a brand consisting of simple initials is the most basic brand. To the extent that brands are identifying marks, that is, they identify ownership, initials do so by placing identity first. This basic mode of brand expression is akin to the boom of eponymous stylings of designers that emerged in the eighties when I was a teenager. Polo wasn’t just Polo; it was Polo by Ralph Lauren. Equally, the labels that dominated our fashion landscape were sought-after (or we perceived them to be sought-after) because of the names they stood for: Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, or Perry Ellis were familiar and prominent identifiers that now stood alongside common, enduring ones like Coca-Cola and Levi’s. Some of these names were so ubiquitous, so deeply entrenched in the general zeitgeist that they literally became singular. In fashion and luxury Versace, Armani, and Gucci joined Prince, Sting, and Madonna as one-name wonders on the music side of things. In many cases, their logos were even further whittled down to single initials, like Fendi’s “FF,” Gucci’s “G,” or Dolce and Gabbana’s “D&G.” This trend somewhat continues today with multinational banks like BMO (Bank of Montreal) and RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), restaurants like KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), and product/retail brands like PC (President’s Choice) and, of course, HBC (Hudson’s Bay Company), whose original names are rarely said and, maybe, scarcely remembered.

These stylings, which were just seen as marketing moves from the business perspective, worked because they directly invoked identity in two senses. They were identifiable, as in recognizable, in an unadorned, unobstructed way; equally, they were identifiable in the sense that they seemed to represent the most simplistic rendering of the brand, implying some level of unimpeded access to that elusive, inherent quality that we all yearned to engage, that we all sought to identify ourselves with. This, too, I see in the marks of Black cowboys who registered their initials as their brand. In the case of Benjamin Washington there is an added layer akin to the singularity of names like Prince or Seal. Normally, when I identify a Black cowboy or rancher’s brand, I first encounter their Blackness in some archived document. For example, I might come across their name in a census where their racial status is declared, often with a scribbled out or a palimpsestic B, for Black, written crossly over a presumed or prewritten W, for white. This kind of “overwriting” is very common in censuses when it comes to identifying Black residents. It’s as though the enumerator is so predisposed to anticipating anything but a Black person that they instinctively write something else in advance before being compelled to change their entry. I’ve hardly noticed it for any other racial designation (but to be perfectly honest, I am mainly just looking for instances of Black presence, so I very well could be missing other examples). I can honestly say I’ve never noticed it for white people. That is, I’ve never seen a W written on top of something else. That’s significant. I should point out that Canadian censuses are not always consistent about noting race. It’s as though the national impairment of Colour Blindness, which so many white Canadians have traditionally viewed with pride is a delusion (I get it, what you’re trying to say is that the difference in our skin colours does not have any hierarchical significance to you — but you still treat us differently and convince yourself that you’re just being “normal” ), as well as an impediment to those of us trying to prove Black presences exist where you assume otherwise. The understanding that these white Canadians have of colour blindness is nothing more than a systemic bias which accommodates the normalizing of whiteness and the erasure of Blackness. Imagine, for example, coming across the name “Benjamin Washington” in the census, and then seeing, like so many others listed, that he was originally from England. Why would you think anything further about his race? See what I mean? Systemic erasure masquerading as progressive “equality.”

Thus, in most cases, I thrill to find the evidence of a historic Black presence first on a census. Or, if it is not first on a census, it is in scouring local histories, often from the sixties and seventies. This is during a time in which the federal government was encouraging communities in this practice in the build-up to the nation’s centenary in 1967. Many rural municipalities took advantage of the occasion to produce historical accounts of their region. Some of them occasionally mentioned the single Black person, or Black couple, or Black family, or — on rare occasion — entire Black community living in their midst. This, too, like the census discoveries, is a thrilling event that I cherish, particularly (though not exclusively) when I encounter names I’ve never seen before. Once I discover a Black presence, either through the census or an old local history, I then go to the brand books, going back as far as makes sense for the time period of the individual I’ve noted. Most of the time, I find nothing. But once in a while, there it is: a cattle brand that has been languishing in the text, waiting for someone — waiting for me — to find it again. This is the greatest thrill and I’ve only felt it about a dozen times, so rare are these brands.

