Part 3

In the summer of 2025, I started to sketch out an idea for an opera. Opera is not one of my go-to genres but recently it has started to appeal to me. Earlier that year I had been invited by the Calgary Philharmonic Chorus to give a talk on the unrecorded development of jazz on the Prairies, featuring Clarence Washington, a completely unknown Black pianist who played live music in cinemas in Central Alberta. After the talk, one of the members pointed out how operatic Washington’s life seemed. He suggested I consider writing a libretto dramatizing his story. “After all,” he suggested, “you are a writer and your sister is an opera singer.” Inwardly, I blinked. I don’t know why I had never made that association before. My sister is a trained opera singer, though she has had to pivot in strategic ways to cobble a life for herself in the arts. The operatic world has only very recently started reconsidering its stranglehold on European priorities, so, in the meantime, while opera was trying to figure out how to “do better,” she had to earn a living. She’s still a singer, and she still sings opera, but she has added several other skill sets (theatre, dance, film, choral, etc.) to her repertoire.

I think my direct connection to opera didn’t occur to me, in part, because Neema’s trajectory did not land her in the centre of the genre’s world. Another part of it, though, is that I have not really been drawn to opera in my life, though I am a music lover and come from a family of music lovers. The closest I got to it is with my parents’ fondness for Fiddler on the Roof, and musicals are only (barely) opera-adjacent. Opera has simply never strongly appealed to me. Perhaps, that has even influenced the classical composers I prefer, Beethoven (1 opera), Brahms (0 operas), Mahler (half an opera, if reworking someone else’s counts). The real challenge for me, though, is exactly what Neema experienced, that most operas take on themes and explore narratives that quite thoroughly erase us.

But the genre is still very compelling to me. It is bombastic and dramatic and collides music, dance, theatre on a large scale; it produces its magic by overloading the senses, and very often the theme of a particular opera involves someone being overwhelmed or something being overwhelming. That cornucopia of possibility seems very appropriate to exploring various Black histories, particularly those that court tumult. A couple days after delivering my talk to the Philharmonic Chorus, I sketched out a basic plot for a libretto on Clarence Washington’s life. And then, in the way these things often happen, as I was imagining a dramatic arc for Clarence Washington, I kept jotting down notes for an entirely different story with a completely different set of characters.

This new story’s working title was “Jealous Guy,” and had the most innocuous plotline: Jimmy and Charlie are brothers who have fallen out, and Rupe, the brothers’ cousin, has replaced Jimmy as Charlie’s BFF. Jimmy, a wildly imaginative, scheming brainiac, blames the rift on the failure of their last business venture. He is convinced his next business idea will fix everything and make them millions. All he needs is a royal army, an empty country, and ten thousand African slaves. No problem, right? Oh, sorry: didn’t I say? The year is 1670, and Jimmy’s brother, Charlie? He’s the King of England.

The opera charts the birth of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which rose out of the financial ashes of the RAC, the Royal African Company, a business that traded in slaves. This relationship between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Royal African Company has hardly been explored but it is central to sweeping transformations that disparately impacted three continents and their Indigenous inhabitants, contributed to the invention of modernity, and paved the way for the geopolitical and economic structures that currently dominate the globe.19 We are so focused on slavery as an American institution that we forget it was a global phenomenon with the participation of numerous countries, as well as financial systems that were deeply integrated and implicated with each other. Beyond the Underground Railroad, most Canadians struggle to see any connections between slavery and Canada. The truth is, although there are certainly a number of steps in between, frankly, you might say that it was the idea of slavery that eventually begat the idea of Canada. What an opera, right? (COC, go right ahead and commission me; I’ll wait.)

One of the things that appeals to me in telling this story is the opportunity to flip historical relationships inside out, making the invisible visible and forcing us to reckon with something that deeply problematizes how we understand ourselves to be who we are. It’s one of my signature moves. The simplest example of this is my exploration of Black cowboys. We can no longer understand the social landscape of the West in the same way when we acknowledge that its composition has been historically different from what we’ve been led to believe. For some people, this is a discomforting challenge that they struggle to accept. For others, it is a welcome surprise that opens new possibilities of understanding for them. I recognize and want to acknowledge both experiences. Discovering and identifying Black cattle brands is reconciling and empowering, and it makes me feel closer than most other ways to a valid “Albertanness” that usually eludes me. At the same time, there is a dark side to this history that also makes me feel discomfort and challenged in unexpected ways. And, if my expectation is for others to confront their sense of discomfort when I reveal these hidden histories, then I, too, must confront my own discomfort as directly and honestly as possible.

One of the tools of dramatic power that I envision for “Jealous Guy” is that the identities of the two principal characters are not made obvious right away. Jimmy doesn’t make us think of James, the future King James II of England. This is because namings are powerful. The namer has power. Before James became King of England, he was Duke of York. And it is as the Duke of York that he established the RAC with his brother Charles. In some ways, I like this story because it appeals to a side of me — maybe Albertan — that enjoys innovation, even entrepreneurial innovation, particularly the inventiveness of it. I sometimes liken it to artistic creativity. But mainly, this story horrifies me. And this horror appeals to another side of me — certainly writerly — that is fascinated with inhumanity as a dramatic expression of humanity. Prince Andrew, the current Duke of York, is not the same Duke of York from the late 1600s. But the continuity of the name demonstrates a persistence in the legacy of wealth and power of the royal family.20

We are all very good at naming things in ways that erase what we don’t want to see and reinforce what we want to get. The convenient retooling of the Hudson’s Bay Company first to The Bay, and then to the acronym, HBC, has gracefully elided the territorial appetite of the colonialism that impelled it. Who would bother to think about the displacement of Indigenous people or the spreading of smallpox when you are buying a pair of socks on a credit card marked HBC? What could those three letters possibly have to do with that? Equally, who would think that slavery has anything to do with HBC?

