Part 5

Some names are more rightful than others. Some names return in the most unexpected ways. One of my obsessions has been to determine who the first Bickersteth was. By this, I mean, of course, the first African Bickersteth. My curiosity is prompted by one of the unusual historical legacies I claim through my Krio background. In Sierra Leone, Krio ethnicity is distinguished from the other indigenous ethnicities by our collision with the West. We are marked by it and we pass on that mark like an indelible scar that is rebirthed again and again. We are Christians. Our language is hybridized. We were known once as Afro-Saxons. And we have European last names. As you know, this last fact is partially due to slavery’s merciless mortar expunging our original, African names and grinding us out with European ones, sometimes imposed, sometimes chosen. We are impossible returnees. But there is another wrinkle to that story that does not follow the same path across the Middle Passage in the same way. In fact, that path was quite literally disrupted.

After Sierra Leone was established as an African colony in Africa, it went through a number of status transformations. At first, it was nothing at all that could be identified as an official people in the modern or Western sense: it was simply a settlement administered by the Sierra Leone Company, which had been run by a number of abolitionists in England. Then in 1808, it was made a British Crown Colony. These were rocky times for the colonists, as well as for the conception of the colony itself. Although they had returned as free people to establish a new beginning in a town they duly called Freetown, slavery itself still abounded. In fact, it still surrounded them. For all of its history connected to the abolition movement of the eighteenth century, Sierra Leone remained a central site for slavery well into the nineteenth century. The Sierra Leone Company had been run privately and was often struggling with finances and organizational cohesion. In 1807, Britain abolished the slave trade. But don’t get too excited. Yes, this move was an important one and signalled a moral shift in Britain’s policies, but it was just as much brought about by economic incentives, as well as strategic foreign policy moves. Just in case you missed this detail, it wasn’t slavery itself that was abolished; it was the slave trade. That meant that British citizens could still legally own slaves, that Africans would still legally remain flattened non-humans without full rights. But it meant that the buying and selling of Africans (or anyone) was no longer legal, and it did open the door to conferring some new rights to them, as well as creating the path that eventually would lead to total abolition of slavery. But at this point, slavery itself was still legal. I should also point out that Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, important as it was, was only applicable to Britain, and several other countries still regularly engaged in trading slaves.

And among slave traders, Sierra Leone remained a valued site to acquire Africans. This created a surreal situation, akin to any speculative novel, in which the colony of returned Africans, of free Africans, were surrounded by the tumult and energies of enslaving activities, even as they struggled to live out the freedoms of their hard-won return to Africa. Do you see how impossible returns are?

Some of Britain’s motivations were economic and political, where, occasionally, morality took a back seat. Britain’s economy was shifting to mechanized, mass-production and it no longer needed to generate labour through slaves as much as it had in the past. It also, quite paradoxically, became intent on positioning itself in the world as a beacon of morality, which was as much an attempt to change moral positions on slavery as it was a desire to be seen as a global influencer. None of these things had any impact, at least not immediately, on their so-called possessions in the Caribbean and the enormous wealth that was generated by the slave plantations there. Nevertheless, they positioned themselves as the police of the seas, literally placing navy ships along the coast to intercept and arrest any slave ships speeding toward the Americas with a hold full of enslaved Africans. When Sierra Leone became a Crown Colony in 1808, it was used strategically in the battle against the slave trade. Freetown became an administrative dropping-off point for any Africans recovered from a slave ship and released to freedom. One miracle is that some Africans returned, impossibly, more than once. Some of the African colonists were swept up into slavery again, intercepted en route to the Americas, and returned to African soil yet again. Another miracle is that the already hybridized Krio people became even more so, as ships that had scoured slaves from all along the western coast of Africa were returned to Freetown, and those Africans settled there, melding with the current inhabitants.

So African traditions from all over West Africa commingled and coalesced in a way that predates the cosmopolitanism of modern, immigrant nations like the U.S. and Canada today. And though these newest returnees had managed, just, to escape the enduring horrors of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic, they still underwent powerful transformations upon settling in Freetown. The colony had always been directed by British sensibilities and making it a Crown Colony in 1808 only made the cultural connections official. The governor was British. The laws of the colony were British. The colonists learned English in British schooling systems. They became Christian. They took on European names. Bickersteth was almost certainly one of those names.

Bickersteth is an unusual last name. I’m often told it sounds like a writer’s name (in combination with Bertrand, I assume). It seems Dickensian. It feels literary and heavy with history at the same time. I will admit, its unusual factor made it useful for doing genealogical searches. That is how I know that it is not one of the names that recrossed the Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Besides the fact that it does not appear on any of the documentation related to the “Book of Negroes” or ship manifests of that famous flotilla, it doesn’t even appear in North America until the nineteenth century. I very likely do have ancestors who came from Nova Scotia; they simply did not have the name Bickersteth, or to be more accurate, they did not begin with the name Bickersteth. As a child, I struggled with the name. It should have been acceptable as a European name, but it was an unusual one, and so people stumbled over it. I regularly had (and have) people unconsciously call me Bickerstaff, a variant of the same name. When I was a literature student, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift had made use of the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. It seemed to confer some sort of acceptability in my eyes. But for the most part, especially when I was younger, the name felt like an albatross. Coupled with Bertrand, it made for an alliterative mouthful that seemed to qualify it as foreign to my Canadian peers. In truth, I felt like an imposter. I did not feel I could authentically own the name in the way that my friends of European descent would enthusiastically point out the logical origins of “Smith,” “Cooper,” or “Baker,” as they were so obviously attached to recognizable vocations in Europe. But Bickersteth has no such readily available relation. Though I was not one hundred percent sure at the time about the name’s origins, as far as my family was concerned, I was suspicious; it seemed to have the whiff of slavery about it. It was a suspicion that had me paralyzed by my own needs: I desperately wanted it confirmed; I desperately did not want it confirmed.

As a student at the University of British Columbia, I worked at the University Press part-time. To my amazement, one of the U.K. distribution deals the press had acquired at the time was a book called The Bickersteth Diaries. Many people commented on this coincidence and wondered if there could possibly be any familial links between us. My reaction was embarrassment. The book seemed only to confirm my status as an imposter of the Bickersteth family name. The innocent question of could there possibly be a family connection, for me, hinged on what was buried in the presumption of the word possibly. Could there possibly be a family connection? It seemed to assert the natural order of things: Bickersteth is a European name. So what possibilities allowed for me, a Black presence in North America, to share this name with one of their British authors? I didn’t fully know the history of Sierra Leone at that point, but I did know that however my family became connected to the name Bickersteth was almost certainly not the same way in which my very curious colleagues at the Press were connected to theirs. Because of my confusing Prairie upbringing, in which everything about my Blackness was both anomalous and somehow my fault, my reaction to all of this intense curiosity in my background was shame. I dodged questions. I changed the subject. I shrugged mutely. One of the editors very kindly and very innocently offered to put me in touch with Ursula, the project’s family contact in England, who then sent me a very kind, very polite letter noting her awareness of some American Bickersteths in Michigan and her delight to discover some in Canada. None of her words betrayed an awareness of the possibility that she was corresponding with an African who shared her name. “I hope you’ll have a good year,” she wrote. “And if you felt inclined to write to me, I would be very happy to hear from you.” All of these unspoken presumptions, as well as my halfling history, triggered imposter syndrome. I didn’t know how to insert myself — my family story — into the assumptions that were being made around me. I felt shame, and still to my shame today, I left her letter unanswered.

She noted that one of her uncles had spent time in Western Canada in the early 1900s before settling in Toronto as the Warden of Hart House at U of T. He had even written a book about his pioneering days that she hoped I might find interest in, even though, she pointed out, I appeared to be in British Columbia and the book was set in rural Alberta. This surprised me. All my life, I had assumed that my small family band of Bickersteths were not only the only Bickersteths in Alberta, but that they had only ever been the only Bickersteths to set foot in Alberta. As far as the African Bickersteths are concerned, I was right. But here was another Bickersteth, a real Bickersteth, who had been there three generations earlier. Although I never responded to Ursula’s letter, I took a deep interest in acquiring this book and learning more.

Burgon Bickersteth, the book’s author, was an Anglican lay missionary who answered the church’s call to provide ministry to new communities in the far-flung Western Canadian wilderness. It was a difficult task but appealed to the adventurist who wanted to witness a young nation in the throes of one of its growth spurts. Incredibly, Burgon may have arrived in rural Alberta at the same time as Walter Freeman, both men pursuing different embodiments of Western possibility. I have read his book many times and am struck by how vividly the urge to strike out and create one’s own path of possibility shaped the tenor of the times. As well, it is striking how strongly this urge was connected to the shaping and development of the nation itself. Yet there were unspoken contradictions forced against each other in the process. Burgon admired the diversity of people who came to power the West with nothing but their determination and ambitions. Although he was English and had come on the unspoken presumption that England was the mother nation to this burgeoning Western Canadian province, he seemed nevertheless to take for granted that it was the variety of people that would most naturally realize the province’s potential. Although, today, we are very used to giving warnings about the relativity of eurocentric bias that was both prevalent and de rigueur, Burgon seems to show almost none of it. He is practically blasé about the nationalities he comes into contact with. At one point in the book, after trekking through the middle-of-nowhere wilderness for hours, he comes face to face with my mirror.

I proceeded on my way — ten miles through the bush — without seeing a soul except two negro children. . . . About 1 P.M. I arrived at Hilton’s. Mrs. Hilton is a full-blooded negress, and keeps a “stopping place” — in other words an inn, if you can call two rather tumble-down log shacks by such a name. . . . Mrs. Hilton, with her shiny countenance and two rows of grinning white teeth, soon called me into the little shack, which served as kitchen, dining-room, and her bedroom, “stoppers” being put in two double beds in the other shack.43

My jaw nearly dropped when I read that passage, but it was all small beer for Brother Burgon. As it turns out, there was a Black colony of sorts in Northern Alberta that had only recently established itself near Campsie, and though Burgon never went directly there, I suspect he would have remained nonplussed by its presence as it was yet another manifestation of the cosmopolitan countryside he seemed to cherish.

Travelling seems to have run in the family, for Burgon’s great grandfather Edward, also cherished roaming through wild territories replete with contradictory mélanges. In Edward’s case though, it was the bush of West Africa that drew him. Edward Bickersteth was a missionary who, yes, went to Freetown in 1816 to help establish the Church Missionary Society there and ensure the Christian transition of the Africans who were “recaptured” from slavery. Another common thread amongst the Bickersteths is that they appear to enjoy writing about their escapades as well. In his diaries, Edward frequently mentions his jaunts through the bush, encountering new people and unexpected circumstances. While the average nineteenth-century Englishman would almost immediately upon stepping foot on the African west coast succumb to malaria or some other dread disease found only in the “dark continent,” Edward seemed to be enlivened by being there. He had many plans for spreading the gospel and he set about executing them with the vigour of someone pursuing their dream job. Because he was. His dream was to prove to the world that all people had the capacity to share in the light of Christ and to continue sharing it themselves. Like many eurocentric benefactors of African projects, he connected Christian belief to the civilization of society and understood himself to be raising Africans out of barbarity.