In the case of Benjamin Washington, something unusual happened. I saw his name in a brand book before I learned of his Blackness elsewhere. If you’re just looking for cowboys in general, then, sure, a historic cattle and horse brand book is a fine place to look. But it is not a logical place to begin a search for Black cowboys. Race is not mentioned anywhere in books of this sort and does not have to be mentioned anywhere. It’s a book on cattle brands, not a census. Even Canadian censuses, the most likely sacrament of catalogued identities, do not hallelujah their racial categories all of the time. So, brand books? But there it was: Washington, Benjamin, Grouard, AB. And I raised my eyebrow looking at it. The fact is, stereotypes aside, it is possible to consider Washington as the closest thing to a Black surname that we’ve got on this continent. In an article in February 2011, The Atlantic once considered, “How Washington Became the Blackest Name in America.” 36 It turns out the name has the highest proportion of Black people bearing it than any other last name on this continent. A remarkable 90% of Washingtons are Black. In a sense, Washington is a mark for Blackness. But it might also be a mark of choosing. It is speculated that the name is so common to Black people because of the renaming process Africans were subjected to through slavery. We were deprived of our indigenous ethnic names. We had slave names forced on us. Sometimes, like brand marks, those names were reflections of the enslavers’ identities. But just as often, these names represented choices.

Enslaved Africans mostly had no surnames and so came by them variously. Many of them did not wait for slavery to be abolished, but used names that were circulated among them as a form of community. Some chose to use an enslaver’s name because it connected them — as far back as they could remember — to an ancestor, a gesture of lineage and continuity amid the tumult imposed by slavery. Some simply improvised their choices. In the famous account of his life Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington admits that he simply invented his last name spontaneously when attendance was being called at school. Up to that point, he had only ever been known singularly by “Booker.” 37 It is not known for certain why Washington is prevalent among Black people, but the speculation is that it was a name associated with freedom: though George Washington owned slaves, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was common knowledge that his will instructed their release from bondage. Though we don’t know for certain, it is possible that many formerly enslaved people chose Washington based on the idea of promised freedom. Similarly, it is speculated that names like Jefferson and Jackson were adopted as a result of being associated with the former presidents. These are names that many of us carry to this day. Perhaps this makes Washington something of a luxury brand in Black history. But instead of the consumerist value of affluence that might have been sought with Gucci or Dior in the eighties, Black people in the nineteenth century were exercising a powerful agency and choosing the brand of freedom. Over 163,000 of us carry Washington, making it the most commonly Black name in America. I didn’t know this statistic when I spotted the name in the Alberta Horse and Cattle Brands 1915, but I had my suspicions. Sure enough, a quick search through the indexes of various brand books for other years turned up almost no other Washingtons. For a common enough sounding name, it is vanishingly uncommon on the cattle-driving Canadian prairies.

Strangely, I didn’t do anything further. Not right away. I didn’t go to a census or try to locate a local history for the town of Grouard. It’s as though I didn’t trust my own instinct. Or, rather, I didn’t want to be disappointed by my own instinct. In some ways, this enterprise — chasing down Black brands while reassessing how to locate my African Blackness on the Prairie — felt like its own impossible return. Relying on my instinct to uncover Black presences in history did feel like a recovery, but, as I’ve already pointed out, recovery itself can feel like a re-covering, especially if you’ve been raised here, this place that constantly denies your instincts about your place here (remember my Dunning–Kruger police, Officer B.?). I had my suspicions about the name Washington, but in some ways the very feeling of suspicion created doubts that were actually triggering. This may not make sense to you at first but bear with me: being raised by my biological immigrant parents came with its confusions; however, being raised by my adoptive parental province was downright disorienting. I remember once complaining to my parents about receiving racist abuse from “playful” kids at the park. My mother, in her immigrant, 1970s, pseudo-Black-power perspective, advised me to tell those kids that “Black is beautiful,” the next time it happened again. Duly — because it always happened — when the next time came, I retorted with my mother’s magic words and waited for the spell to take effect. Honestly, the words sounded meaningless to me. After all, these kids were taunting me with the N-word and other abuses precisely because Black was not seen as beautiful. I didn’t understand the power of counter-assertion that Black leaders like Huey P. Newton and Malcolm X had been performing through the late sixties, nor how powerfully such discourse may have affected my parents, who had immigrated from a country where Black was beautiful by default and who were learning the hard way that countries like Canada, where Black was not in the majority, begged to differ. I just wanted the solution to my immediate problem. I wanted the racist noise to stop. I wanted some special sorcery to knock those words out of their mouths, to twist their tongues into silence, to truly shut them up. It just didn’t seem to me that “Black is beautiful” was going to achieve anything. What happened was that my abuser was as confused by those words as I was. As I stood there, feigning defiance, hoping beyond hope that there was something more to the words, something secret that I couldn’t see, that would invoke the spell I was after, he, too, stood there in bafflement. We both stood, staring at each other, uncomprehending, unsure of what I had unleashed, trying to pierce its nonsensical mystery. Eventually, he shrugged and left. And that was that. I didn’t know what had happened. The words seemed to have worked, though I could see plainly that they had not worked. All that their juju had revealed was that if you placed the world of my parents’ beautiful Blackness next to the world of my taunter’s suspicious whiteness, I lived more in the world of the taunters I faced; my perceptions were more aligned with their perceptions. In facing them, I could not help but see something of myself.