But it does. There are three key ways in which the two are connected. First and most importantly, they were connected through money. The first royal venture in slave trading was not entirely successful. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa was established with a royal charter in 1660 but suffered from a number of financial setbacks for over a decade, including an intense war from 1665–67 with the Dutch (who were competitors in West Africa), the outbreak of the Great Plague of London (1665) and the devastation it brought, and the Great Fire of London (1666) and the further decimation it caused. It was not a great decade for startups. Eventually, the company folded in 1672, but not before it had established a key network of funders among London’s wealthy, among them King Charles II, his brother James, the Duke York, and their cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. These people provided the initial capital for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670 on the basis of their previous financial relationship with the African ventures. Another key connection is in the template of monopoly the African trade offered. The royal charters established monopolies for the Crown, clearing the way for its dominance in the slave trade. Monopolies were enforced as legal entities whose structures were then copied into the HBC charter. The third key connection is the concept of sovereign dominance. This, too, was copied into the HBC charter. The concept encouraged the Crown to privatize and administer large swaths of land in the manner of a sovereign nation. In the mind of the Crown, it justified taking control of much of West Africa because it was an ungoverned, wild territory. The establishment of Prince Rupert’s Land on this continent is the direct result of this concept. Most Canadians are under the false assumption that the heinous acts of slavery have little or nothing to do with Canada at all. But as you can see, the connections between the HBC and slavery are deeply interwoven and deeply integrated through legal structures, concepts of sovereignty, and networks of financial support.

Now let’s confront a particularly heinous practice of slavery that the very same Duke of York who helped to conceive the Hudson’s Bay Company engaged in. It is a practice that raises questions for my project of recognizing forms of Black agency in common, everyday ranching practices on the Canadian Prairies. Here is a quote from Elizabeth Donnan’s compilation of slave trading documents, this one describing a slave castle on the coast of present-day Ghana:

In the area of this Quadrangle . . . are large Vaults, with an iron Grate at the Surface to let in Light and Air on those poor Wretches, the Slaves, who are chained and confined there till a Demand comes. They are all marked with a burning Iron upon the right Breast, D.Y. Duke of York.21

The English monarchy’s involvement in, and consequential wealth from, acquiring and selling enslaved Africans was pervasive and far-reaching. What had begun with John Hawkins’s three speculative journeys in the 1560s saw little development until the formation of the Royal African Company a century later. After an inconsistent decade of mostly losing money, the company hit its stride and launched England into the stratosphere of wealth generators. England cultivated the most lucrative trade in slaves out of all the other European countries. This carried on throughout the Stuart monarchy’s reign. James was the original director of the company. His brand, the DY brand, is referred to often in contemporaneous documents, but no surviving image of it exists. However, a later brand, used by the South Sea Company (which was sponsored by Queen Anne) has survived. This brand is tangible evidence of the monarchy’s involvement and shows that involvement to be multigenerational.

The brand was only recently discovered (reported in 2023) in a document discussing an agreement between the monarchs of England and Spain.22 Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch of England, and King Phillip of Spain had already established an agreement (an assiento) for trading slaves in the Spanish territories of the Caribbean. This document was a directive to specifically use the brand for the South Sea Company as the official brand for these purposes.

Know ye, that we the Royal Assiento Company for Negros and appointed Pursuant to the Contract between her Late Britannick Majesty Queen Anne (now in Glory) and His Catholick Majesty: Phillip 5th, do hereby Certify and Declare that the mark henceforward to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be Sold and Dispos’d of in the Spanish West Indies, for and on the Account of this Comp. and of the said assiento, is and shall be according to the Mark in the Margin of this Instrument being the Usuall Mark of this Company In Witness whereof we have caused our Common Seal to be Hereunto affixed Dated the Eighth Day of March Anno Domini 1714 and in the first year of King George.23

My fascinated horror splits into two paths: first, I am intrigued by the design. I can’t help thinking that it is clever in the manner of visual symbols that instantly render their meaning in a unique way. Although stylized symbols of this type don’t have clear-cut names, in the language of cattle brands we might call this brand “crown over connected S reverse-C C reverse-S.” I can’t help myself; I find it clever. Brands of this type are no longer in use because all of their intricacies are so easily lost when transferred to the cattle’s hide, quickly becoming blotches over time. Fittingly, these stylized brands are known as “Spanish” brands because they were largely used in the earliest phase of cattle branding in North America, and it was Spanish vaqueros who began the tradition here. The other path my split brain takes has precisely to do with the brand’s intricate design. I can’t help but think how many lines of hot iron it represents. All that intricacy, translating into a complex of agony against the skin. How callous, to come up with such a mark whose design so carelessly multiplies pain. This is the exuberance of a burgeoning rococo style, rendering its excess in self-indulgence, an excess that ultimately negates the humanity of each African’s chest it pressed itself to.

Of course, my musings are absurd. All brand designs were a callous dismissal of our humanity, from curlicued serifed letters to straightlaced single bars. How ironic it was for me to then come across instructions for caring for the stricken flesh of the branded. These are directed to the captain of the Dutch slave ship De Nieuwe Hoop, but were regulations generally expected of the Dutch West India Company during the seventeenth century.

As you purchase slaves you must mark them at the upper right arm with the silver marker cc n, which is sent along with you for that purpose. Note the following when you do the branding: (1) The area of marking must first be rubbed with candle wax or oil; (2) The marker should be only as hot as when applied to paper, the paper gets red. When these [precautions] are observed, the slaves will not suffer bad effects from the branding.24

The implications here are daunting. The practice of branding must in some cases have caused injuries severe enough to impair the already traumatized person in a way that threatened their monetary value. It is not clear what exactly those injuries might have been — and I’m not interested in determining them — but the fact that there was a need to issue these cautionary instructions suggests all manner of horrific results probably occurred. Some of that trauma might have been caused by the excessively intricate design of the brand, as we have already seen. Also, many Africans were forced to undergo the excruciating process more than once.25 They might be branded DY when they were first acquired in Africa, then branded again upon arrival in the Americas under new ownership, and yet again if punished for a misdeed, such as running away, or being persistently “disobedient” in some way. Sometimes they were branded twice at the start. Unfortunate Africans caught up in the matrix of Queen Anne and Philip V’s assiento were branded on the back with the South Sea Company mark, as well as on the chest with the Spanish royal mark.

The sad fact is that branding enslaved Africans was a fact of slavery. It established ownership; it identified the owner as a figure of power; it framed the branded as abject objects. The correlation that we are now so familiar with is that Africans were considered living chattel, the equivalent of swine or sheep or cattle, whose purpose was to serve the needs of those placed above them in Nature’s indisputable echelons. I can exult at the agency of Black cowboys who wielded brands, but I cannot ignore the fact of how branding has been used to objectify Black people. In a manner of speaking, this is my Double Yoke. If the brands of Black cowboys and ranchers represent an untapped language — or, as I put it earlier, an historical poetry — then this is the legacy of that language; this is what also gets spoken, what is also whispered in the archives, fleshed out in our forgettings. Because it was common to brand the company’s initials onto enslaved Africans’ skin. SCC (South Sea Company) and RAC (Royal African Company) were brands as recognizable in the seventeenth century as HBC is today in the twenty-first. Remembering the financial, conceptual, and legal alignments between the royal family’s companies, consider how thinly the three letters of HBC today act as a layer, cutaneously light, veiling the letters RAC, hiding them from view, marking them with the silenced sound of history.