I would like to point out that this unregulated territory of behaviours, in which Europeans traipsed across the globe, rescuing “barbarians” from their ignorance, was a version of a Wild West that would also express itself in North America. It is, in fact, the reason why most of us are unaware that there ever was such a thing as Black cowboys. The settling of the West was, too, a project of asserting civility. European settlers saw themselves as the prime administrators of vast and empty territories that needed organizing. The West was considered wild, in part, because its perceived emptiness invited this organization, but mostly it was because the emptiness of the lands was not cooperating with their plans. The inconvenience of already-present Indigenous peoples, who had their own cultural priorities, traditions, political structures, spiritual practices, family and social dynamics, personal ambitions, social aspirations, historical imagination, and narrative modalities (to name a few) hampered the settlers’ vision of empty lands. Indigenous cultural priorities, etc., were therefore understood by settlers as wilful resistance (because it was) whose logical remedy was genocide (because white supremacy). The dimensionality of Indigenous peoples was met with a barbarity that named them barbarous, an intrusion that saw them as intruding, a lawlessness that accused them of lawlessness, a wildness that envisioned them as wild. As white people encroached on lands occupied by Indigenous peoples from time immemorial, the conflicts that ensued took on symbolic meaning for them. They were cleaning things up. They were getting their house in order. They were settling things. Part of this process involved narrating their exploits as both necessary and moral: they were doing good. But what is very important to recognize in this whole process is that the establishment of whiteness as the moral force of the West was as much a retrospective action as it was a contemporary happening. The West comprised all sorts of people with conflicting and overlapping understandings. The image of the white-hatted cowboy as a sheriff establishing order amid wildness is an invention of movies, television, and dime-store novels. Cowboys were primarily cattlemen, and they included all sorts of people, including Indigenous people, Black people, women, Queer folk, and Asian Americans/Canadians.44

The white-washing of cultural diversities is a practice that goes back to colonization and the simplest metaphorizing of black equals bad, white equals good. Part of the lawless spirit of the West was subverted in its prototype version in Africa and its post-type in Western Canada by European adventurers like Edward and Burgon Bickersteth. Although both were connected to projects of land acquisition, their primary vision was of spiritual conversion. For example, Edward Bickersteth had nothing against Africans and, unlike many other Europeans, he did not see the darkness of their skin as a metaphor for the inherent moral condition of their soul. For Edward, Christianity was, by default, the truest path to God, but that was a function of practice — of choice — not inherence. His goal was to convince everyone he could to choose correctly. I don’t know. Maybe there is something in that formula that he offered that was particularly appealing to people who had gone through the Door of No Return. Certainly the centrality of Christianity across multiple communities of African descent in the Americas strongly suggests as much. But equally, there was something in it that also drew the people who were sucked in by the gravitational pull of that door, felt the horror of its gravity, felt its irresistible force lasso them and spin them toward its centre, toward its greedy mouth — only to have some unexpected element deflect them off course and spin them right out of the monster’s gaping maw, landing them back on African soil. These people were not lost for generations, did not lose connection to their cultural traditions, or their language, or their ethnic identity. They were stolen into slavery and then by a miracle they could not have predicted, they were returned to the continent of their birth, sometimes only a few days later. But even this narrow escape, this skirting past the ominous forever-door was only the beginning of a profound transformation.

True returns are simply not possible. While they may have begun their journey in Yorubaland (Nigeria) or Asante (Ghana) or Mende (inland Sierra Leone), they were “returned” to Freetown. And Freetown was an engine for Western reconfigurations. In Freetown, they were schooled in English. They were taught to read and cherish the Bible. They were told that people in England, powerful people, who had played a role in their rescue, wanted them to succeed, to know the light of Christ. Although a few of them did manage to reunite with their original communities, most of them had no means of returning to their original homeland (Africa is very large).45 In a similar way to how Africans in America coalesced around a common cultural identity through their shared historical realities, the Africans who were landed in Freetown amalgamated into a community of multiple ethnicities whose cohering force had two elements: their shared displacement and their ongoing, changed relationship to Africa itself.

One of the most powerful and enduring symbols of this relationship can be seen in the naming processes they underwent. A key task that Edward Bickersteth oversaw was the schooling of the children of so-called recaptives. This, of course, was a religious education and, in that eurocentric way I’ve mentioned, was meant to showcase Africans’ capacity for civilization to those who thought we were inherently barbaric. It’s also worth mentioning that organizations like the Church Missionary Society that Bickersteth was affiliated with had a lasting impact. They established schools like Annie Walsh Memorial, Sierra Leone Grammar School, and, at the postsecondary level, Fourah Bay College, which was an educational beacon that served all of West Africa for many years and today is incorporated into the University of Sierra Leone. Although they were established in the nineteenth century, these are schools that my parents attended. As a child, I heard much about the great Annie Walsh Memorial School that my mum attended in her youth. Once, I asked her who this Annie Walsh person was. She shrugged: “Some rich white lady.” It was clear that the power of the name was lodged in its own originating memory. The rich white people came to show us another door, different from the one of no return, and their transformational potency has remained in our cultural and historical imagination ever since.

In his diaries, Edward talks about the joy he witnessed in children’s faces at learning about the Bible and that they, too, could enjoy all of the heavenly rewards it promised. He impressed upon them the joy their benefactors would receive in learning about their love of Christ. And then he mentions something very curious. He names some of the English benefactors who have donated their money to the cause of educating Africans who had been caught up in slavery, and as part of the process, or maybe part of their education, he bestows these names on the children: Pratt, Biddulph, Martyn. Some of these names I know today. Some of them attended parties at my parents’ home. Swirled in dance. Called me nephew.

But, in mentioning these names, Edward Bickersteth also does something very curious. He glosses over the most obvious name of the bunch: his own. Clearly, there were Africans who obtained the name. I have evidence. But for some reason, he says nothing at all about this particular naming. Maybe he was simply being modest. Or maybe it just wasn’t important enough to him, as unlikely as that seems (after all, he was literally telling the kids of the importance of their names). Or maybe there just weren’t any African Bickersteths yet. Maybe Bickersteth is a name that someone chose in the wake of Edward’s influential time in Freetown. Or maybe Edward is tiptoeing around some sort of impropriety. Maybe there were no African Bickersteths in 1816 because they were still growing in the womb. Maybe, since he only stayed a few months, he never even knew about the Bickersteth(s) he left behind.

If I sound cynical, I don’t mean to. I am sincerely interested to know what happened and I am prepared for all of the answers, tickling to tragic. Actually, it seems to me that Edward was simply too nice a person to pull off an impropriety. It’s always a possibility, given his empowered role, as well as the track record of men who find themselves in far-off lands whose inhabitants don’t quite count in the way that women like their wives back home do. Have you, for example, heard of the Métis? But though I am covering my bases, I have to confess that it doesn’t seem likely that Edward would have engaged in this kind of behaviour. He seems too nice. I might even anecdotally suggest that niceness is a standout Bickersteth trait. Years ago, on a flight to the U.K., I had one of those casual airplane friendships with the man seated next to me. We had very little in common but shared a natural curiosity about lifestyles different from our own. As the plane was deploying its landing gear, and we were gamely exchanging contact cards, my new friend did a double-take. “Bickersteth?” he said incredulously, staring at my card. “Your name is Bickersteth?” I felt an old familiar pit in my stomach. Things had been going so well. Was that old headache still lingering around? Appearing when I least expected? Least wanted it? The Freddy of my Elm Street? “I work for Bickersteths,” he continued matter-of-factly. “They own half the town I live in in Kent.” The more he spoke, the more I realized he was not questioning the legitimacy of my name. He was genuinely surprised to find himself seated next to someone who had the name of influence and capacity in his community, a name that literally represented his boss, but with whom he had been bantering on equal footing, sharing a laugh, enjoying himself. There was also the fact that our airplane romance had been predicated on our stark differences from each other. He was English; I was Canadian. He had an established career; I was a grad student. The list went on. I’m sure it startled him to see me attached to something so familiar in his world. He finally seemed to process the surprise and gave me a warm smile. His boss, he told me, is actually a very nice man. It was a nice gesture. It was as though he was affirming our own friendly relationship, drawing a figurative consonance between all Bickersteths. We’re nice.

I also somewhat made up for my failure to respond to Ursula Bickersteth (yes, she was also nice) who had sent me a letter during my time at UBC Press. I eventually made contact with an actual Bickersteth in England. At the time, I, too, was living in England. I was a graduate student at the University of London. My wife was working as the manager of a high-end shirt shop and so I was primarily caring for our infant son, who had been born in the U.K. Between my studies and my son, I was so busy I hardly had time to pay attention to what was going on around me. I had recently received an email that made no sense at all to me, outlining my responsibilities for an upcoming meeting that I had no knowledge of. Because I was so busy, I lost track of that email until the day I received a follow-up describing their satisfaction with my performance at this meeting I knew nothing about and had never attended. Now I paused to focus on the details long enough to read the one part of the message that I had skimmed over, indeed, that we all probably skim over: the salutation. It read, “Dear John.” I realized that the email was never intended for me. It was not even that someone had sent the email to the wrong address; rather, the correct address had landed in my box. I’m not sure I can explain this other than to say it was the early 2000s and (I guess) email technology wasn’t as robust as it is today. I’m no programmer so I can’t really explain it. All I can say is that I was randomly receiving someone else’s emails when I shouldn’t have been. One thing about it is that it wasn’t one hundred percent random: we shared a last name. At the time, I was on yahoo and my email address was something like bickersteth@yahoo.com. In those days, simply using your last name was enough to get you the email address of your choice. I can’t clearly remember John’s email address but it was very close to mine, maybe jbickersteth@yahoo.com or something like that. I remember thinking something along the lines of, “well, that shouldn’t be possible,” but now that I had solved the mystery, I allowed myself to get swept back up in the mayhem of my busy life. A few rogue emails later, I finally got around to emailing John to let him know about this anomaly and forward him his missing emails. It turns out that he had not been missing any messages; duplicates had been sent to my box. What’s more, he hardly seemed to care about what we would today see as a serious infringement of privacy and was instead thrilled to have made contact with another Bickersteth.

John was extremely nice in more than one way. It turns out he was retired and something of the family genealogist. Perhaps in an effort to redeem myself with Ursula, I immediately told him that my family was from Sierra Leone. He was completely undaunted. Like Burgon and Edward before him, he had an adventurous spirit and he fondly recognized all Bickersteths as legitimately Bickersteth. He enthusiastically told me about various branches he was in contact with in Nigeria. That was something I had no knowledge of. Nigerian Bickersteths? He shared with me the family’s connections to Church Missions and the many countries that had been therefore impacted. He gave off no imperialist vibes. He just seemed to have a genuine pleasure in connecting the Bickersteth dots around the world. When he learned I was studying literature, he encouraged me and pointed out that many Bickersteths were writers and many of them were also travellers. “Like you,” he prompted. He suggested that if I wrote about my experiences being abroad, I would be joining that tradition. For all of the postcolonial angst it caused me, John made me feel more legitimate in my Bickersteth name than I had ever felt before. When he learned I was wrapping up my studies and we were moving back to North America, he sent me a massive packet full of documents on the history of the Bickersteth name and a family tree that went back to the Middle Ages. He had sent it spontaneously and so the note he scrawled out in his looping spidery cursive expressed his hope that I would receive the package before I had left the country. He wished me all the best. “Warmest wishes to you, Bertrand. On your next visit to the U.K. you must come and stay.” He was so nice.