This sharing burdened me in later life. The burden became something of who I am. Triggers drew me back to decisive moments like my mirrored taunter, causing indecision in my adult life. Seeing the name Washington raised suspicions in me about his potential Blackness. But raising suspicions also raised the spectre of that suspicious mirror from my past. I couldn’t feel the suspicion and react triumphantly, chase down Washington’s Blackness, and exult. My first instinct was to hesitate over an unconscious and unresolved guilt. I actually looked at that brand several times before I finally chose to act on my hunch. I eventually forced myself to look through censuses around the period of the year the brand was registered (1915). I know my trepidation sounds irrational. But I grew up in Truman’s version of Alberta. Although I remind myself regularly that truest history is the multi-voiced one, and that multiple voices have been silenced throughout Prairie history, I still instinctively anticipate the authority of absented Blackness. And that is not a good feeling: to be confirmed in the consciousness of an already misinformed public imagination as a nonentity, that you really don’t belong here, that no Black person does, that there is no history of Black people here and so you don’t deserve a tomorrow, that Black presence is an oxymoron. The tragedy is, this is my default. So I didn’t want to look up Benjamin Washington in a census because my instinct was that — despite the legitimate sign of his name — he would not be Black. I did not want to feel that disappointment. Again.

But I didn’t. Benjamin Washington turns up in a number of censuses. I found him, first, in the 1921 census, living in the Peace River district, and in the column called “Racial or Tribal Origin,” the word “Negro” is scrawled over top of what looks like an initial attempt to write something else. There it was: his palimpsestic Blackness in evidence. I was thrilled. But there were some quirks, an inevitability you encounter when you wade through the mire of censuses on a regular basis. His parents are noted as being English. Maybe this is true, but in other censuses he reports them as being American. Anomalies of this kind would need addressing, but now that I had confirmed Washington’s Blackness, I allowed myself to explore his cattle brand first. Benjamin Washington’s brand presents his initials on top of an inverted quarter circle, as though poised at a podium or on a stage or something like that.

Brands that have this feature (the inverted circle below the letters) strike me as raising or elevating the letters of their brand. There is another version of this feature that is standard. It occurs when the circle is flipped around the other way and the letters above are nestled in base of the curve, physically connected to it. This brand is called a “rocking” brand because it gives the impression that the letters are placed on a rocker (the quarter circle). Was this Benjamin Washington’s way of attempting to raise himself above the fray, to lift himself, to stand out in his community? There was a common discourse among Black communities that involved “uplift,” a movement around racial solidarity, upward mobility, religious propriety, and, controversially, respectability. In fact, it was a somewhat divisive concept among Black folks (especially with regard to respectability), but the discourse was especially popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a period that coincides with Washington’s ranching activities and the registration of his brand. Might his rising quarter circle encompass a gesture toward that contemporaneous Black discourse around uplift?