In some ways, the branding of Africans executed part of the process of their transformation into something less than — or, to some, other than — human. The conversion ushered in Blackness as the dominant framing for African humanity. In fact, Blackness dilutes African humanity; it flattens it, empties it of its natural multi-dimensionality. I have talked to many Africans who now make their home in this part of the world and who have expressed how they did not conceive of themselves as Black in any overt, self-conscious way until they came here. Upon arrival, who they are, as well as who they have been, is dramatically reconfigured: suddenly, they are implicated in the history of a country that had emerged from the shaping collision between the RAC and HBC. Now, in the Americas, on the Canadian Prairies, they are seen in natural alignment with all manner of people who up to this point have had nothing in common with them, from Shaquille O’Neal to Harriet Tubman to Drake to some random family who happens to live at the end of their street. They are pulverized in a merciless mortar only to be scraped out, forcibly reshaped into something that, apparently, can be comprehensively understood through a handful of stereotypes and repeated anecdotes. This transformation, though not nearly as brutal, is our modern equivalent of branding slaves. And though it would be unfair to say that Black people feel like the animals of North America, it would not be inaccurate to say that we are often made to feel less than human in North America.

Nonetheless, enslaved Africans who were brought to this continent were not thought of as animals in the usual sense. Yes, their humanity was denied and all manner of atrocities were visited upon them. The shocking fact is that despite their regular dehumanization they were invariably integrated (willingly or not) into the European family tree. Today, approximately one out of five African Americans has European ancestry. That’s a staggeringly high number. White enslavers and overseers seemed to have no qualms about engaging in the most intimate of human relations with a category of people that were otherwise considered subhuman. Often, they had already had white wives and white children even as they had extramarital relations and produced extramarital children, essentially, in broad daylight. The women and children forced into and out of these extramarital relations often lived under the resentful gaze of the white matriarch — who had no legal or social power to refute her husband’s activities — and had complicated relations with the white children of the household. It was as though this kind of heinous indulgence, though frowned upon, didn’t truly count, despite — or because of — the recognized subhuman status of Black people. This is not the kind of interaction that is accepted — resentfully or not — with true animals. It helps to show the striking contradiction at the heart of Black personhood: we are people who do not count as people.

When my parents emigrated to Edmonton, Alberta from Freetown, Sierra Leone, without even knowing it they had already been reconfigured before they had arrived. I’m sure they experienced an untold number of jaw-dropping, dehumanizing encounters, but the one that was shared as a family story when I was growing up was their church debacle. Let me first remind you that Sierra Leone was founded by formerly enslaved Africans, who had been transformed into Black beings, who then forged their way back to Africa imbued with their transformations. Let me also remind you that part of those transformations involved displaying a bevy of European traits to the extent that they were accused of being Afro-Saxons, including their manner of dress, their educational system, and their religion. Let me finally remind you that so distinctly did they espouse their religious identity that other Africans, who found themselves in Freetown but had not been similarly transformed by slavery’s merciless mortar, called them Akiriyo in their language because they seemed so often to be going to church. All of this, I will finally add, was established in the late 1700s, long before Albertan churchgoers were even a thing, long before Alberta was even a thing, before Canada itself was even a thing.

For my parents newly arrived in Edmonton, then, attending church was a consideration that was not even a consideration in the way that breathing is a consideration that is not even a consideration for all of us. Their families had been attending Christian churches for nearly two centuries. My mother came from a family of staunch Anglicans dating from Sierra Leone’s earliest colonial period, and my father’s family were Methodists whose name (Bickersteth) was carved into one of the foundational stones of their church. My dad had even started down the path of becoming a pastor before he married my mom and their trajectory changed as they became immigrants instead.

When they attended church in Edmonton, they were welcomed, but there was an unfamiliar vibe. To their confusion, the pastor launched into a sermon about heathens in Africa who needed prayers, who needed to learn about the light of Jesus Christ to save them from the darkness of their pagan continent. “They are not evil people,” the pastor intoned, “they are simply ignorant of Christ’s path. They are not blessed in the same way as us and so they need us; they need our prayers to show them the light they cannot see.” My parents looked at each other, blinking. They had arrived in Edmonton in September, so I imagine a slice of early-autumn morning light suddenly hitting their eyes. I would have been barely two months old at the time. Was I there with them? Did I suddenly and inexplicably start wailing as babies do when you least want them to? It was a moment.

It was a moment that scarred my parents who could not conceive of a God who would allow Christian people to be so ignorant of another part of the Christian world. It scarred them badly enough that they stopped going to church for years to come. But scars are the result of a previous wounding. And in this case, the wound was the contradiction of Black personhood. These Edmontonian churchgoers believed they were extending sympathy to fellow human beings. At the same time, they could not conceive of fellow human beings in Africa sharing a type of humanity that was common to them. To them — and to many people today — Africa has no meaningful history; hence, it couldn’t possibly already have Christians; it must need saving. Because there is no scope for it in this discussion, and because I really hope we’re past this stage by now, I am just going to skip over the fact of Africa’s multi-millennial Christian presence or the white saviour complex so obviously in evidence here.

This experience marked my parents’ initiation into North American Blackness, a state in which one’s historical realities — both personal and social — are no longer considered real; in which one’s dimensionality is flattened to one or two tones; in which this strange Blackness, which is not even a colour, colours everything about how one is perceived; in which the stories generated about Blackness limit one’s possibilities to the point of refuting any meaningful tomorrow. You thought you were a human being like other human beings, but it turns out, on this continent, you are like a human being, in the way that a cherished cat or dog — or any other variety of creature that is valued akin to kin — is like a human. This is your new status as a person. It is not just scary, it is scarring. Something is gouged from you, or dismantles you, or lacerates you in a damaging and lasting way. Your humanness is opened up and then scored and then thickens and solidifies around itself. You feel yourself become a scar and then you understand why everyone else looks at you in the way they do. You are not a person like they are. You were never meant to be a person like they are on this continent. You are the walking wound of their ambitions. And your Blackness will never go away because they need it; they need your scarified personhood as proof of their own belonging. As the refuse in stratified Western modernity, Black people are the needed unnecessaries. Honestly, there’s never been another kind of animal like us before.