So maybe Edward Henry Bickersteth was just nice. His orientation was eurocentric, but his intention was egalitarian (through Christ). The best scenario, then, for my first Bickersteth, is that someone, let’s call him Abiola, found himself a pawn in the wars between Yoruba factions. Swept up in a military raid, he was sold to Europeans in exchange for weapons to serve their war. This was the worst thing to ever happen to Abiola. He was a fun-loving character, boisterous and demanding with his family, but loyal and full of exuberance. He enjoyed fufu lathered in palm oil and he loved the striking tang of palm wine tapped from the tree. He lived for song and dance and was known by everyone as an enthusiastic celebrant at any occasion. He prided himself on inventing new dance steps for festive times. One of them caught on in popularity and he smiled to see even the young people mimic his long, sweeping step followed by two joyful half-circles of the foot. Sometimes, his enthusiasm tipped the scales into frenetic, overexcited territory. But he never crossed that line far enough that anyone doubted he would eventually come to his senses. He always eventually did. Abiola was chained to his fellow captives and made to walk miles until they reached the coast. The sight of the sea terrified him. He had never seen it before and as far as he knew he had reached the end of the earth. Nothing of this mortal world could lie beyond that flat and shimmering expanse. In a sense, he was right: nothing human lay in store for him once he crossed that haunted plane. In another sense, what lay before him was only far too human in its appetite, its solipsism, its fear of the other. A man whose skin was transparent like a ghost’s approached him with a stick of some sort, and as he was held down by other Ghostmen, the first pressed the end of the stick onto his chest. The pain was excruciating. He screamed. He passed out. He was brought on board the Betsey, a ship that had already held hundreds of Africans, and the smell of their confinement, their struggles, assaulted Abiola the instant he was shoved below deck into the ominous hold.46

For two weeks he was in hell, tossed along the seas, stifled in the heat and stench of human fluid, excrement, blood. It was there, in the hold, that he realized he had certainly crossed into a world he did not belong. He felt the fury of the gods in every toss of the sea, every baffling encounter with the Ghostmen who had no interest in his suffering. A stubborn man, never one to accept the limits before him, he began to hatch a plan to fight back against the Ghostmen with the men chained nearest him. Then, as they were about to execute the insurrection, they heard a commotion on deck. There was cannon fire and excited voices. The women, who were generally not chained in the hold and had access to the deck, appeared to have already instigated something! They took advantage of the distraction to work at their manacles and, with the help of some of the women, freed themselves. When they reached the deck, they emerged into a battle raging in full. Ghostmen from another ship were boarding and attacking their captors. After a bloody battle, the new Ghostmen and the freedom-claiming Africans took control of the ship and returned it to the African coast.

Abiola found himself in Freetown, the most cosmopolitan place he had ever landed: he was surrounded by a plurality of people, languages, and customs. He was grateful to be back on land that he never thought he would see again. The Ghostmen who had fought with him on the ship commended his bravery and told him he was specially recognized by their God. Abiola wanted to know more about this God who had shown favour on him, allowing him to cross back through the Door of No Return. A Ghostman named Bickersteth showed him a book that spoke words of power and told him that he was blessed by the power of this book. In the coming weeks, Abiola settled in Freetown, found a loving partner whom he married, and tried to learn the Ghostmen’s language. But it was difficult. He never quite got the hang of it. Occasionally, he would finger the marks that had been burned into his chest, just over his heart. Bickersteth had told him it was a “letter” from his language. Abiola did not understand what this “letter” was exactly, but he felt a deep compulsion to erase it from his skin. He often traced it with a sad finger, as though he could do just that.47

Once, while he rubbed at the mark, he was surprised to feel an odd familiarity in its pattern. He rubbed at it again and again, trying to capture the meaning of the feeling when all of a sudden he recognized it. Its straight line and two swirls were an echo of the sweeping dance step he had invented just before the calamity of war had struck.

He was in awe. How did the Ghostmen know this? Was it their God? He had for so long hated this mark that his flesh could never forget.

Now, it remembered something entirely different. Maybe, because of this, he also never forgot Bickersteth and the blessings he had talked about. When Abiola’s first son was born, he cried with all the passion he used to expel at joyful celebrations. For the first time since he had been captured in the Yoruba wars, he got to his feet and he danced. Now his feet remembered what his flesh could not forget: the graceful straight-backed step, the two glorious swirls of joy. He called his son Ekundayo William Bickersteth, in honour of the Ghostman who shared his blessings with him. He wished all of his descendants the same transformational tears he had shed for generations to come.

This is the best version of the story, one in which the name Bickersteth is a special category of choosing, reflecting agency and transformation together. I don’t know if it is the right story. Documents on Africans who were returned to Sierra Leone from slave ships are incomplete and difficult to search through. The SlaveVoyages database provides a lot of information on the ships used in the slave trade and even provides limited information on the Africans who were landed in Freetown, including their African names and any marks noted on their skin.48 Similarly, the Register of Liberated Africans, housed in the British Library’s Endangered Archives Program, contains brief information on the people who were returned from slave ships to Freetown. But there is no way to connect this information to anyone who consequently chose (or inherited) a European name. There is no way to know when and how that specific transformation took place. These are the gaps we must sacrifice to the imagination, to the arts, to poetry. These are the choosings of agency that we must acknowledge took place. Maybe Freeman is a name that a Black rancher’s family in East-central Alberta had imposed on them. Maybe it is a name they chose. And maybe, in so choosing, they returned to it. Maybe, in the same manner, Bickersteth is simply a name one of my unnameable ancestors returned to. Though I suffered much confusion and embarrassment about my name when I was younger, I now clearly recognize the possibilities that others failed to see — like the tension inherent in African family trees that are marked by European names — as an impossible return that is a particular historical legacy. I need not feel shamed by Ursula Bickersteth’s unsuspecting presumptions or my colleagues at UBC Press who could never have known the turmoil they caused in me when they wondered at the possibility of a family link. Strangely, I think it was a reality that John Bickersteth sensed in his enthusiasm for all Bickersteths and is reflected in the poetry of the name Ekundayo, a Yoruba name I bequeathed to my son, which means my tears have become joy. In other words, impossible returns are the possibilities.

The final Black cowboy’s cattle brand I would like to share with you is one belonging to Charles Dyson. Dyson was a farmer, a rancher, and the community blacksmith in Pincher Creek, Alberta. His family story seems split between two remarkable possibilities. The first is that they lived as free Black people during the era of slavery. Dyson’s mother, Rachel, was born in 1824 or so in upstate New York, which strongly suggests her family was free. Dyson’s father, Charles Henry, was from Baltimore originally. Maryland was a slave state but Baltimore was a unique city in that it held the largest population of free Black people in the country.49 In fact, there were far more free Black people in Baltimore than enslaved ones. This suggests that Charles Henry, like his wife, was likely free, despite the prevailing presence of slavery. If true, it is a remarkable family legacy for Dyson to claim. The other possibility is equally remarkable: the Dysons are emblematic of freedom-seeking Black families who found their way to agency through the historic Underground Railroad.

Here I want to be cautious about what I’m celebrating exactly. The one element of Black history that is regularly admitted in Canada is the nation’s role in the Underground Railroad. But Canada is too quick to frame this history as a reflection of its own tolerance and benevolence in opposition to the racism of the United States, which legalized the practice of slavery. History as a gesture of solipsism doesn’t interest me, particularly in this context. I shouldn’t have to remind you, for example, that Canada also had legalized slavery, nor that many Black people returned to the U.S. immediately after the abolition of slavery there, a phenomenon that suggests things were not so attractive in “tolerant and benevolent” Canada that it encouraged them to stay here. For me, the significance of the Underground Railroad here is in its demonstration of the persistent claims on human dimensionality that Black people made. What they were seeking was not a simple relation between slavery and freedom, where freedom was the inverted prize to slavery. They were seeking the varieties of ways in which people express their humanity from under the cosh of limitations that restricted who they were and how they chose to live out extra/ordinary possibilities, such as family, relationship, and love.

Black people who were enslaved regularly and repeatedly sought ways out of slavery. They concocted ideas together, they colluded with allies, they asserted their visions. Although Baltimore was largely populated with free Black people, slavery was still the legal reality and, as a port city, slaves were still regularly sold into servitude in the South. Free Black people were often accused of being runaway slaves and threatened with being returned into slavery. The topic was particularly heated in the years leading up to 1850, which saw the Fugitive Slave law enacted. This was a law that shifted the onus of proof onto the accused. In other words, if a Black person was accused of being a runaway slave, the accuser no longer had to provide proof; instead, it was up to the Black person to show evidence that they had not escaped from slavery, which had a very high bar that was almost never met. This resulted in many innocent people being falsely forced into slavery and created an atmosphere of tension and antagonism among the free Black residents of Baltimore. During the 1840s, Dyson’s father made his way to Syracuse, New York, which was a prominent terminus on the Underground Railroad. This decision strongly suggests his desire to transcend an environment in which slavery prevails. Further to that, after marrying Rachel and starting a family, they all moved to Chatham, Ontario, which was yet another terminus on the Underground Railroad and had a large population of Black people who had come from the U.S. This pattern of movement, from Baltimore to Syracuse to Chatham, is deeply entrenched in the histories of migration that were made possible through the Underground Railroad.

However, the most consistent narration of the Underground Railroad in Canada overlooks its most important element. The dynamic is not a binary between slavery and freedom. This particular binary blinds Canadians to the obvious. Slavery didn’t just prevent “freedom” as a concept that limited Black people’s actions. Slavery dehumanized us. The heart of being human is social connection, meaningful community. From the start, slavery terrorized the meaningful connections between enslaved Africans. They were forced apart, prevented from sharing space with members of their own ethnic groups, depriving them of their customs, their languages, their world views. In the Americas they were further forced out of relation with each other. Family members could be sold at a moment’s notice; women could be raped; parentage was erased. Even attempts to commune spiritually were either refused or sporadically offered, and always heavily regulated. The response to these kinds of impositions was to vigorously seek to rebuild community, family, and relationship.

John Ware’s story may be inspiring to many Canadians because he “overcame slavery” but this is an abstract honour. The obvious is missed. Rarely is the centrality of his family relationships considered: that he had five children, that he had a loving wife, that she came from a large and loving family, itself connected to various ongoing Black communities in Alberta as well as in Ontario, where they came from. Rarely do people think of this very specific, very necessary achievement in Ware’s life: the re-fusing of networks of love through an ongoing and living complex of friendships, family, faith, and community. Witness, one of the most common acts that formerly enslaved Black people pursued after abolition was to marry. What does that tell you about the dimensionality of Black people? What does that tell you about the binary dynamic of slavery and freedom? Yes, the Underground Railroad is a centrally important vehicle of Black agency and Canada should be proud of its participation. But, frankly, it is lazy thinking to simply reduce the value of the Underground Railroad to the conduit of “freedom.” Dyson’s family may have been enslaved at some point and moved to align with the possibilities of agency, or, they may have been free Black people who chose to preserve their family by removing themselves from the unjustified threat of slavery. Either way, the family’s story is a remarkable one.

Charles Dyson was born into this context in 1844 or 1845, in Syracuse, New York. In 1850, the family was still located in Syracuse; in 1861, they were settled in Chatham, Ontario. But by 1870, they were back in the U.S. It appears that the Dyson family is included among the statistics of Black people who did not see the need to stay in Canada once slavery in the U.S. was abolished. Curiously, though, while the family resettles in Barry County, Michigan, Charles, who was about twenty-seven years old at this point, chose to stay in Canada. It may have been that he had spent the significant years of his childhood there and now felt “Canadian” enough to want to stay when the rest of the family returned to the U.S.50 Who knows? Like so much of Black history, we are forced into speculation because the gaps outnumber the facts. But I think I have one clear indication of what might have kept him rooted in the Great White North. In 1870, he married a local girl, Liza Jefferson, and he never left Canada after that.