I later located Washington in a local history called Pioneers who Blazed the Trails, which focuses on the High Prairie region in Northern Alberta. He is described as a singular Black man who was held in deep respect by his community. His mention as “the only negro to ever farm in this district” and “the only negro in Grouard” is completely consistent with other representations of Black people (especially men) and is so prevalent as to represent a trope.38 But there are some unresolved gaps in Washington’s story that mark the representation of his identity in cattle brands. Washington appears to have been involved in the British Home Children project. This project has a history that is deep and complex and is beyond the scope of my discussion here. The British Home Children project was a program for children who had been orphaned, often in London. They were raised to be labourers and were sent to Australia and Canada to support the work of family farms. As you can imagine, the situation seems fraught with power dynamics and the valuation of human life according to labour productivity. One cannot help but note how perilously close this arrangement comes to similar contexts already explored in this text. Indeed, there are many stories of abuse and exploitation of the children sent into these circumstances. One might certainly question the degree to which most of these children would have been at the mercy of the institutions making decisions about their lives for them. In Washington’s case, several censuses suggest he may not have even been literate, which raises more questions about the education he was provided and the additional vulnerability such a circumstance would have placed him in. Regardless, Benjamin Washington was sent to a well-known farm in Russell, Manitoba: the Barnardo Industrial Farm. He arrived there in 1892 and by 1901 he was in Edmonton, Alberta. Nothing is known of his life at the industrial farm or his journey to Alberta, just as nothing is known of his early life in London. His parenthood is unclear. In one source, he is identified as an American who moved to the U.K. But in most of the archived materials, England is noted as his birthplace. His involvement in the industrial training farm in Russell, MB links him to the British charity organization Barnardo’s, which was established in the 1860s and is an entity that still exists today. This corroborates my suspicion that he was likely an orphan or came from family straits so severe that he was unable to be properly cared for. How well connected to his parents was he? He lists his own birthday variously in different documents, though the year is consistently between 1874 and 1877. Sometimes the date is May 1; sometimes it is March 1, or March 12, or February 12. He also appears to have had siblings, a brother and a sister; however, they don’t appear to have participated in the same agricultural training scheme as he did, and so far I have been unable to locate them in the archives. In short, it is very hard to know who Benjamin Washington was prior to arriving in Canada.

One thing, therefore, that stands out starkly to me is his cattle brand. Washington occupied himself in a number of ways after settling in Canada. He worked on freights. He was a domestic helper. He farmed. Primarily, though, he farmed, and this is most appropriate because he was trained on an industrial farm and may have even been introduced to ranching. But farming was, ostensibly, the main purpose for which he was sent to Canada. So he wasn’t a cowboy. In 1905, the year John Ware died, Washington settled in the High Prairie region in Northern Alberta. The cowboy era in Southern Alberta was sounding its death knell. By 1912, the Calgary Stampede was launched in part as a commemorative festival, a ceremony of a skillset that was anticipating its own nostalgia. Perhaps there were still traditional cowboys around when Washington registered his brand in 1915, but the lifestyle was coming to a close. It makes me wonder how much of the cowboying life he knew personally. Was he drawn to it? After all, when he arrived in Canada in 1892, the mythology of the West — its mythic frontier, its aspirations of individualism and freedom — was in full force. Did any of it infatuate him? Impossible to know. What is known is that, despite having very little practical experience of ranching, and despite not possessing any significant numbers of cattle (as per the censuses), and despite possibly not even knowing how to read or write, he imagined, designed, and registered a brand that was published only once. Subsequent years of the brand book do not contain his brand. It was as though he literally just wanted to make his mark.

I also want to mention that if he was out to make a name for himself, then this was just part of a strategy for successfully earning a living. It costs money to register a brand; you don’t just do it to launch your name into orbit and escape the gravity well of anonymity. Sadly, he may simply not have been successful in this area. After all, his farming doesn’t seem to have amounted to much. Eventually, he gave it up and rented the land out to other farmers while he lived on a small portion of it.39 So, the cattle brand may have been as much a pathway to economic security as it was a shot in the dark of a different kind: the kind that bursts into light, like fireworks, dazzling against a firmament of forgotten Blackness.

Perhaps Benjamin Washington was illiterate, or perhaps he was only illiterate in certain languages, like the languages that made his choosings impossible. Perhaps, the language of cattle brands simply allowed him to return from that impossible choosing. The language of Black cattle brands always courts the impossible return. We can see versions of this courting in another brand too. Frederick Hall was not a cowboy, but he was a horseman. He came from a farming family in Iowa in the early 1900s, helping to deliver another farmer’s goods from Des Moines by rail. In Alberta, he worked at several farms and ranches in and around the Innisfail area. In 1907, he was issued a patent for his own homestead near Pine Lake. Although he noted on his application that he had no stock (only horses), he registered a brand on three different occasions.