I would like to suggest a numinous quality to scarified animals and persons alike. Today, no one argues that forcibly applying a superheated rod of iron metal to a human being’s bare flesh is not an inhuman act. But it is a conundrum that an act of inhumanity on one group could, at one point, somehow, be realized as the proof of humanity of the other. In part, this conundrum reflects a straightforward point that James Baldwin made often regarding exploitative racism. Here is one such example:

If [white] Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call ‘the Negro problem.’ This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters.26

On the other side of things, though, a separate argument has emerged regarding the application of this same heated iron to the flesh of cattle. Ranchers have long been the target of animal rights activists who assert that branding cattle is a barbaric practice that causes undue and unwarranted suffering on the animal. Lest I mislead you into believing there is a stark division between people who support animal rights and people who raise animals for food production, the division is not always so neat: many farmers and ranchers care deeply about the animals they raise and regularly seek ways to avoid or alleviate suffering. Where the two groups may actually diverge is in their understanding of personhood, who gets to be associated with personhood, and what natural rights are conferred with personhood.

Baldwin’s quote, like so much of what he writes, offers brilliant insight into the Blackness we seek to escape and the Blackness to which we are ineluctably joined. Baldwin is a subtle thinker, though, and whiteness is often also implicated in his arguments around conceptions of Blackness. In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” he elaborates that “whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” 27 Then he complicates this thought when he refers to his Blackness as a barrier between him and himself, which he characterizes as both an affliction and, crucially, a crutch.28 At the heart of all of these words is his complex reckoning with self. White society must reckon with Blackness as a solipsism of its own making; Black people must reckon with Blackness as a socially-constructed self that therefore demands self-critique.

Here’s a trivial but appropriate way of thinking of it. All my life I have been a dog lover and have never really appreciated cats. My wife, on the other hand, grew up with a cat as a family pet, and for a period of my married life I found myself living with two cats. While I never understood the overall appeal of cats, I did eventually find myself liking one of them. Later in life, through a variety of circumstances, we shifted to dogs and my wife (I am happy to say) changed camps. She now thoroughly prefers dogs. Our current dog is a very intelligent Giant Schnauzer who has a playful but dominating spirit. I find many things about him unusual in striking and impressive ways, but I’m not sure I like him. So, I am a dog lover who doesn’t like his own dog. But I think I recognize that a lot of this has to do with my sense of self rather than his particular personality quirks. I love dogs, but it’s clear to me that I prefer dogs who reinforce my sense of superiority. To some extent, I think this is why all dog-lovers love dogs. They shower us with adoration and, for the most part, they show obedience to our will. Who wouldn’t love that? It’s almost like being a god.

But we’re not gods. We are human beings split between feelings of self-abnegation and self-absorption. Two summers ago this became clear to me when my dog changed colours. Let me explain. Otto is a Giant Schnauzer with a wilful, dominating personality, but he is also very playful and affectionate in an energetic, uncompromising way. At off-leash parks, he is the dog that boldly leads the walk roughly a hundred feet ahead of me, announcing his presence and asserting himself with whomever he approaches. But folks love him. He never lets them pass without dancing in circles in front of them, forcing his head beneath their hands, stealing happy caresses from them. Of course, they never see it like that. I’m the one framing it as theft (remember?). He can be manipulative, though, and his main pleasure comes from displacing another dog from their human companion. That is a large part of the exuberant petting he seeks. If the dog approaches him while he is being pet, he will bark loudly at them and chase them away. Then he returns happily for more petting. For some reason, nobody sees this but me (and the displaced dogs). Otto, my Giant Schnauzer with the giant personality, remains as popular as ever with the other dog walkers.

Until the summer he changed colours. To be clear, Otto is a black dog, like most Giant Schnauzers. But last summer he had to undergo dental surgery. As part of the healing process, he had to wear a muzzle to prevent him from biting or chewing on anything that could rupture his stitches. To my surprise, everyone started treating him differently. Now he received wide-eyed stares from a distance. When he approached others with his usual exuberance, they avoided him. One person, who hadn’t noticed his muzzle at first, happily stretched a hand toward him, and then, just as he reached her, suddenly veered in the other direction. The few people who would pause to greet him, would very cautiously touch him, or hold their hands away from him altogether. A few rogues, who I will never forget, seemed not to notice the muzzle at all, and gave Otto exactly the rough love that he always sought, turning and turning in happy circles as they rubbed him vigorously. Very few people even asked about the muzzle, but simply responded to some script they had in their minds. To my surprise, I found myself volunteering the information, defensively, protectively, before anyone had a chance to judge him: “He’s fine; it’s a preventative measure while his mouth heals from surgery.” The explanation always broke the unspoken tension and Otto got his rubs, albeit cautiously.

One summer evening we were out walking; a family with small children stopped in their tracks when they saw Otto, the parents pulling the kids close to them. They gave me tight smiles as we passed them (I kept Otto leashed by me). Suddenly, without any warning, it occurred to me what I had been missing all along: my black dog had become a Black dog. I looked back at the family we had passed, the kids laughing and leaping about with their coiffed Spaniel, who had actually cowered at Otto’s approach, everyone’s blond hair shimmering and shining as the light of the evening sun faded. I turned back to Otto, who was trotting up to the next group of dog walkers, oblivious. And then, again, I surprised myself with another thought: no, not oblivious, but undaunted. Otto was unstoppable in his confidence, his sense of purpose, and his vision for achieving what he wanted in the world. I felt the usual cautionary words tickle the back of my throat, ready to launch before the dog walkers veered away from him: “He’s fine.” But I didn’t. He is fine. He is completely unchanged from who he was before the muzzle, before he became Black. In fact, he has always been a B/black dog. This may even be the crux of Blackness. It is attached to us, regardless of our actual, intrinsic nature. Otto was bold before. Now he was Black and bold. He was assertive. Now he was Black and assertive. He sought to control the narrative. Now he was Black and controlling. He was an animal before, but now he had become a Black animal, a numinous animal. In this way, he was utterly changed although he had not changed in the least. What’s more, he made no apologies for his Blackness. The problem was me. It had always been me. I had felt defensive about this dog that I originally didn’t like because I sensed an affinity with his Blackness. Now, I resented the fact that my first instinct had been to appease others, relieve them of their imagined fears. I completely changed tack after that. I stopped seeing him through other people’s eyes. I stopped seeing his muzzle. I admired his indifference at other people’s preconceptions. I loved his undaunted determination to demand love that he deserved. He became wholly likeable to me. I shifted entirely; he made me feel good about myself.