By 1900, the couple reappeared in Pincher Creek, Alberta. Pincher Creek is cattle country and so it is no surprise that Charles eventually took up ranching. His cattle brand first appears in the 1900 North West Brand Book.

As a contributor of Black cattle brands in Alberta, Charles Dyson stands out for two very important reasons. First, as a blacksmith and as someone who had a cattle brand, it is very likely that he forged his own branding iron. This is remarkable to me because it reveals the conception of brand designs for what it is: artistry. I see Dyson as a fellow poet, a scribe whose language was molten metal, whose medium was fire.

For me, this makes Dyson seem like Hephaestus, the Greek God who forged great weapons and armour for the heroes, notably Achilles and Aeneas (in his Roman incarnation, Vulcan). He was, too, a lame God who had been cast from the heights of Mount Olympus by Zeus, his own father, for the simple reason, it would seem, that he was ugly. In some stories, Hephaestus is the sole creation of Hera, Zeus’s wife, and that’s why he is hurled from heaven’s heights. Zeus is angered by her creative independence and immediately takes a dislike to the son who is not his son. To cement the relationship, it is emphasized that Hephaestus is ugly and even Hera is embarrassed by her own creation (in some versions, she is the one who tosses him away for this reason). Either way, he is forcibly ejected from heaven. In most accounts, his ignominious landing injures his foot permanently, which sometimes makes him something of a laughingstock to the other gods. In this way, I strongly identify with him. I often felt as though Alberta, my parent who is not my parent, rejected me growing up. Equally, it is a powerful metaphor for the Black experience in general. Marked by this thing called Blackness, we are also marred by it. At the same time, like Hephaestus, we find ways of transcending it, of transforming it, of creating.

In this way, maybe it is also fitting to think of Dyson as a version of Ogun, the West African Yoruba God. Like Hephaestus, Ogun is something of a blacksmith; he has access to and forges with iron; he is a technological god, who provides the way forward when no clear path seems available. The difference between the two is that Ogun is not a victim of circumstances in the way that Hephaestus is. True to many Greek myths, Hephaestus is a character in a drama full of characters. The challenges that he faces have to do with the personalities and ambitions of other — more powerful gods — around him. His solution is metaphorical: he creates weapons out of his dire circumstances. But the problem he emblematizes is purely human: you’re ugly and we don’t like you. In the case of the Yoruba God, the problem is circumstantial: it is simply the nature of reality that occasionally there are obstacles to face. Sometimes, this is depicted as a literal bush space between Heaven and Earth that the gods are struggling to find their way through. Ogun seizes iron from the earth, almost in an act of determined theft, and by creating tools like machetes, forges a path through the impenetrable bush for the gods to make their way. In the West African tradition, it is the problem that is metaphorical: life has obstacles we cannot avoid. This has nothing to do with personalities or the drama of characters; it is simply the existential realities of the world we must face.

I think of Charles Dyson as Black Hephaestus because in my mind he is a hybrid of the Greek and Yoruba traditions. In an oddly fitting way, the new hybridized label obscures its African origins. Ogun + Hephaestus = Black Hephaestus. This is the inevitable result of our North American context. The fact of Blackness — the historical reconfiguring of our identities — is the unavoidable existential reality on this continent. It is scrawled over top of any preceding dimensions. And it happens to any African — and most dark-skinned people — who comes to this country from elsewhere, regardless of their own preexisting histories, ethnicities, traditions, or languages. They become palimpsestically Black. This is one way of looking at the Wild West of human relations that this continent perpetrates. Once relocated here, Black people are caught up in a forced relation with white people making meaning for themselves. This makes us subject to all manner of illogical categorizations, from the petty — being placed at the bottom of hierarchies of beauty — to the profound — having the legitimacy of our humanity questioned — even as pettiness and profundity are collapsed as one. Charles Dyson’s historic presence clears the way for me, provides me with a path through an impenetrable set of circumstances that also involves stealing the language of burned flesh.

I said that Dyson stands out in two ways. The first is that he is the forger of his own branding iron, Black Hephaestus. The second is that he is always with his wife, Liza, the woman who kept him rooted in Canada when the rest of his family went back to the U.S. Charles and Liza were married in Ontario and made the move west to Alberta at the end of the nineteenth century. Eventually, they started a ranch in Pincher Creek and Charles registered his brand. If you will indulge me, I would like to suggest that Liza is the key to unlocking Charles’s brand. Reading this cattle brand presents a challenging opacity. All of the cattle brands I’ve been exploring have their particular difficulties, and Dyson’s brand is particularly challenging because it is composed of numbers. These numbers don’t appear to bear any direct relation to anything obvious either, like the year of his birth or some other straightforward talisman. Much like today’s 6-7 (which you will have no understanding of if you are reading this in 2026 and you are over the age of forty), a basic sequence is suggested; in fact, it is the most basic sequence, the initiating numbers at the start of the entirety of numbers. But, with no supporting context at all, the simplicity itself is rendered as an inscrutable complexity. Because of who I am, I would like to offer some poetic guidance toward understanding this brand. To my eye, there is a third, fundamental mark to the brand. This is the bar between the two numbers. In the language of cattle brands, bars are very common and they decorate all sorts of well-known historic brands, such as the Bar U Ranch in Southern Alberta, and the Bar S Ranch near Nanton, AB, or the brand mark, “Bar 7 Square S” (often mistaken for 75), which has been in the family of a friend of mine since the early 1900s.

Part of the difficulty with deciphering brands is that they very often convey some sort of insider knowledge; you have to be part of the community or, as with my friend’s family brand, part of the family, to fully know the brand. And the bar is a fundamental starting point with cattle brands. Every straight line begins with a bar. But also, it is the cattle thief’s main tool. The running iron is a simple bar that can be applied to existing brands, changing their original design. For example, a bar added to the bottom of a capital F changes the letter into an E. Cattle thieves would judiciously add their simple strokes to existing brands and thus falsely alter the ownership and deviously claiming the cattle for themselves. Like it or not, folks, this, too, is poetics. You’ve been seeing it in action. Frederick Hall’s F plus Charles Dyson’s Bar progresses my alphabet, illustrating my point.

I can cut the inscrutability of Green Walters’s yoke in half, flip it, and make it the Jumping-off point for my brand of poetics by simply adding a line.

I can assert myself as a subject self when I realign Dyson’s bar as mine.

When I add a line to his line and have it lie down, I create the beginning of a new line.

A new lie that is also mine.

These are the poetics of Black brands that I choose to lift to the level of theft. The simple bar is the fundamental line that begins everything by palimpsestically erasing what was there before. In the language of Black cattle brands, the bar is the only mark that can add and subtract at the same time. This is not an idle or passing observation. Note, in cattle brands the bar is a joining symbol that can literally link. You can see it in the case of the Bar U brand, in which the bar and the U become a unit, though not actually connected. It is certainly the case with a brand like S-S, in which the bar literally links the two letters together, like two criminals, or captives, slave to slave.

This is the clear adding power of the bar. But bars can also subtract, particularly when they are enacted by running irons. With a running iron, I can take the c branded on your cattle and turn it into a d and then, with two more strokes, it can become d7. Now you’ve lost your cattle to me. Your brand is erased. My additions equal your subtraction.

This, too, if you will allow me, is the poetry of Dyson’s cattle brand. The evidence is in his move to Alberta. Once here, he did a number of impressive things: he became Pincher Creek’s first blacksmith, he started a ranch with his wife, he designed and registered his own cattle brand, and he witnessed his wife register a brand under her name as well. Even John Ware — who acquired multiple brands and dispersed them throughout his family — did not hold a brand side by side with his wife, who held her own. This circumstance surely makes Charles and Liza Dyson the most cattle couple of all the Black cattle ranchers in the West. I’m still looking, but at this point I can probably say that Liza Dyson was one of the few Black women in Western Canada who owned her own cattle brand — the first being Nettie Ware, when she was barely ten years old. When I first spotted Liza’s brand in the brand book, it seemed to strongly evoke something of the Dyson name to me.

The brand is composed of an inverted — or upside down — P, followed by a number 7, all over an inverted rafter symbol. Inverted letters, more colourfully, can also be called “crazy” letters. Rafters are normally placed above other figures, like the roof of an A-frame house, but brands often play around with positioning. In this case, the rafter is being a little “crazy” too, being upside down as well as acting somewhat like the “floor” of the brand. The fact that the letter P was crazy, strongly suggesting a d, along with the coincidence of the 7’s somewhat analogous shape to the letter y (particularly the similarly angled backbone of them both), immediately struck me as an attempt to approach the first two letters of the Dyson family name.

But this interpretation was soon countered by another reality. In the 1907 published brand book, I came across the same brand registered to John Hardy. Normally, this is not a large problem. Identical brands were often registered by different people so long as they placed it in a different location on the animal’s body. This is why you will see “right thigh” or “left flank” mentioned as part of the brand information. Also, though, if the two brand owners live reasonably far away from each other — such that their cattle could never interact and be confused with one another — it was considered acceptable for their brands to be completely identical. I have seen many identical brands in various brand books, but they were often located in different provinces or in opposite regions of the same province. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these distances would have been impossible to overcome without weeks’ worth of travel. In the case of Liza Dyson’s brand, though, the two owners were both located in Pincher Creek, Alberta. This could only mean one thing: Liza had purchased cattle from John Hardy and had the existing brand registered in her name as part of the transfer. I was only slightly disappointed that the brand wasn’t her original design. It’s still a great accomplishment, a great story: this Black woman in Southern Alberta was part of the cattle industry and there is a record of her participation. Moreover, she participated as part of a Black family, a power couple of Black ranching deities, Hephaestus and Aphrodite, growing their stock, expanding their brand. Let me quickly point out, however, that Aphrodite does not make a neat comparison here because in the Greek myths her marriage to Hephaestus was arranged and marked by infidelity. I do prefer to think of her in her Roman incarnation of Venus because Black Venus was a Civil Rights symbol that artists such as Margaret Burroughs and Romare Bearden invoked powerfully.51 But, like the secret language of Black cattle brands, “Venus” courts more than one Black history, bringing to mind for instance Sarah Baartman, who was paraded around Europe as the Hottentot Venus, and is not easily or uncomplicatedly accessed in any context.

Mainly, though, the analogy doesn’t work for me because the Dysons seemed like such a solid couple. I said that Charles Dyson did a number of impressive things when he moved to Alberta, and the most impressive thing, by far, is that he fell for his Black Venus, Liza. Twice. There is an odd blip in the historical documents. After Charles and Liza move from Ontario to Alberta, there is a mention of the husband and wife getting married again. When I first saw this, I had to shake my head.

Wow, I thought to myself. What a loverman Dyson was. Not content to get hitched to his Canadian gal in Ontario, he doubled down on his love and renewed the whole process in Alberta. I loved this idea of fealty to love, this longevity, this ever-enduring commitment. Fittingly, Dyson’s brand is also notable for being one of the longest-standing Black brands. He registered it in 1900 and it shows up in brand books for the next twenty years. None of the other Black brands I’ve discussed (or identified so far) offer this level of longevity. In this way, they conform to the general ephemerality of Black history, but in this one very specific way my Black Hephaestus bucks this trend. Why wouldn’t this long-distance competitor in love persistently prove his presence, his particular dimensionality? He got married to the same woman twice!