In 1915, he registered an upward-facing quarter circle over a lazy F H. This brand can be seen as a variation of Benjamin Washington’s initials. The quarter circle is positioned differently, and one of the initials is lazy instead of upright. But we can think of it as accomplishing something very similar: the simple act of leaving his mark, asserting his identity as directly as possible. In the Department of Agriculture’s Alberta Horse and Cattle Brands, 1919–20, this same brand shows up again, as if it were an affirmation. But something interesting happens in between these two brand books. In the brand book for 1916–18, Hall’s cattle brand is not present, but he registered a brand for his horses. This brand is different from his usual cattle brand. It presents his initials with three clear changes, two of them striking: both letters are now upright, the quarter circle above has been replaced by a bar below, and the H is gone, now substituted with a D. The effect is to emphasize the initials in a way that is completely different from his cattle brand. Both letters are upright; there is no ornamentation or manipulation (that is, they are not reversed or lazy or upside down) of any kind; and they are effectively underlined by the bar. It is as clear an assertion of his initials as is possible.

But I am particularly struck by the replacement of the H with the D. In one way, it makes sense to do this. Hall already had a cattle brand he had registered in the previous edition of the brand book. What’s more, its purpose was different in that it was meant for cattle, whereas this one was meant for horses. Changing the initials further emphasizes the distinction: “F H” for cattle, “F D” for horses. In another view, however, the poetic one, offering different initials is like offering different identities of the same person. So who was FH compared to FD, and why choose D anyway? Frederick Hall’s full name was Frederick Douglas Hall. If that doesn’t ring familiar to you at this point, it should. Though the spelling is different, the name evokes the great nineteenth-century orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. As I’ve pointed out earlier, Douglass was arguably the most famous Black person of the nineteenth century. He was a symbol of Black achievement, Black freedom, and Black agency positioned against a restrictive white society that regularly curtailed or denied the possibility of these things. His name was legendary among Black people. It would have been impossible for those two names, Frederick and Douglas/s, to be coupled and not to evoke the renown of the great orator.

By the time Frederick Hall was born in 1867, Frederick Douglass was already a famous man, whose autobiography was a bestseller in the U.S. and the U.K. It is a special kind of choosing that incorporates the most famous abolitionist of the day into the name of one of your children, particularly if you yourself had been or knew people who had been enslaved. Then, for Hall to insert it in the years between his cattle brand registration represents yet another special type of choosing. He is, in a sense, using the cattle brands as a performance of his multi-dimensioned self. The part of his identity that is associated with Frederick Douglass — the “F D Bar” brand — pops up like a middle name itself, subtle but essential. With the exception of censuses, in most of the documents that Hall identifies himself, he includes his middle name as well. It’s an aspect to his identity that, frankly, most white Canadians would have been insensible to. It was an acknowledgement of his identity with a particular historical ring. Similarly, his horse brand, nestled as it was between the two publications of his cattle brand, expressed a dimensionality that would largely have gone unrecognized. This was Fred Hall nodding to his “Douglassness,” nodding, that is, to his Black agency, even out here in the so-called middle of nowhere. This classic middle-of-nowhere nod (you know what I’m talking about), that filled me with ambivalence as a teenager, creates an entirely different response in me now.40 Today, it allows me an impossible return, a special choosing; I see Fred Hall’s middle-of-nowhere nod and I nod back.

It is a curiosity that Sierra Leone is one of the very few African countries whose name is neither African nor in an “official,” colonial language. Sierra Leone is Portuguese but was never a colony of Portugal. The name nods to its so-called European “discoverer.” Need I have said European? After all, aren’t all discoverers of this nature European? The term might be redundant: European discoverer. In this same manner, the name South Africa is redundant. But South Africa is an English name, or, at least, uses English to express its name. Sierra Leone’s name is an imposition invented by the naming power of Europe that sought to reconfigure Africa into an entity that suited its social and economic ambitions (for itself), essentially deeming the entire continent empty of history. Hence, Pedro de Sintra, the Portuguese navigator who “first” set eyes on Sierra Leone’s mountainous coastline, was reminded of lions seated on their haunches and bestowed our name upon us. Unlike many African countries that chose to reshape themselves during the period of decolonization that took place during the twentieth century, Sierra Leone did not change its name. Gold Coast became Ghana; Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. The Democratic Republic of Congo took renaming to the extreme: after independence in 1960, it became the Republic of Congo, then Zaire and finally in 1997, the Democratic Republic of Congo). And so on. But Sierra Leone stayed Sierra Leone. The English colonial governor packed up and left; English remained our official language, and it still is; and though we have no official ties to Portugal, our Portuguese name stayed Portuguese. And, despite this odd quirk of history, there is something fulfilling in the retention of this name: it too represents a form of renaming. It, too, represents an impossible choosing.