And then, a few weeks later, when the muzzle came off, I shifted back again. Without changing a single thing about himself, he reverted to being manipulative, forceful, thieving. How could this happen? It happened because I’m not a God. I’m a human. And that means being split between self-abnegation and self-absorption: we all are when it comes to our dogs. Or maybe we are like Greek gods. We shift our allegiances (from dogs to cats to dogs) when it suits us. And it happens to suit us most when we find ourselves forced to confront that side of us that is exploitative, that measures love in degrees of how it mirrors what we want to see. We carry a split on the surface of who we are: is our love empathetic or apathetic? Are we protective over our dogs, or do they “safeguard our purity,” as Baldwin says? This split of who we are is a scar. Blackness is a scar and scars us. In my parents’ case, the encounter with the Blackness that North America forced on them changed them dramatically, socially, and personally. I also suspect that there was something in them that didn’t change, that maybe they had already been questioning some aspect of their faith. In fact, to this day I would describe them as questioning people; that is, they are both curious individuals who are interested in exploring questions and reconsidering their lives in reflection of their questioning. You might say that the imposition of Blackness brought out the Blackness in them. But I prefer to see it differently. Their doubts were viewed as Black doubts; their loss of faith as Black loss; the disruption of their questioning as Black rupture. This is James Baldwin’s double reckoning. It is Green Walters’s Double Yoke. Socially, they were Africans who became reinvented as Black people, whose role and status differed from what they had previously known, as well as from everyone else’s. Personally, they were deeply affected; their Christian faith was damaged. I can only imagine that they felt betrayed by their God, the God they had known and loved for so much of their lives, so much so that my father was going to become a pastor. The result of this damage is that they stopped going to church, and not just for a short while. I essentially grew up in an agnostic household (my dad had turned atheist, but my mother held on to certain rituals) and almost never set foot in a church until I was fifteen years old. They eventually did return to their Christian faith, but, as I said, it took years. They had been scarred.

The reconfiguring of Africa led to a reconfiguring of Africans in a scarring way. Our histories became collapsed into one amorphous relationship with Europe and the West. But this too is what allows for a relating between us. My parents arrive and are scarred. I grow up here, scarred. Green Walters and John Ware invent cattle brand designs that are inherently scarred. And all of us make choices that are also impossible returns. In this way, the history of Black cowboys on the Prairies — a history that is not directly related to my personal or family history — becomes intimately part of my history. One might argue that someone like Cheryl Foggo, whose ancestors formed the spine of Alberta’s pioneering history, has a legitimate claim over a figure like John Ware, whereas I am merely clutching at straws. I don’t begrudge Cheryl’s claim on this history one bit. At the same time, though, I recognize that we both access this history in a similar way: the repudiation of the common flattening of our humanness. In our case, the flattening is specifically achieved through the erasure of a crucial historical contribution to this part of the world. We can’t forget that everyone except for Indigenous people migrated here at some point. When it comes to people of African descent, that migration is activated by a scarring Blackness, which is then reactivated upon arrival. Cheryl’s Blackness was activated with the arrival of her ancestors in the early 1900s. John Ware’s was activated with his arrival in the late 1800s. Mine was activated when my parents arrived in that church pew in 1969. Because we are each forced to confront this flattening-Blackness as a consequence of forced migrations and arrivals, we all have access to the commonality of each other’s histories, though they are not common.

This brings me to my own very specific approach for confronting the flattening of Blackness, my own scars, and the commonly experienced erasure of Black history in this part of the world. At the heart of it is the language of Black cowboys. I am a poet. I work with words. Mainly, I use words to try to recover and reclaim historic Black presences that have gone missing. As I have shown several times, it is our national and regional default to evacuate the historical memory of Black presence, and this happens in very specific ways: we do not learn of community building, or enterprise, or ingenuity, or intelligence, or aspiration, or love. When we learn about historical Black presences in this part of the world — if we learn about them at all — we are invariably enveloped in stories that demonstrate lack of agency, singularity, physical heroics/atrocities, criminal exploits, or undifferentiated presences. It is the most normal thing in the world to dismiss or ignore or simply discount the variegated, dimensioned existence of Black people in this part of the world. It is one of the things that draws me to ally myself with Indigenous causes here, as this is a social position that they share with Black communities.

My goal, then, was to find a way, using words, to counter these tendencies. Poetry is often my go-to tool because poetry can so effectively fill in the gaps of what we don’t or can’t know. For example, when it comes to understanding John Ware’s brand, we can only speculate because Ware left no specific explanations about his choices in writing or in discussion with others. Poetry allows us to speculate in a way that both reimagines Ware’s story, and at the same time exposes the limitation of the conventional interpretations of his connections to slavery and his “lucky” number. One of the poems I published in filling Station engages this process. As I said, the language of cattle brands is at the heart of my approach, but my aim is to effect something more than just reproducing a forgotten brand (as important as that is). I want to expose a contestable relationship with the past that has largely been seen as given. The poem consists of words that are arranged in the shape of Ware’s “Walking Sticks” brand. The title of the poem is very long and effectively acts as a portion of the poem itself. I will reproduce it for you here:

John Ware is one of the most documented Black people we have in our Prairie history. There is no other Black figure for whom we have accumulated so much recorded evidence. In part, this is why you have never heard of other Black cowboys like Thomas Rife, Lige Abel, or Green Walters. Not only did those Black men not have any access to the recording instruments of history to instantiate their own stories, but the “mainstream” keepers of history only thought to include them as footnotes or accessories — if they thought to include them at all — to what they deemed as “proper” history. By comparison, John Ware is practically buried in historical accounts. Yet, as you can see from my poem, what we don’t know about Ware far outweighs what we do. When it comes to Black history, being buried in a deluge of accounts guarantees very little factual accounting of a person’s dimensionality.