Except that he didn’t. On 1 November 1870, Charles Dyson was married to Eliza Jefferson in Chatham, Ontario, but on 6 June 1901, when Charles married Eliza again, this time she was called Eliza Johnson. It is the most extraordinary coincidence that is nothing more than ordinary in that particular day and age. Elizabeth is a common name, less so today, but not much less. Eliza is almost never a diminutive version today, but it was ubiquitous in that form in Charles Dyson’s day. There really is no mystery behind his two marriages: they were two different Elizas. But what happened to the first Eliza? Eliza Jefferson from Chatham? I imagine her as a childhood sweetheart. There is no clear evidence of how long the Dysons lived in Chatham before heading back to the U.S. — it could have been anywhere from a few years to nearly two decades. And if it was the latter period, Dyson would very likely consider Chatham his home and Liza Jefferson his hometown girl. But as usual, Black history is a reluctant guest at the party of clear facts. Instead of mingling at the centre of the crowd, it hangs back, speaking only shyly and intermittently, uncertain of the company it is meant to keep. Hence, mysteries abound: in 1871, for example, there is no sign of Charles in the census. Eliza is there, in Chatham, married (her name is now Dyson), but Charles was somehow missed — or missing. It was probably nothing more than Dyson was out and the census enumerator did not account for everyone in the household. But this seems strange. Why wouldn’t Eliza account for him? Why would he not have somehow turned up on the census anyway? Was there discord between the newlyweds? Had something already happened — barely a year into their marriage — that tainted Eliza’s willingness when the enumerator inquired after her husband (she is, after all, indicated as married on the census)? Whatever the reason, Charles Dyson is a non-presence in 1871, until he pops back up — with Eliza — in the 1881 census. No apologies. No explanation. That is the way of historical documents. And then, after that — again with no explanation — it is Eliza who takes over as the non-presence. The 1881 census is her last appearance in history. This is why it was so easy for me to assume the couple was still a couple when I located them in Alberta in the 1900s. People pop in and out of censuses all the time. In this way, censuses are both the official records and the magic acts of our collective past. And part of the magic is built into the genealogical and research process. In other words, part of the deception in the magic act includes me: I didn’t locate the Dysons in the east and then travel with them forward in time as they travelled west to Pincher Creek. I found Charles Dyson in Alberta first; I lovingly located his cattle brand in the 1900 Brand Book; I saw his wife’s name in a later brand book; and then I traced their trajectory back in time. Eliza (Johnson) Dyson was my first Eliza Dyson. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to assume the Eliza I saw in 1881 was the same Eliza I saw in 1906; that she was the same Eliza Dyson living (alone?) in Chatham one year; that she was the same Eliza who married her Chatham man in a Methodist church the year before.

But she wasn’t. Eliza Jefferson was Dyson’s hometown honey from Chatham. Eliza Johnson was not even from Canada. She had been living in Chicago before marrying Charles. In fact, she had already been married previously. Her maiden name is actually Reed and she was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, a stone’s throw away from where Charles’s family had moved after they left Chatham. In a weird way, she too might be considered a hometown gal to the Dyson family in general. Who knows, maybe this marriage was arranged after all between families familiar with each other. (Maybe Black Venus is her appropriate divine avatar.) The archives say very little about these intimate details. But some things can be determined. We know that Charles had been in Pincher Creek since at least 1891, and we know that this represents a ten-year gap since his first bride last appears in the documents. As for her disappearance, Charles himself whispers the sad truth from the archives. In the 1891 federal census, Dyson admits a W next to his name: he was a widower and Eliza was dead. If she had somehow lived to 1891, she would have barely cracked her forties. I suspect she did not get even that far, that she died while the couple was still in Ontario, that her death, maybe, precipitated an irretrievable change in Charles, which led him to do the impossible, even when his parents had beckoned from Michigan decades earlier: leave his beloved Chatham for good.

How did Eliza die? What took her life so young? History peers shyly at us but keeps quiet. Dyson had moved west like all of the era’s aspiring opportunists, but he was striving to escape the shadow that had fallen over his heart as much as he was moving toward something new. He was no longer young; he was approaching his fifties; he was changed by the shadow over his heart. And soon, I will show you proof. Nevertheless, it was a new beginning for him, and he made the most of it. He was self-sufficient and pioneering; he became the town’s first blacksmith. He built a log cabin for himself that was remembered in the 1940s and seen as historic. He was a member of the community, as demonstrated by his many mentions in the Pincher Creek Echo. Maybe he rekindled something of his old sense of home in this new town in Alberta. Maybe this new departure rekindled an old dimension in him and he felt the flames of love, for Eliza, again.

Maybe. I don’t know. There is a famous story concerning my namesake, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, and his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead. In their influential text Principia Mathematica, they set out to prove the symbolic logic of the basic equation 1 + 1 = 2, which they do, but it takes them several hundred pages. In other words, for all its simplicity, one and one is not a straightforward equation. The poetry flowing in me understands this wrinkle through the logic of running irons. It tells me that bars are always important. Bars can be barriers, even forms of banishment. When we say “bar none,” we invoke it as a counter to itself. We reach for it as a standard; it can be high or low, depending on if you’re being aspirational or critical. In the language of brands, the bar links, it joins, but sometimes it also subtracts. And, maybe, as I apply my own running iron — my own bar — to this narrative, I am altering Dyson’s narrative with my own mark (of course I am: I have been leaving my marks all over history in this book). But maybe this double way of seeing bars — as additions and subtractions — is an appropriate way of reading his brand. I apply the poetry of my running iron to Dyson’s bar and alter it, without altering it, from a bar sign to a minus sign. In so doing, I alter Dyson’s brand from a cipher of meaning to a decipherable brand, from random numbers to a balancing equation. Now, I no longer see “one bar two.” I see one and two and one minus two. The bar becomes its doubled self, the linking and the subtraction at once. The gathering force of belonging (a pseudo roundup of the everyday) and the obtruding barrier of exclusion at the same time.

Charles Dyson did many impressive things when he moved to Alberta. But, maybe, according to my running iron poetry at least, the most impressive thing he did was to acknowledge his two Lizas, both of whom he loved, both of whom he was joined to — a situation that could only exist simultaneously in his brand. And this doubling is a dimensionality of love that is elevated by the brand. As much as the 2 can represent his two Lizas, it is even more powerfully representative of a state of union, something that he lost when he lost Liza Jefferson to death. The 1 is not simply Charlie himself, but the bachelor minus the state of union he aspires toward. The bar in this context is the most basic mark because it signals the fullness of his dimensionality. The one is always connected to the two, even when it cannot be connected to both. Even when one Liza gets subtracted from the equation, the bachelor is still the man of matrimony. The basic bar speaks to a plurality that is only too human. In this way, Dyson has advanced Green Walters’s Double Doke. Dyson’s “doubledness” is the simultaneous plus and minus of belonging. But it is not a state of belonging that is in any way beholden to impositions from white society. It is not a navigation of obstacles to assert or prove the validity of one’s humanity against the prevailing standard. In Dyson’s case, the proof is in the equation. He was born to a family whose defining impulse was to realize the freedom in love. If seeking companionship, union, intimate communing is the highest bar for human relationship, then it is also the most basic, common impulse of all people and thus the lowest bar. This is the truest dimensionality of our humanity. It defies both the rules of geometry and the laws of physics. It is simultaneously local and universal. It is physically embodied and geographically displaced. And, maybe, when it is flattened into something like Blackness, maybe, it is still perfectly capable of figuring out its own undeniable brand of love.

In the 1980s, when the world was not so thoroughly interconnected as social media’s present-day has enabled, a returnee from a visit “home” was an event to celebrate by the Prairie Africans of my Alberta. This meant the delivery of many long-missed items that the average Canadian doesn’t even know they’re missing, but that was soul-restoring and regenerative to my parents’ generation. This would mean actual palm oil was now accessible. No more canned tomato paste as a weakly-analogous substitute. For a couple of weekends my mom would busily prepare Krio culinary classics like plassass and granat sup in what she called the proper way. “Ah,” I thought to myself, “so all along we’ve been eating another version of a hodgepodge, pinching ingredients that don’t actually belong to us.” My own personal teenage angst was not so thick a fog, though, that I couldn’t see the joy these reconnections brought to the displaced West Africans. And nothing seemed to encapsulate that more than music. They were thrilled by the latest musical craze from Freetown and wore out the grainy cassette tapes from weeks of replay. Funny enough, though, the party music they seemed to favour mostly came from the other side of the ocean. For a lot of my childhood, my parents had been happy to bounce along to dance songs coming out of the Caribbean: the eighties reggae vibes of Black Uhuru; the soul-inflected crooning of Gregory Isaacs, especially his hit “Night Nurse;” and particularly the sizzling rhythms of soca music from Trinidad. Arrow’s “Hot, Hot, Hot” drenched our living room dance floors long before Buster Poindexter reintroduced his slightly cabaret, slightly campy version to mainstream audiences. Mighty Sparrow, a calypso master who switched it up with soca in the eighties had a massive hit with a song called “Soca Pressure,” whose insistent chorus thrummed in my head years after those eighties house parties. Their ultimate choice, though, had to have been “Tiny Winey,” a classic “jump-up” by the Jamaican group Byron Lee & the Dragonaires. This was played at every gathering with energy and enthusiasm and was almost certain to get our parents urging the kids to join them “just this once.” We did. But we feigned exasperation to keep our teen street cred.

It was “Tiny Winey” that was playing on the night my family was throwing a party for Aunty Biola. The evening had been a roaring success, even when her husband, my Uncle Biola, tipped the evening toward something menacing, something approaching sinister. And me, in my confused frustration about which identity I could authentically own, had been so seduced by this glimpse into an alternate universe where my uncle was still somehow both in Calgary, on the winter prairies, and in Sierra Leone, acting the part of a “real” African man, that I had completely forgotten about the purpose of the party. And I should not have forgotten that. I should have been aware of how jubilantly my aunt was being celebrated, how everything was tinged with the prickle of relief, how, even, purposefully and intently my aunt, aglow in the atmosphere of rejoice, gazed at me.

My Aunt Biola was unlike her husband in so many ways. She was orderly and timely; he was instinctive and abrupt. She was a thoughtful planner; he was a reactive volcano. She was a meticulous manager of events; he was a hopeless, helpless victim of circumstances. In one way, though, they were very suited to each other. They both tended to be traditional in their responsibilities to each other. Uncle Biola was the breadwinner, handled anything to do with the car, punished the children, and dealt with door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers. Aunt Biola managed the household, did not have a driver’s licence, knew every woman on the block, and always had Uncle Biola’s supper ready when he got home. In this way, their inversions marked the shape of the puzzle pieces of their shared lives: mysteriously compatible. Part of the mystery was that they both shared strong and stubborn personalities and could be unrelenting in the positions they took up. Occasionally, it made for spectacular arguments, but for the most part their puzzle pieces slid into a natural and effortless place.

One of these arguments took place just a few weeks before the night of the party. Aunt Biola was so talented she could have pulled any number of hustles. Because of her braiding skills, she was our community hairdresser. She was also a seamstress on the side. Topping all, though, was the fact that Aunt Biola was an immaculate cook. In fact, she had been trained at culinary school. Whenever the West Africans of Alberta got together, she would produce a breathtaking table of dishes, mixing African and European traditions with panache, the sheer number of dishes requiring side tables and the kids’ card table all jammed into their small dining room. At these events, everyone would chip in some dish or other, but Aunt Biola’s Salone Salad or pɛpɛsup with ɔgfut or with krenkre would outdo all else, dominating the table in size and opulence. Aunty Biola was also the best at rejigging Sierra Leonean meals into new, Canadian contexts. She was the one who would discover a unique substitute for palm oil or cassava leaves, when everyone else was making do with tomato paste or spinach.