After my ancestors achieved their impossible return back across the Middle Passage, backwards through the Door of No Return, they discovered what all impossible returnees learn, what all returnees learn: return is impossible. They were back, but they were impossibly back, and as such they carried their “impossibleness” with them. As I showed earlier, one example of this is seen in the poetry of the Krio language itself, both structurally rooted in English and inherently expressively African. A de kam is itself an expression of this impossible contradiction in its refusal to speak of leaving. But after a few generations of being settled, the Krio people (who were called “Creole” throughout the nineteenth century) began to chafe at their historic connections to slavery. They rejected being identified as “former slaves” or “recaptives” and criticized the view that sought to mark them indelibly with this context. They asserted themselves as free Africans with connections to a continent whose actual histories transcended by far the single, cataclysmic intervention of the slave trade. In the 1870s, they went through a version of the Black Arts movement almost a century before Sonya Sanchez or Amiri Baraka spit any poems, or Archie Shepp blasted his Black Arts notes, or before, even, the existence of the Black Panthers. This was the period in which the somewhat pejorative term “Afro-Saxons” was applied against them, yet they were busy immersing themselves in the Africanness of their identity. They established “African” clubs. They denounced Victorian clothing (which was very commonly worn then). They championed African music. They asserted African names over their European ones. I found a reference in the Sierra Leone Weekly News to an Aaron Bickersteth who had taken on a Yoruba name and asserted it beside his European one. This was possibly the most consistent and, arguably, the most impactful practice of their resistance to a historical identity that flattened them into the single dimension of slavery. Actually, the legacy of ambivalent naming practices carries on among the Krio, sometimes demonstrable within a single family dynamic. I, for example, got a European name, while my sister was given an African one.

Naming is a powerful assertion of identity and, equally, can be a powerful subversion of imposed identity. I pointed out that when I first spotted the name Washington in a brand book, though I hesitated to react right away, I immediately sensed I had stumbled across a Black presence, such is the power of certain historical namings, certain impossible returns. I had a similar experience with another name I came across in a brand book, but this time, my reaction was completely different. Sensing I had come across another unremembered record of a Black presence, I immediately searched it out in the censuses corresponding to the brand book’s time period. In this case, I was right. There it was in the census on my first try: Racial or tribal origin: negro. The name was Freeman. I want to point out that there are actually a number of Freemans in the Brand Books.

When I went to the censuses, what I did was search for any Freeman in Alberta and filtered it through racial origin. Walter Freeman’s family was the only result that came back. So, while my experience made it look like every Freeman equals a Black presence, it just so happens that the first one I came across in the brand book was exactly what I was looking for.

This census entry is notable for, once again, demonstrating that palimpsestic Blackness that seems almost inevitable in these early cases. Perhaps, this time, it was precisely the uncertainty of the category that caused the bureaucratic double-take. The enumerator had written “Canadian” at first (which in all contexts is the actual correct answer here) but then crossed it out and wrote “negro” over it. Perhaps he felt that doubt, which I am positing as deeply Canadian, that sensibility which understands itself to be free of “American race prejudice” and would never judge someone inferior on the basis of their skin colour, but would instinctively question how anyone who wasn’t white could still constitute being Canadian in the same manner that they as white people understood themselves to be Canadian. The result is a prevaricating statistical entry (“Canadian” ) that exits at the same time it is entered. The result for me, though, prevarication, palimpsest, and all, is a successfully identified Black presence on the historical landscape of the Prairies. In my eyes, that is a remarkable uncovering.

Isaac Walter Freeman is as remarkable for his embodied Black presence on the Prairies as for the utter ordinariness of the life he led in Alberta. Walter moved with his family to Alberta in the early 1900s with his wife and two daughters. This ordinary fact alone makes them somewhat remarkable. Historical accounts of Black people on the Prairies seem so bent on identifying the singularity of, largely, Black men, that it is practically revolutionary to be able to point to an entire family who never graced the pages of a history book. John Ware shares this “remarkable” feat as well, but in his case it is baffling and somewhat bipolar. Despite being regularly represented as a unique figure, singular in Alberta’s history as a Black cowboy, there is, at the same time, ample documented and readily available evidence of the family he married into and the family he created with his wife, Mildred. My focus is on the language of cattle brands here, so I will only digress long enough to point out that Mildred came from a large family, the Lewises, who also moved to Alberta en masse. In fact, they joined what must surely be thought of as a community of Black people. Though not as thickly populated as those in the plantation South, or those beginning to emerge westward across the United States in the wake of the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, those sporadic arrivals of Black folks in Western Canada, too, constituted a protective gathering, a social network that stayed connected through church experiences, social celebrations, and labour, even when they weren’t geographically next to each other.