Another poem, “A Black Hand Revisits,” adds a layer — dimensionality — to the effect achieved in “Some say. . .” This time, a poem is presented in the conventional sense, with multiple lines of evocative words, figuring some meaningful representation for the reader. But there is an added feature:

The strategic use of bold formatting combined with the grey shading of the text produces a layered effect. Over top of the conventional poem, itself concerned with wrinkles, folds, and surfaces — as much of the land as of the flesh — is Ware’s “walking stick” brand. John Ware’s intellectual and imaginative presence, his economic acumen, his visible agency is the extra dimension of this poem. It is, for me, a way of returning Ware to contemporary relevance from the abyss of national amnesia where much of Black history on the Prairies lives, where Blackness itself is flattened to an inhuman proportion. But let me remind you of the Double Yoke of poetic agency. Yes, it is important for me to incorporate cattle brands in these poems — even recognizing the horrific history of their application to enslaved Africans — but central to these brands, in the particularity of their Black historicity (which cannot hold the reins of its own narration as readily as the dominant eurocentric version so candidly does) is that they are riddled with gaps; there is always an aspect that remains elusive. It is not even possible to know for certain what Ware’s brand is. The number nine? A walking stick? So, this is the dimensionality that I have added. This is the “extra” layer that fleshes out Ware’s life for us: an unknowability. But, also, this is clearly a palimpsestic uncovering: something gets covered over even as we rescue Ware’s dimensionality. In this way, I am poeticizing a common distorting that occurs in memorializing Ware. In a discussion related to my point, Karina Vernon, Canada’s pre-eminent scholar on Black Prairie literature, reveals how John Ware’s memorial at Dinosaur Provincial Park covers up the wider context of his presence — the Black communities he circulated in — for the sake of a white-washed mythology about his singularity. “As a way of remembering John Ware,” she points out, “this memorial only forgets.” 29 In other words, covering over is a key feature in the meaning-making of John Ware. Likewise, if we are to take the “meaning” of Ware’s brand in the poem “Some say. . .” and juxtapose it with visual effect of “A Black Hand,” yet another layer, another accretion of meaning, is produced through the Black cowboy’s signature mark. That is, over top of everything — or undergirding everything from below — is the inescapability of unknown.

Over the summer of 2025, I had the privilege of joining an archaeological dig on the site of John Ware’s original cabin near Millarville, AB. Reputedly, the site has been unoccupied since Ware and his family lived there over a century ago. However, time having worked its forces, no one was certain of the exact location, nor if anything at all from that period had survived. Cheryl Foggo had initiated this work several years ago, and it partly informed her documentary, John Ware Reclaimed. A few tantalizing objects were uncovered, suggesting the likely possibility that his original residence was indeed very nearby, and a summer of speculative digging, turned into a federal grant, a team of archaeologists, and a multi-year exploration of the area. Cheryl invited me to join the latest phase of the project and I had the pleasure of being introduced to actual archaeological work by an actual archaeologist, Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer, the project leader. True archaeology necessitates none of the antics we know of Indiana Jones, so-called archaeologist, who spends most of his time running, jumping, escaping, wooing, or looking harried and — other than very brief instances in each film — almost no time digging. I also can’t help adding that he is not very scientific in his approach, nor is he an ethical archaeologist, often stealing objects and disregarding or dismissing sovereign Indigenous rights, cultural, or traditional claims.

True archaeology is methodical and precise. An area of land is carefully selected after intensive assessments that might involve advanced technology, like GIS analysis, magnetometry, and Ground Penetrating Radar (now widely associated with a different history of perpetuated horrors: the grim tragedy of locating hitherto unidentified Indigenous burial sites at former residential schools). Then, when a specific dig location is determined, standard “low” tech takes over: an area is marked off and precisely laid out in a grid; the soil is removed in layers, sometimes as thin as a few centimetres at a time; as excavation progresses, each grid unit is inventoried assiduously — even obsessively — so that the precise location and context (what archaeologists call the provenience) of every find is documented, often by plotting it within the site grid or by triangulation from fixed datum points. Even the chemical composition of the soil is analyzed to give a clear understanding of its potential impact on the human-hewn artifacts that it has suspended for decades, or centuries, or longer. Each excavated level is also passed through a screen as microartifacts and organic remains are often missed by the naked eye. This work carries on layer by layer, unit by unit (or each square of the grid), until it reaches sterile soil, or, equally, a story begins to emerge.

I was enchanted to learn that this process of uncovering, layer by layer, the stories hidden in the soil is known as stratigraphy to archaeologists. To a writer, it seemed like such a beautifully appropriate way of expressing the methodology involved: the writing (-graphy) or composition of a story through its uncovering in layers (strata). Beautiful. I was lucky in other ways too. On the day I visited the site, the weather was beautiful, the sky endlessly blue; it was sunny and warm. The wet weather we had been experiencing for much of the summer would continue later that month, but on that day the worst thing to contend with was the mosquitoes. Honestly, even the outhouse on site was practically pleasant. These auspicious conditions were perhaps the marks of the dig’s success on the whole. In previous years, a few promising items had been identified. This year, they hit the jackpot. Lindsay grinned up at me from the bottom of the excavation pit where she pointed out significant features they had located beneath the surface. She wiped a streak of dirt from her forehead and urged me into the pit beside her. There, she pointed to the stratigraphic layers, which revealed the cross-section of a decomposed sunken floor. She pointed out cut nails (or square machine-cut nails) that had been found, which specifically associated the site chronology with John Ware’s contemporaneous period. Beyond the pit, she showed me items such as a thimble, an ink bottle, and other items that also positively identified the time period as contemporaneous with the Ware family’s. We climbed out of the pit and she continued the story beyond. Here, she pointed out, is the trace of the irrigation system that Ware had constructed behind his property. And here, she said, is the refuse pit where bones that had been gnawed by the family dog(s) were recovered. And items like this, she emphasized, indicating the thimble, are evidence of Mildred Ware, John’s wife, of her particular influence on the family environment, on family life on the prairie. Wow, I thought. That sunken floorboard had me floored. “All of this,” Lindsay asserted, “is the evidence of John Ware and his family’s living and enduring presence on this land.” Despite the persistent absence of Black communities in Prairie history, despite the inevitable flattening of their dimensionality whenever we are graced a glimpse of them, the story that is told in these strata that Lindsay read for me demonstrates otherwise. I was overwhelmed.