One day, Aunty Biola surprised everyone by getting a job. It was a cooking job that started very early in the morning and ended early in the afternoon, so she would be home with plenty of time to have Uncle’s food waiting on the table. Yet no one was surprised more by her shift into the world of the duly employed than Uncle Biola. He simply had not seen it coming. Truthfully, Uncle Biola is the kind of guy who only expects the world to go as he expects. Much as I’d love to frame his eccentricities — wearing summer clothes in winter, shouting as his default volume — as some form of heroics, in fact, he is simply a man who does not see the point of yet another perspective when his own will do just fine. Part of why he doesn’t feel the need to think beyond the next thirty seconds is that there is nothing in his world to predict. Anticipation is the activity of the weak or needy, or of pointless dreamers. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems to me that one of the reasons why he married my aunt is that her sense of order and meticulous planning produced solidly reliable routines in my uncle’s life. And perhaps this bubble of predictability she produced for him also created certain illusions for him: that he was in control of world’s events; that inevitabilities were a natural function of gravity or the law of physics; that the woman he married, who ensured his clothes were ironed and his belly filled, would always be that same woman who ensured he was properly clothed and fed. That supper would always be placed in front of him at 6:00 p.m.

“It will be placed in front of you at 6:00 p.m.,” my aunt protested. But Uncle Biola was still too much in shock to process her words. It had never occurred to him that he might have a wife who would elicit some measure of satisfaction outside of the house in a capacity that had nothing to do with him. It so defied his expectations that he had nothing to say. He just retreated into himself — in that way I saw him do at the party, when I glimpsed him as a “real” African man — his eyes cagey and red, his chest rising and falling in silence.

Later that night they had an intense fight that was defined by the acrid silences they launched at each other. My aunt called my mom, her voice rising and rising in pitch, just starting to crack. Another uncle of mine, Mark — who we called Modu — called Uncle Biola and tried to reason with him. Uncle Modu was a university professor and reasoned everything out. His eyes had a piercing intensity, but his belly and his laughter were both soft. When I think of Uncle Modu, I can’t imagine any other version of him living in Sierra Leone. He was younger than my parents’ generation by about ten years, and he left Sierra Leone about ten years after them. To me, this made him a very recent arrival, but somehow he was already more Canadian than all of them. He adapted to the food; winter annoyed but didn’t exasperate him; he spoke French. It made me wonder if there was really no such thing as a “real” African man, no alternate universe that I was being deprived of. Maybe, if ever there was an alternate universe, we were already living in it: West Africans on the Prairies, transforming and being transformed by simply being there. Of all my displaced relatives, Uncle Modu was the least likely to refer back to their lives in Sierra Leone as a touchstone for recuperation or sense-making in Canada. He was a great storyteller and often recalled extraordinary-sounding events to me about life in Freetown, but these stories — his old life — were just an aspect of his totality, the foundational layer of an ever-accreting life. If Uncle Biola was lodged in the present, devoid of expectations from a sheer lack of imagination, Uncle Modu was always reconsidering the future, imagining newer and newer possibilities.

“Eh, bo,” he cajoled Uncle Biola. “Let’s not make a to-do here. Trɛnkman nɔ fɔ fɛn plaba.”

Uncle Biola glared at him, his breath stirring from somewhere deep in his chest. But my soft-bellied professor of an uncle did not relent. He let out his sigh.

“Bo,” he insisted softly.

The following week everyone was over at our place celebrating Aunty Biola’s success at landing her job. Uncle Biola seemed to have overcome his surprise, though there was something extra to his energy that night. Although he was laughing in high spirits, occasionally I would see my mom give my dad a wary look. In fact, thinking back, everyone seemed vaguely cautious around Uncle Biola that night. The only people who seemed insensible were Paul and Mary, our token Africans who were from the Caribbean. Paul was the incessant joker of the group. Every single sentence he uttered would raise raucous laughter or loud groans. His wife, Mary, was very thin, light-skinned, and considerably taller than him. Paul was a compact, arrow-headed man with darting eyes. He often held his hands in a pose of expectant reverence, his fingertips just touching as though he were on the verge of postulating or professing something profound. Unlike Uncle Modu who was a professor, everything about Paul seemed to aspire toward academic authority. His constant ribbing was the generous contrast to this persona that nobody took seriously anyway. I liked Paul because he was one of the few adults who seemed to give as much attention to the kids as to everyone else. I never understood his jokes, but I felt included whenever he launched one into the general revelry. Sometimes, he had hardly finished the joke before I was barking out in gleeful appreciation. Often, I laughed even louder when the surrounding response seemed sluggish. I felt protective of his sense of humour. At times it was only me and Mary — who without fail tittered silently at every single one of his jokes, her shoulders bouncing up and down — who reflected Paul’s merriment back at him. On this night, Paul’s joking seemed to punctuate the tension around Uncle Biola’s energy. Although the two seemed to reflect jubilance at each other, in truth there was something very precise in each one’s delivery that completely missed the other’s. It was as though they were funhouse mirrors to each other, reflecting approximations.

I didn’t really pick up on it, though. All of my participatory laughter was masking an inner turmoil. A few days earlier, I had careened between feeling invincible and feeling vulnerable, and I was still struggling to reconcile the feeling. I kept pressing my hand to the logo on the chest of my shirt, like a talisman of protection. But instead, my hand felt jolted by the hammering heart beneath it. I was wearing a brand-new Polo shirt. It was a light pink, a hue approaching what we used to think of as Miami Vice pink. I wish I didn’t need to, but I feel compelled to explain that Miami Vice was a hit police drama in the eighties (Don Johnson’s break-out show) that managed to capture our attention as much for the striking neon fashion it displayed as for its narrative-thin, action-packed storylines. My shirt hinted at that brand of pink, and so would be noticeable to anyone of my generation, but it had a softer, more conciliatory tone. The logo featured a horse-mounted polo player brandishing his mallet. It was iconic. I loved this man and his mallet. I loved the purity of the icon. My mom was forever buying me watered-down brand look-alikes: Lee jeans instead of Levi’s, Sanyo portable cassette players instead of Sony Walkman, Janzy backpacks instead of JanSport. This was my first Polo shirt — not Pollo or Po-lo or Pillo but Polo — and the heat of its logo against my chest filled me with a sense of power. I knew it would get a reaction from my cousins. It did. Even Paul gave me a knowing wink. I was invincible.

When my friend Gabriel walked out of the store, cold and self-certain, with four bottles of Polo cologne in his bag, he taught me a new way of accurately understanding myself in the eyes of Albertans. If he was unmolested because he understood himself to be an unmolestable creature, then surely I would be unseen because I knew myself to be an unseeable creature. What Gabriel didn’t teach me, though, was how to feel invincible. I was so inspired by this new vision of myself he had helped me toward that I didn’t stop to think about how I felt about this transformed self. I think there must have been some part of me that was torn about it. I remember going back to that very same store that Gabriel had pillaged the day before, determined to reproduce his feat. I kept my gaze away from the surly, pock-faced stockboy who was barely older than me. He had tried to flip up the collar of his Lacoste shirt, but one side remained flopped inward, almost drooping to his collar bone. I scoffed to myself. I admit: I felt a measure of confidence. But it was not the usual type of confidence. It was the confidence that comes with recognizing a new concept. When certain pathways in our brain connect, we feel good. I think this is even more powerfully felt when the new concept aligns with an old mystery, something that we’ve experienced or encountered regularly throughout our lives but lacked the knowledge of or language for to the extent that it remained opaque, unnameable. Gabriel’s cool indifference was the connector for me. It sparked a trail of recognition that wriggled through my brain, lighting up dark avenues that I had suspected were there but couldn’t find my way through. And when two pathways intersected, my whole mind lit up with a dopamine dose of disillusionment that was irresistible. This is what I felt. I was high on understanding.

But as I stood in the drugstore aisle, staring at those bottles of Polo, I couldn’t maintain the feeling. I still felt unseen, but not in the clear, dopamine-doused way that I had earlier. Maybe I was an unseeable creature. Maybe not. I was certainly a creature of some sort, a confounding, numinous sort of creature. But was that enough to protect me? All of this ruminating interfered with my feelings of invincibility. I knew I had to act quickly or I would draw attention to myself and the whole thing would blow up in my face. I had been standing, frozen in thought in the aisle, for too long as it was. The stockboy huffed past me, flicking at his collar. I made my decision. I picked up a box of Polo and dropped it into my backpack. I swung the bag over my shoulder and walked toward the door. I had deliberately taken the box while the pock-faced, drooping-collared stockboy was walking away from me, but still in the aisle. It seemed to confirm my particular brand of invisibility, especially when he got to the end of the aisle and quickly disappeared around the corner without a glance backward. I made my way down the aisle and toward the exit. Out of the corner of my eye I could make out several employees huddled at a till, but I ignored them. If my theory was right, I would be unseen to them because I am unseeable in this country. I knew that in the simplest terms I did not count. That is why people were not satisfied when I continually responded here when they persisted, no, where are you really from? Coming out of my mouth, where I am really from (here) doesn’t count. That is why I had virtually no academic teachers encourage me when I was young, despite (I now recognize) my clearly academic bent. My intellect didn’t count. That is why nobody saw any point in recognizing Black History Month in Alberta until 2017 — more than two centuries into the Prairies’ Black history. Our presence here doesn’t count. My theory was that these were the proof of my invincibility and, like Gabriel, who understood how to take advantage of his position in the world with brilliant clarity, I only had to fill the role that was expected of me to get the things I wanted.

The trouble was, my theory was not right. Or, I should say it was incomplete. As I neared the door, I had to pass directly past the huddle of young workers, and I couldn’t help myself: I glanced toward them as I made my exit. They were all bent over some task on the counter — I think it was a magazine — except for one of them. He was standing erect, serenely surveying. Now his collar was inexplicably and perfectly flipped up, as though on alert, as though sensing something amiss. In the millisecond of my glance, it seemed, too, that his acne disaster had vanished. His hair, which I had never noticed before, had a Tom Cruise shag à la Risky Business. What I had taken earlier as surliness now read as low-grade disdain. Frankly, he looked cool. He stood calmly, his oblivious coworkers chattering beneath him, sunlight from the store window shining on his face, his eyes falling on my backpack with calm inner understanding. If not for the darkness of his hair and his peaceful demeanour, he would have reminded me completely of Gabriel. I looked away as quickly as I could have. Something in me did not want to see anything in him as remotely close to Gabriel. But I’m sure in my hastiness I must have looked furtive and just added to the guilt I was slowly projecting from my orbit.