But let me not digress much longer. I will finish this point by returning to cattle brands and pointing out that the Ware family, which consisted of six children along with John and Mildred, also proliferated several cattle brands.41 Once again, history seems besotted with Ware’s more or less single output, the Four Walking Sticks (or Four Nines) brand. I say more or less because it is well documented how he dropped one of the Walking Sticks from this original design fairly soon after its introduction. But the stories stop there. In fact, Ware registered several different brands. In the manner of many ranchers seeking to establish a foundational legacy, he spread the ownership of those brands throughout his family. His daughter, Nettie, and his sons, Robert and William, all had brands registered under their names in the 1900 and 1904 Brand Books.

In 1900, Nettie, the eldest child, would have been seven years old. So this was hardly an independent venture on the part of the children. John Ware was growing his business and one of the vehicles for this growth was his growing family. For me, then, it is very important to acknowledge the presence of Black families on the Prairies, particularly when they can be located in historical documents, because so much of our historical imagination has excluded the possibility of this simple, common, yet powerful dimensionality of human life. To uncover evidence of Walter Freeman, not just as an individual, but as a member of a Black family living on the historical Prairies, filled me with joy.

The Freemans lived in truly middle-of-nowhere Alberta. Walter homesteaded land near Throne, AB, which is roughly between Red Deer and the Saskatchewan border. The nearest town is Coronation, which is about 12 km northwest of Throne, along Highway 12. The area is notable for being settled during the early part of the twentieth century, mainly 1909–15. This is precisely when Walter shows up in the documents. This, too, might show why his census enumerator’s entry stammers with contradictions. Column 17, the column dedicated to “Nationality” follows the columns for “Year of Immigration to Canada” and “Year of Naturalization” (respectively, columns 15 and 16). Together, the three columns make up the “Citizenship” category. Having learned in column 13 that this Black homesteading family had all been born in Canada (Ontario) and had taken up the call to come West and earn the fruits of freedom and independence that was owed to any true-blooded Canadian (male) who is worth the salt, the enumerator struggles with the knowledge that people who, in his view, are a very “untrue-blooded Canadian” family have answered that call and are prospering as though they were as capable and worthy to do so as he was. That is, on seeing this Black homesteading family was entirely born and bred in Canada, he is forced to enter absolutely nothing in columns 15 and 16: this family of Canadians (whose parents were also born and bred in Canada) never immigrated and were not naturalized but were already naturally Canadian. So, naturally, the enumerator’s logic took over and he quite reasonably entered “Canadian.” This is the usual entry for people who were born in Canada, particularly if their parents were also born in Canada. But then, paradoxically, his Canadian sensibilities took over and he doubted his own reasoning. I can only imagine this apparent contradiction of the eye contributed to an apparent confusion of the hand, resulting in the scrawled-over entry for the Freeman family’s “racial or tribal” origin in column 18. In some ways it is fitting, though. This, in black and white bureaucratic text, is how Canada officially sees us: a collision of origins in which an unexpected Canadianness is rendered almost illegible by the superscription of an equally unexpected Blackness.