I like to think of poems like “Some say. . .” and my poetic project as being akin to stratigraphy, but in a very special way. While archaeologists “read” through history by uncovering layers of soil, poetic stratigraphy recovers lost history palimpsestically. With this type of poetry, the act of uncovering is the act of covering. Or the result of dis-covery is, to put it poetically, the process of this covery. This, to some extent, is the role of art where other disciplines — science, law, religion — fail us. Even though we might be able to determine a historical fact to a specific and narrow degree of certainty, the uncertain factor always remains. The arts, and in my case, poetry, deliver that elusive part of the fact, the irretrievable unknown, even as it reinforces — irretrievably — the unknown.

As I mentioned earlier, I never liked the name Bertrand as a child. My father named me after the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, probably, because he was attracted to his intellectual achievements. But outside of the academic circles my father moved in, Bertrand Russell was an unknown quantity, especially in the Edmonton, Alberta of my childhood. When I was younger and still being buffeted about by opposing gravitational wells of the twin stars that raised me, I was self-conscious about anything that exposed me as anomalous. So I was quick to suggest “Bert” as a neutralizing familiar when people stumbled over it. In combination with my triple-syllable alliterative mouthful of a last name, “Bertrand” felt like an over-the-top, musical-theatre move toward something far-flung and foreign.

Like most children of immigrants, I was completely occupied with trying to convince the wider white world of my environs that I was just as normal as they were. The irony is that although I settled on the placating, single-syllable version of my name (“Bert”), and although that did solve the problem of having a confusing name, when my Prairie African relatives joined the bandwagon — as immigrants always do — the single syllable of my name became something different. Somehow, it sounded even more simple — simplistic even — against the hinted background of an unwanted cornucopia. It came out as “Bat,” which should have echoed benignly with baseball, or a vampire’s alter ego; instead, it emphasized an African relief against a Lawrence Welk soundscape, the single pulse teeming with Fela Kuti’s affluence of Afrobeat. To be clear, in my teenage world neither relief was a relief. This was typical of the inward contestations I endured with identity: whenever I didn’t get the thing I wanted, I was unhappy; whenever I got the thing I wanted, I didn’t get the thing I wanted.

Today, my view is entirely different and I cherish those so-called mispronunciations of my name. I no longer even see them as mispronunciations (because they’re not). I see them as the most legitimate expression of who I am: a Canadian of African descent whose second cousin is history. It was unfair of me to understand my African culture as one of thievery; that is, as a culture that lacked its own indigenous origins. But, as you now know, I didn’t arrive at that understanding accidentally or voluntarily. Like everyone else, I had a hard time seeing any meaningful tomorrow in the script that had been legated to me. My perceptions were limited to these dead-end narratives. I didn’t hear the inherent poetry in Krio. I didn’t hear the inherent poetry in my Uncle Biola’s or any of my African relatives’ playful uttering of my name. Instead, I heard an English that was broken. What I could not have known is that accessing and inheriting the legacy of a broken language would teach me to be an uncommon listener. And that would eventually teach me to be a poet.

Today, I teach at a college whose athletics teams are called Broncos. In the past, I may have felt alienated and somewhat dismissed by this name. But now that I have done more than just scratch the surface of Black history here in Alberta, I have extensive knowledge of multiple ways in which these tropes — conventionally reserved for white people — were never, factually and historically, occupied exclusively by white people. Black cowboys have been the greatest preserve of my sense of historical belonging in this regard. Today, when I hear one of my students refer to the Broncos, or I see a post from the Broncos Athletics social media team, I smile to myself. I have learned about African horse and cattle traditions. I have followed the life of Kareem Rosser, a Black professional polo player from Philadelphia. I know of an entire team of Black polo players at Morehouse, Martin Luther King’s alma mater. I regularly explore the buried historic presence of Black cowboys and horsemen, people like Billy Welsh, James Whitford, the Robinsons (a father and son duo), and multiple members of the Lewis family, including Ethel Alice Lewis, Spencer Lewis, and Nettie Ware, John and Mildred’s daughter. Now when one of my students refers to the Broncos, I feel the term belongs to me in a way that I know they would never suspect. To put it bluntly, one of the things that John Ware was famous for was riding broncos. He had excellent horsemanship skills. If there was a horse that needed breaking, John was capable of subduing it. There is a famous story that Grant MacEwan tells in his biography of John Ware in which an unsuspecting crew of ranch hands attempt to have a good laugh at Ware’s expense by cajoling him into riding what they knew to be one of the orneriest horses on the ranch. John, who is quietly certain of his skills, plays along, reluctantly agreeing to do it if they will give him an improved saddle to the one he currently had. The famous, much-repeated line is, “If you give me a little better saddle, and a little worse horse, I think I can ride him.” 30 Everyone happily agrees, rubbing their hands in anticipation of Ware being tossed onto his backside. To their shock, Ware sticks in the saddle, calmly and expertly wearing the horse down until “the once-famous bucking horse stood in subdued quiet.” 31 The ranch hands stare, blinking, and Ware wins a new saddle.

It’s hard to know how accurate this story is given that so much of MacEwan’s text was gleaned from oral histories. But I’m sure there’s an element of truth to it. Ware was absolutely known for his horsemanship, so even if this story didn’t exactly happen, the point of the story did. One joy I get from this story is how “breaking” becomes something good here, becomes a sign of mastery, of expertise, and even belonging. Once Ware demonstrated his abilities to the others, everything changed. They rightfully produced the saddle for him and bestowed an enduring sense of respect on him from that day forward. He was clearly one of them. “Breaking” brought them together. Maybe even more importantly, I love how this story shows his agency. For once, we see a Black man in a position of mastery and authority over his situation. The ranch hands thought they knew what a Black man was capable of (being flattened), but Ware knew differently and was given the chance to show it. He chose his action and ended up the better for it. I love that choosing.

Had I had the sense to listen to the lesson of Krio’s poetry when I was younger, I would have seen that what I thought of as “broken” was the sign of mastery, of expertise. Of course, that was impossible for me as a teenager. But when I was older, I did learn to see that mastery. I did learn to hear the expertise of a culture’s redeployment of language. I mentioned earlier that there are connections between the Krio word bɔbɔ and the English word boy. To my teenage ears, I could not hear any difference at all (even though, in this case, the words do not even have the same number of syllables). The two are only distantly connected. In this same distant way, though, the word boy also harbours an unexpected connection to the word cowboy.