“Hey,” I heard him call. I ignored it. Don’t slow down, I warned myself. Don’t look back, I urged. I felt myself slow my pace. What are you doing? You idiot, keep going! I did not keep going. I turned to face him, like a wildebeest who knows he will not make it across the river, who can only imagine the crocodile’s jaws around his neck, who perhaps welcomes the end of the flight and the oncoming darkness instead. When I faced him, I did not see the jaws of a crocodile. His eyes seemed vaguely unfocused, as though he was looking right through me. Confused, I glanced behind me but there was no one else. He pointed at me — or what felt like through me — and said, “Your backpack.” I stood frozen, feeling the crocodile’s jaws tighten against my throbbing Adam’s apple. “JanSport,” he said and flipped a thumb skyward. Then it clicked. He was approving of my backpack. I hated that bag and I usually tucked it under my seat or flipped it face down or otherwise tried to hide the fact that it was a ridiculous look-alike that my mom had bought for me, not caring or knowing the difference between the trendy JanSport and the no-name Janzy or Janzen or whatever it was called. Even the logo was a shameless imitation of the original brand, which was a smart looking dark blue patch with red lettering highlighted in white. It was unmistakably JanSport’s brand. But the Janzy version was an off-colour patch and the letters had no highlights. It might fool an adult, or someone from a distance, but it would never pass muster if given a second investigation by someone in the know. And in my circles, everyone was in the know. But somehow, whether because of the distance or the fact that he wasn’t really that cool after all, the surly-faced boy with the indecisive collar did not give it the twice-over. He seemed to think I was in possession of the genuine article. I let him. For all that I thought I had been identified, he had not actually seen me. Just like that I eased back into my familiar invisibility. I slipped out of the store. The world ambled by.

But my theory of unseeability was only partially complete. I was unseen for the most part, but that depended on the context. So, while my academic educators hardly noticed me — except for when I didn’t turn in assignments or did poorly on exams — I was regularly seen by gym teachers, basketball coaches, track and field trainers, and the like. Often, these characters would hunt me down in the first week of school and urge me to sign up for tryouts without knowing anything (else) about me. Also, I was seen by everyone whenever I did anything funny. And I often tried to do something funny, since, who doesn’t like being the centre of attention? And it was clear that the role of slapstick comic was generally approved of. This was the era in which Eddie Murphy was breaking out in Saturday Night Live. He had not yet achieved the watershed moment that Delirious heralded, an utter transformation of how comedy could be delivered, particularly by Black men — witty, brazen, racially defiant. It took Richard Pryor’s cutting critiques to a completely new level. Before that, though, he was often struggling to reinvent characters like Buckwheat and Gumby, whose comedy was propelled as much by costumes as by words, engaging in a tug of war between slapstick and something else. Before Eddie Murphy broke that mould, a Black man who acted funny was a seeable creature when I was young. And, therefore, so was I. I remember a friend of mine, who was witty, observed that people liked my style of joking because it had nothing to say. At the time I was insulted. Now I marvel at how astute he was at such a young age. But the one way in which I was most consistently seen, especially when I was out in public by myself, was as a potential law-breaker. It was common for rough-looking white men to approach me at the train station and offer to sell me drugs. I grew familiar with the watchful eye of the police if I was walking by a cruiser or happened to be nearby some officers for some reason or other. In retail stores, this translated into plainclothes security guards following me through the shop. It seems silly to only recognize it today, but the one context in which the test of my unseeability was most likely to fail was if I engaged as a shoplifter.

Not only did I not recognize this at the time, I doubled down. As soon as I made it out of the drugstore with my loot in my bag, I got it in my head to go into the very next store — Eaton’s downtown — and do it again. This, I think occurred to me in part because, unlike Gabriel, I had not been able to sweep four bottles of cologne into my bag. I had planned to do so and even as I was reaching for the bottles, I had it in my mind to replicate Gabriel’s feat. But, as I pointed out, I was not feeling the purity of cool indifference that Gabriel displayed. I was struggling between the two feelings that my sense of being unseen evoked in me: invincibility and vulnerability. Without realizing it, I reconciled the two feelings by taking no more risks than one bottle of Polo. Now, as I strode down the street, the world blind to my presence, I overwhelmingly felt like I needed to make up for my earlier doubt. The instant I saw Eaton’s in front of me, I turned into the department store with no plan or inclination of what I was going to do exactly. When I saw the Polo shirt and its hinting Miami Vice pink, I didn’t even hesitate. I plucked it from the rack and swept it into my Janzy bag. As I walked out of the store, I felt a wave of vindication come over me. It was as though the situation had resolved itself by beckoning to me. I had had no plan, and then, suddenly, the shirt had appeared in front of me, the solution to every Janzy problem my unwitting parents had foisted on me. I saw the horseman, his mallet in full swing. I knew nothing of the sport of polo. The polo player, too, was strangely anonymous to me, ubiquitously recognizable, but lacking any personal biography. I had only the vaguest sense that the logo was meant to hint at something aspirational, something classy. I saw in it something purely physical. The man on the horse, his mallet held up in mid-gesture, the frozen movement. It felt like pure power to me. Of course it did. Even then, I had a sense of the enticing power of horses. Although in my childhood experience it was mainly girls who drew them and fawned over them, it was impossible even for me — especially in this part of the West — not to recognize their status as brokers of power. They were everywhere in our modern society, especially in Cowtown. We had the Stampede after all, a massive ten-day long indulgence of rodeo culture (with a healthy injection of commercial shine). And though girls, primarily, doted over horses, the boys around me also had their version of pining in the form of horsepower. They noted it in all of the hyper-masculine vehicles that dotted our pop culture landscape — from Delorians in Back to the Future, to Ferraris in Magnum P.I., or TransAms in Knight Rider. I could recognize the horse in the Polo logo as a basic unit in all of this fawning. Maybe, too, there was something familiar in the arc of the mallet swing. I had encountered many stories distilled through African and African American culture when I was growing up. For example, some of the Brer Rabbit stories had counterparts in Krio folklore. I was very attuned to these kinds of folk stories, possibly in an inchoate yearning for some sort of connection between the two continents that collided inside me. So, I was aware of the mythical figure of John Henry, though I didn’t fully know who he was or the details of his story. I knew it had something to do with his strength and an impressive swing of his hammer or a mallet. I don’t know for certain today, but I feel there was some unconscious affinity in me for this potential congruity: the physicality and the anonymity of the Polo logo, its action frozen in time, the rider stripped of identity, and the image of John Henry, a figure of pure physicality, whose gesture of strength was a mirroring swing of his mallet, but beyond that was someone whose identity was utterly beyond my grasp.

At this point, I had walked out of the store and had turned down the street when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t hesitate; I didn’t turn around. I burst into a run at speeds worthy of any starry-eyed track coach from my past. But the hand had gripped my Janzy firmly and with the force of my forward momentum it was coming off my shoulder. I couldn’t run. I half turned, the bag slipping off of my shoulder, and gave it an enormous tug. Now I was facing my assailant, a skinny man who I had noticed near the door when I walked in, but who I hadn’t given a second thought to, so immersed was I in my sense of unseeability. I knew that if I ran away, he wouldn’t be able to catch me. I was — despite my reluctance to satisfy every track coach’s stereotypical view of me — very athletic. Every year I qualified for the Provincials in the sprinting events. I had a small collection of medals and ribbons on my bookcase in my room. I could have dropped the bag and flown. But I was worried about identifying objects. As it was, I was wearing a football jacket from the school I attended. Maybe this plainclothes security guard was not as familiar with the local school colours as I thought, but I didn’t know. I also worried about any contents in my Janzy that might be able to identify me. For the most part, I was pretty sure my bag was empty except for a hoodie, a couple of library books, and of course, the bottle of Polo with the shirt to match. But I wasn’t 100% sure and didn’t want to risk it. A tug of war ensued. The security guard was shouting at me, raising a ruckus. I sensed people approaching. I was getting desperate. I gave the Janzy a mad yank. The security guard let out a grunt and the bag lurched out of my grasp. The cheap zipper had broken and the Janzy’s contents had spilled out onto the street. I snatched what I could — only my hoodie — and leapt away, sprinting blindly, breathlessly. I had walked into Eaton’s feeling invincibly unseeable, but as I pounded my way through the streets, my only thought was to get away from all of those greedy eyes plastered to my back.

I don’t know how long I ran, but probably the guard had given up long before I stopped. Eventually, I realized no one was chasing me and I could stand for a moment, hunched over, catching my breath. That’s when I noticed a flash of pink buried in the handful of hoodie I was gripping. I stared at it, my mind still spinning as I gulped for more oxygen. I had run a huge distance, zigzagging through alleyways and randomly changing direction. At one point, I had dashed straight through City Hall, terrified to be in the bosom of so much scrutinizing power and simultaneously awed by my own audacity at such a move. I finally came to a rest just outside, wheezing with my hand against the building’s wall. Little did I know, but I had run straight down a road of Black history. A century earlier the Lewis family had lived in a log cabin on Stephen Avenue. John Ware’s daughter Nettie was born there and describes it as being directly across the street from the Queen’s Hotel.52 This hotel was demolished in 1982 to make way for the modern expansion to City Hall. The municipal building still stands there today and was brand new when I was sagged against its side, catching my breath as a teenage fugitive.

In the 1890s Stephen Avenue, still important today, was essentially Calgary’s Main Street. In my flight through City Hall’s public atrium — I might suggest — I had effectively travelled along the city’s historic spine. I had walked through a Black historical space that I could have claimed had I known about it. Then again, what space of history would I be claiming? John Ware hated Calgary. He was a cattleman, not a city man; moreover, the city was not kind to him. He often faced the worst kind of racism when he was here. From time to time John had to be in the city for supplies or work or some necessity; otherwise, he avoided it. As soon as he could, John established himself in the grasslands to the south, where he started his first ranch near Millarville. But one quirky Calgary story stands out to me. The story goes that John was bringing cattle to Calgary, but there had been a flood and a bridge along the way was out. According to the tall tale, the legendary cowboy was able to coax his herd into the waters and under his gentle guidance they were so assured he could step calmly across their backs — a living, bovine bridge — as they made their way to the other side. Though fanciful, this story has always struck me as a powerful retelling of how people viewed Ware’s skills. Other than Martin Luther King, I can’t think of another Black person whose legend flirts with the impact of Jesus Christ (in this case, walking on water). It turns out, however, that this story, as dramatic as it sounds, is an impossibility. It never happened. Instead, it is an unconscious fabrication of my mind. When I finally researched specific sources to nail down the tale’s details for this book, I discovered my error. I have carried so many stories about John Ware in my head that over the years several details of his life seem to have coalesced into this fantastic tale. Here are the facts: he was known to have crossed a bridge at Calgary after walking his cattle through the city when it was illegal to do so. During an outbreak of mange he fell into a vat of brine while helping cattle into the vat. Most tellingly, there were often tributes made to Ware’s physical size, often including his ability to step over calves. These references have influenced stories — readily available today — about him walking on or over fully grown cattle.53 This stew of storymaking, coupled with my archival neglect — and spiced up with a dash of some Christ-like aspirations I apparently have for Ware — resulted in this fantastic tale.

The story has some use, though. When I think of it today, I try to imagine what my teenage self would make of John Ware and his many legendary feats. When I was that age, I often felt like I was walking just off-balance, on the wrong side of gravity, always struggling against or with some mysterious inertia that didn’t seem to affect anyone else. It would have blown my mind to know that I had just passed through the former home of the family of a revered Black man, as though I were the ghost of some distant, unborn past. It would have made me feel more solid to know that I was not the only one trying to master this balancing act. Later in life, long after I knew about the Wares and the Lewises and the many Black ranchers and cowhands that populated the Prairies, I stumbled across another, completely different kind of ghost. In Ethiopia, there is an ethnic group known as the Hamar who are nomadic cowherders. In a demonstration of how central cattle are to their lives, the Hamar have a tradition that all young boys must undergo as a rite of passage. Ukuli Bula is their tradition of bull jumping and requires every boy to leap onto the back of a bull and then continue walking across the backs of several more in a show of aptitude and bravery. I’ve watched some examples on YouTube (because . . . YouTube) and the rite sounds more difficult than it looks. To be sure, it is challenging. But the whole process is helped by the participation of the community. Women sing and dance in enthusiastic encouragement. The bulls are lined up side by side and held in place by other community members. It is not usually more than four or five bulls that the boys must cross, each bull representing a single step of their journey. I was struck by the group effort involved. Although it is meant to be a rite of passage for specific boys to cross a threshold into manhood, the entire tradition is supported by everyone, the boy wrapped in the spirit of community love.