However unexpected, the Freeman’s family story is one of the most Canadian stories there is, if Canadian stories involve a search for wider opportunities in the quest for self-determination. Walter Freeman moved from Ontario to find fortune in the West. He was born there in 1882 to Arlington and Liza, who were also both born in Ontario. Arlington’s parents came to Canada from the U.S., and because Arlington was born in 1854 or 1855, there is some suggestion that his parents had experienced slavery on some level, though it is impossible to know exactly what that level was. There are, however, some very persuasive clues. The first clue is the timeframe: Arlington was born in Canada while slavery was still legal in the U.S. The period between 1833 — when slavery was abolished in Canada — and 1865 — when it was abolished in the U.S. — was intense with activity along the Underground Railroad. This, along with the fact that Ontario was the most common Canadian terminus of the Underground Railroad, strongly suggests his parents engineered an escape to Canada. Another clue has to do with the gaps in the family’s knowledge. On his death certificate, Arlington’s father is named (Robert), but his mother’s maiden name is unknown. The certificate doesn’t ask for a mother’s first name, so we don’t know if it was unknown as well. I suspect not, but, either way, the indication is that the family’s history was touched on some level by slavery. This is primarily due to my third and final clue: the family name itself. Freeman. This is the very reason why I instantly suspected a Black Prairie presence when I came across this name the first time. It is why I didn’t hesitate to go to the census in the manner that I hesitated with Washington. Indeed, it is, prima facie, why I discovered a family of Canadian “negroes” when I located them in the census. It is also why Arlington may not have known his mother’s maiden name, whether or not he knew her first name. Freeman (or Freedman) is a name that Black people chose to celebrate the dimensionality of their humanity that had once been denied under the uncompromising imposition of slavery. It signals the possibility of choice, as well as the path to a tomorrow that was abrogated by the slave trade (initiated by the “Door of No Return” ) and remains dismissed in North America’s resultant Blackness (being viewed as fundamentally ahistorical). It is the reflection of a humanity that they always knew they had but were not allowed to acknowledge. Yes, they often chose it, and so it was a choosing, but it was also not a choice at all; it was a necessary declaration; it was a ground zero assertion of fact; it was a return to who they had always been. They had performed their own reverse journey through the Door of No Return, just like the Krio of Sierra Leone. The name “Freeman” was a powerful act of reclamation, the choosing of their own impossible return.

This, I suspect, is why I didn’t hesitate when I saw the name, as I did with Washington. In the case of Washington, the aura of slavery mysteriously, inevitably emanates. Its presence can — and often is — rejected, but the aura haunts. “Freeman” seems to do something completely different. It inaugurates; it births. Think of Leonard Pitts Jr.’s evocation of the name in his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Freeman, in which a newly emancipated Black man called Sam Freeman learns to rethink who he is within the context of gained liberty. Think, too, of Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In a famous passage where she gains her freedom, she delivers a sermon in the clearing and the new relationship that freedom confers between Blackness and the Black body.

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either.” 42

Washington was a name that may have been imposed and that may have been chosen, but Freeman signals choice. It, too, may have been imposed and may have been chosen, but the poetry for me is in the evocation of what is being chosen. It is the renewal of dimensions, the renewal to love.

This is the central Canadianness of Freeman’s family story. They wanted a better life and their Canadian lives allowed them to pursue that essential thing that defined them in the most authentic way possible, even when Canada itself stood in their way. This is no different than it is for McDonalds, Riels, Chans, Romanoffs, or Nenshis. For many of the families who came to this country through the Underground Railroad, the initial realization of freedom was quickly tempered by the realities of racism that existed here, too. But the benefits on offer for other groups were apprehensible to them too. So, despite resistance, they formed communities; they established networks; some of them started businesses; many of them worked land they had acquired; some of them answered the call to go West and help build the nation. This, too, is an essential part of the Canadian story, which we can never ignore is very much enmeshed in territorial claims. Black aspirants were enmeshed in this history too, though, as people whose humanity had been flattened in stark, imposed relationship to the land, the dynamics of their particular enmeshment are not straightforward. Arlington and his wife Eliza had seven sons. The third son, Walter, chose to answer the call and go West, seeking that sense of independent achievement, individual autonomy, that ownership and industry that for many settlers in that day was freedom. In coming to middle-of-nowhere Alberta with his family, Walter was simply seeking to return to his name.

His family had been farmers in Ontario. His father had owned a mixed farming operation since he was twenty years old and Walter continued this tradition in Throne. He homesteaded land that eventually produced crops and he raised cattle as well. One of the few documents I found of Walter, other than census or homesteading documents, is a brief mention in the newspaper of Walter buying a Hereford bull for $200 in 1918. It is a small note, but a large confirmation of his status as a cattle man. The other confirmation is, of course, his published literary works graced in the pages of cattle brand books. The “Quarter Circle Reverse F Four” brand does something slightly different than Benjamin Washington’s “B W” or Frederick Hall’s “F D” brands.

While those brands focused on the intrinsic simplicity of initials — that is, they presented the straightforward letters as a straightforward representation of who they were, unembellished — Walter Freeman’s brand does the opposite. The F of this brand is emphasized, it is reversed, it is all embellishment. It is as though it was urging us to look at the F, if nothing else. It signals the singular importance of the letter because, in this case, singularity signifies dimensionality. The F has to be noticed because it is the F of freedom. It is the freedom one family reclaimed when they returned to their rightful name.