There is some speculation that the word cowboy actually betrays the presence of Black labourers on ranches and cattle trails and roundups. The logic is as follows: while there were many different words to identify someone who worked with cattle, on a ranch or on a trail — for example, cowhand, ranch hand, cowpoke, cowpuncher, and cowboy — the word boy was largely used for Black men, regardless of age or expertise.32 Remember, the era of cowboys was not very long but it did briefly overlap with slavery. We tend to think of enslaved Africans forced into labour on southern plantations, but truthfully, enslaved Africans were used anywhere that hard labour was required. So if you owned a ranch, and you owned slaves, you would put those enslaved people to work on your ranch. They would gain all of the skills that any working ranch hand would need to develop and in many cases they would develop them to a very high degree because they were made to do the hardest, most technically demanding tasks. In Texas, where ranching and slavery were particularly common, many people who worked with cattle were Indigenous, Black, or Mexican. In fact, they were so numerous that no one racial group held a majority, including cowboys of European descent.33 So the prevalence of Black men in the industry makes it probable that the word boy as a term addressing them was also prevalent. While a term like ranch hand may have referred to anyone working on the ranch, cowboy was very likely reserved for Black men.34

This is the kind of poetry that history hides that I have learned to listen for. The Double Yoke of this poetry in history is also always present. For, hiding behind the word cowboy are two joined problems, two joined revelations. On the one hand, we uncover the previously obscured presence of Black contributions in an area that is conventionally understood as dominated by the agency and concerns of white people. On the other hand, we once more dis-cover the relegation of Blackness to some flattened entity without choice or agency: regardless of one’s level of expertise or experience, regardless of whether one is seventeen or seventy-two, being a Black male meant one was perennially subservient, underdeveloped, unworthy of stature; in short, it meant one was trapped in the perpetuity of boyhood.

I suppose I sensed this when I was a teenager, when I instinctively reacted against it by giving in to the stereotype of thievery. When you are a recognizable thief, you feel diminished, relegated to a lower status, certainly, but you also feel like a master of certain otherwise elusive limitations. The rules that contain you, and everyone else to a large extent, do not apply to you, even as they are applied to you. In a contradictory way, I felt more adult as a thief, and this is a feeling that most teenagers struggle to realize; it is what we yearn for almost more than anything else and is why we start smoking and drinking and seeking sexual encounters with verve. I say in a “contradictory” way because this feeling of adulthood I was experiencing was in tension with another, very different context that was being imposed on me.

As a youngster, I was largely seen as an oddity by other Albertans. My presence was questioned, the whiteness of my palms was remarked upon, and people took liberties with my hair; these things made me feel embarrassed and deeply uncomfortable, but nothing was as confusing as the treatment I received from a certain category of young, white women before I hit puberty. Generally, they fawned over me. I was coddled and cuddled. My cheeks were pinched. My pre-puberty chub was squeezed. I was the target of uninhibited feminine giggling. I was compared to Gary Coleman, star of the seventies sitcom Different Strokes, in which he played a cute, chubby-cheeked Black child who, along with his older brother, was adopted by a wealthy white man. It was my Negro Teddy Bear phase, one half of the role of boy that had been prepared for me. When I crossed into puberty, things changed, seemingly overnight. My presence was questioned in menacing ways. Shop owners followed me in their aisles. Elderly women scowled at me on the bus and claimed the empty seat next to them with their purse or their hand. Teenage white boys who I didn’t know picked fights with me, as though I was some sort of scourge or conquest. And young white women abruptly started to ignore me. This is the other half of the role of boy, the one that forcibly relegates. And let’s be clear, this particular relegation strategically denies the Black male body as a sexual being. The threat of sexual violence — entirely invented by the white imagination — is defused in the gesture of a single, emasculating word.

The thing about these roles that were assigned to me is that I had no choice in the matter. From the cheek-pinching fawning to the hooded-eyed glaring, it was all directed at me without my having done anything. I was like Otto with a muzzle, but unlike Otto, who was indifferent to his Blackness, I struggled but couldn’t fully understand these symbols that were being used to invoke me. Pre-puberty, it was a confusing, secret language that white people around me all seemed to understand and deploy amongst themselves with panache and fluency. When my friend Gabriel swept those four bottles of Polo off the shelf and into his bag, he too seemed to be speaking this same secret language to me. So when I too began to claim bottles of Polo and Lacoste pins and Jordache belts for myself, I felt myself to be accessing that language as well. At the same time, I felt like I was exposing myself to something, that this language was as dangerous as it was liberating. I wasn’t sure why, but it seemed to be offering something different to Gabriel than it was offering to me. I clung to it, though, because the thing it did present to me was choice. Being a thief was a choice that being a teddy bear (or a sexual threat) was not.

When Black cowboys chose cattle brands of their own design, they too were exercising a secret language: the broken language of slave chattels. The language of choice, of choosing, particularly in a flattening world, is the counter to that flattening. But this language is only effective because it is broken and even after it breaks, it continues breaking. That is its Double Yoke: it is broken and it breaks. If I saw Krio as only broken English when I was younger, it is because I could not see that it was this very brokenness that, at the same time, made it more than English. It breaks English and in so doing speaks the realities of its own Africanness — its history, its culture, its music — with poetry. It does not destroy English. It does not obliterate it. Most importantly, it does not replace it. But in breaking it, Krio is able to achieve that fundamental realization of who we are: figures of the impossible return.

For Black cowboys, the language of cattle brands must always court the impossible return. This is why John Ware’s brand is read as reflective of slavery and resists that reflection at the same time. This is why Green Walters’s brand is the Double Yoke. In some ways, knowing about these Black cowboys when I was younger would have offered me a lifeline, a very different kind from the one that shoplifting seemed to be presenting. There was some instinct in me that understood things were not being presented as they were. This was years before Jim Carrey emerged on the comedy scene, years before I would start to recognize something familiar in his singular whiteness on the show In Living Color. It was years before he starred in the Truman Show, in which his character would learn that he had been living a lie, that his life was simply a series of superficial TV sets, that behind the set, an entirely different reality was playing itself out. But both versions of Jim Carrey’s characters — singular whiteness and superficial reality — are important metaphors. It recently occurred to me that if everything had just been spelled out before me in plain letters, I would not have needed to become a thief. At the same time, spelling everything out was both the solution and the problem I needed to overcome. Somehow, this is exactly what every Black cowboy understood. This is what every Black cowboy’s brand does. And then it hit me: exactly what I needed to do.