Now, I can imagine John Ware stepping gracefully from cow to cow, each step a reassuring demonstration of his newfound footing in this far-flung cattle kingdom of Western Canada. Although he seems to walk alone, he, too, like the Hamar boys, is surrounded by a loving community that informs his sure steps, even as those steps guide the tentative cattle beneath him.

It feels as though there is still something of Africa echoing in that gesture of unusual crossings. I knew nothing of it as a teenage thief, exhausted by flight. My body was hunched over, one arm propped against my knee, one arm outstretched against City Hall — the building that had covered over the historic dwelling of one of the most meaningful families in all of the Prairies’ Black history. That echo bounces inside me, across time and space, from the Hamar to John Ware to me. Some estimate that the Ethiopian tradition is several thousand years old, but it is still alive and thriving. Its vitality fuels the poetry of my imagination, showing me that the ghosts of Black history can still haunt here, can possess a gesture, can collapse time, can linger in the corners of memory’s oblivion. Somehow, I was both a ghost and a victim of that ghost. Somehow, I was alone in the city and completely surrounded by a buried history. One day, I would learn to see that buried history everywhere, supporting me, guiding my steps, singing and dancing my name in enthusiastic encouragement.

A few nights later, I ironed out that crumpled, pink shirt and wore it to Aunt Biola’s party like a warrior’s sacred armour: Heracles’s holy skin, crafted by the great god Hephaestus himself. The logo of the anonymous horseman swinging his mallet shone out like stardust twinkling from my cosmic source material. I felt powerful and seen in that shirt. I felt I had earned that power through the many trials that eventually led to me wearing that shirt — some of my own doing, some not. And it did get the desired effect: my cousins were all obligingly admiring. The fact that even Paul seemed to recognize something valuable in my outfit, even though he may not have been as versed in the language of brands as young people were, only added to the power I felt. All through the night, I felt the logo against my breast, burning with its own undeniable potency.

Somewhere around eleven o’clock in the evening, the party my parents were throwing for my Aunt Biola hit its euphoric high: King Sunny Ade boomed out; the Africans pounced onto the dance floor like Olympic athletes, everyone chasing a medal, everyone confident in their ability to win a medal, everyone glorying in the rhythm of summer that pulsed through these Games.

Everyone except for my Aunt Biola. She had been quiet most of the night, only dancing intermittently. She had a watchful, guarded look, especially when Uncle Biola took centre stage, drawing in the evening’s energy, spinning toward some undefined edge. Her approach to her husband’s careless predilections for public joy over his own physical health had always been no-nonsense, exacting even, like a school Marm or a prison warden. But on this night when she was being celebrated, there was a subtly subdued cast to her. Unlike Uncle Biola, she was a person who generally avoided being the centre of attention. But that had never stopped her from joining in with celebrations like this one. At the time, I could only put her hesitancy down to something particularly reckless in Uncle Biola’s disregard to consequences of any kind: the party-goers’ veiled apprehension, his precarious health, his wife’s feelings. On the other hand, Aunt Biola did at times seem over-vigilant when it came to his health. Certainly my uncle saw it that way, and her attitude to that was undeniably disproving. She would criticize him full of irritation bordering on eye-rolling indignation. But once, he suffered a hypoglycemic episode when he had been drinking and dancing too much and actually collapsed. I remember seeing Aunt Biola push her face almost up against his, shouting his name over and over again, her usual tone of annoyance drenched in a desperation I had never heard before. It made my heart well in terror. He recovered and she was furious with him for weeks. But the event showed me that for all of her sterile disappointments in him, a more powerful feeling was beating just beneath the surface.

Perhaps this is why I didn’t feel any concern over her glowering look when Uncle Biola’s state suddenly teetered toward the “real” African man I hungrily yearned to see. If anything, I felt protective of him and dismissive of her critical stance. In some ways, I was absorbing the rules of a particular African masculinity that was intermittently on view for me. I was far more prepared to think that she was haranguing him unnecessarily than I was prepared to acknowledge he was dismissing her unfairly. And when my parents joined her side to entreat him, I felt disappointed. I didn’t want their intervention. I didn’t want any of them to interfere: my parents with their avuncular concern, my Uncle Modu’s soft-bellied reasoning, Paul and Mary’s side-eyed cajoling. They were being careful, caring even, but at that moment I hated them. I hated their impulse to sugar-coat, to temper Uncle Biola, to fetter his intrinsic energy. I felt that it belittled him. I felt that he was likely belittled regularly by Canadians who did not understand him or the value of his particular energy. I had played a role in the belittling myself by yearning for someone else’s accent to come out of his mouth, someone urbane and silver-tongued, someone white. Likely, it was my guilt as much as my sense of protectiveness over my Uncle Biola’s uncompromising “Africanness” that jolted me into speaking.

“No,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Uncle Biola is right.”

The room of onlookers paused, confused by my statement. To be clear, Uncle Biola hadn’t even said anything. There was nothing for me to be refuting (“no” ) or supporting (“Uncle Biola is right” ) at all. My words were simply inserted as nonsense within an already tense atmosphere looking for an excuse to either deflate or explode. My parents turned to me with an exasperated look. Uncle Modu scratched his head. My words hung in the air between us. Uncle Biola is right. Mary gave a resigned shrug, but for the first time I had ever seen Paul had a reproachful look on his face, almost irritated. Increasingly, it appeared that my words, meant to come to my uncle’s rescue, had added an air of vulnerability to the night’s ambience. Suddenly, I was the one adrift from the rest, unsure and isolated; I was the one who needed rescuing. As a matter of fact, Uncle Biola’s look was probably most disconcerting of all. His red eyes had focused narrowly on me. His lip was not quite curled in a snarl. He had the distinct look on his face that I was an unwanted thing: a stain, or a bad odour. I lost what little composure I had as a twelve-year-old. I was reminded of how this generation of Sierra Leonean’s — my parents’ generation — had been raised to see children as an inferior species, something whose value is only measured in report card grades and school recitals. Otherwise, children had no business inserting themselves in the concerns of adults. Too, this was the early 1980s, and in that era it was not uncommon to punish children physically at one’s whim, even if everyone didn’t agree with it. The possibility was a legitimate one. This was even more the case with immigrants from West Africa. They had no hesitancy over “knocking sense” into a child or “setting them proper.”

At this point, I wanted to slink away unseen. But there was no escaping this moment. I had stepped right into it and now I had to face those consequences. My uncle let out a low growl. From the depths of his volcanic belly he rumbled my name and it was full of heat, full of molten potential:

“Bat.”

I closed my eyes, waiting for the physical punishment to descend. I only had enough time to wonder what my parents would feel, what they would do, when Uncle Biola rained his punishment down on me. Surely they would intervene? But, honestly, I wasn’t sure they would. It was part of the code they grew up with: any family member can discipline a child of that family. All of the adults were considered parents to us. It’s a cliché, yes, but the saying that it takes a village was an actual lived experience for me. From my teen perspective, this was its dark side.

Then I felt a hand land gently on my knee.

“No.”

I opened my eyes. My Aunty Biola was glaring fiercely at her husband, one hand protectively held to my knee.

“Do not even think about it,” she hissed at him.

I was too stunned to know what to think. Too many layers of possibilities seemed to be draping over me, burying me beneath. I was defending him. Now, because of that, she was defending me. In the background, the music was still pumping loudly. Jimmy Cliff belted out “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” in his glorious, soaring voice, the cellos shuddering in refrain. I was confused and ashamed and angry and annoyed. My mother sat down on my other side, between me and Uncle Biola. My dad wrapped an arm around Uncle Biola’s shoulder. We sat in silence, enfolding each other in our various gestures of protectiveness, our conflicted intensities of love.

“Eh bo, can’t we dance now?”

It was Paul. Our Caribbean friend had feigned an African accent when he stressed bo. But in deploying the term, even clumsily, he had also shown how he, too, was one of the family, trying to worm his way in from the outside. It was too much: everyone burst out laughing and I found myself joining them. For once, I was in on the joke.

Later, in the kitchen with my Aunt Biola, I apologized for causing a scene. She looked at me serenely with that same unusual intensity she had been aiming at me all evening long.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to steal my thunder.” I didn’t know what to say. I shook my head. She smiled at me and turned to pull something out from under the kitchen table. “I have been keeping something for you.”

It was my Janzy. I stared at it in shock while she placed it in my hands. Again, I was speechless. Was this some sort of set-up? Were my parents now going to jump out of the cupboards and demand to know everything? I was mortified and desperate. How did she get this bag? Was it even mine? My hand fumbled over the zipper. It zipped up and down flawlessly. There were two library books in it, the ones I had borrowed. There was no sign of the Polo cologne.

“I fixed the zipper for you,” said my aunt, the part-time seamstress.

I felt something waver inside me. It slowly dawned on me what she was doing. From the living room, the music cranked up another notch. I heard loud laughter and could make out my father’s solemn bass rollicking beneath the music. Despite the tensions of the evening, everybody sounded happy. They were happy. They were happy for Aunt Biola. I, too, was happy for Aunt Biola, the woman who unhesitatingly came to my defence. But I kept forgetting that she was the whole reason for this party. I knew that she had recently got a job, but I didn’t know much more. I didn’t know how getting a job had forced my uncle’s insides into ambitious wrestling moves. I didn’t know that we were in a difficult economy and that my uncle had been laid off. I didn’t know that my aunt had never had a chance to practice her cooking and managerial skills in a professional setting. I didn’t know that most restaurants were cutting back in this economic period, nor that only restaurants attached to another business, like a retail store, were in a position to hire. I certainly didn’t know that department stores were hesitant to hire Black people, even in the eighties, and that Aunt Biola never thought she would get the job when she first read the ad for a cook at the Eaton’s Tea Room. But she did. She got that job and, as she was walking out of the building, she was in a perfect position to see the altercation taking place between an in-store security guard and a young man, just a boy, really, who looked exactly like her increasingly furtive-eyed nephew, who used to be so full of outward facing energy not so long ago.

I didn’t know any of this yet. But standing in my kitchen, feeling confused and ashamed, it was becoming clearer to me what my aunt was doing. She gave me a long look and a quick hug. For the briefest moment, I felt that logo on my breast being pressed into my skin, burning between our beating hearts. When she returned to the room full of musicked revellers, drunk on joy, I heard a loud cheer and the Mighty Sparrow rhythmed out yet another notch louder.

This is what my aunt was doing: when she gave me that quick hug, she whispered in my ear, “Tomorrow.” In the wholeness of the gesture, I felt my flattened identity uncrumple and fill out. There would be pain to come, undoubtedly. And shame. And tears. But even as I knew that, I never doubted the love I was being enveloped in, that we were all entwined in. West Africans on the Prairie. Black cowboys on the savannah. My aunt was giving me the gift of our brand of double-yoked love. It is the love that promises pain and shame and tears tomorrow. But more importantly, it promises tomorrow. She had spelled it out for me for the rest of my life: between the trails of our Black Prairies and our African legacies, there is history, there are cowboys, and because there is love, there is always a tomorrow.