Part 2

Whose history can I claim? Whose stories apply to me, help to build my own? I am an African in Alberta. I am also an Albertan out of Africa. Cheryl Foggo, the undisputed doyenne of the historical and ongoing narrative of the Black Prairies, has often talked about the importance of discovering John Ware in her childhood. Understandably, as residents of the “Last Best West,” she and her brother were fanatics of all things cowboys when they were young and had, of course, heard of John Ware. Yet, they had been completely unaware of Ware’s Blackness until Richard Foggo came face to face with it on a school trip to the local museum. This revelation shattered their previous assumptions of what or who a cowboy is and kicked off what might be thought of as Cheryl’s lifelong love affair with the magnificent figure of John Ware, Black cowboy.

I completely relate to this form of ambivalent reconciliation with history. On the one hand, discovering that an important historical figure — who contributed to the makeup and character of the wider province — was Black, was an exhilarating, affirming experience. On the other hand, the recognition that such a figure even existed in our history and yet had been denied the prominence he so obviously deserved, was yet another reminder of the relegated status Blackness holds in this province — this country — by default. For Cheryl, whose family story is a living monument to the central place of Black communities in the pioneering history of the Prairies, the response to this default relegating is obvious: counter it as vigorously as possible with writing, with films, with public talks, with creative and intellectual works of all sorts embodied with her own pointed acuity and magnanimous patience.

For Cheryl, this response is a straightforward one, perhaps, because her family history aligns with the formative colonial history of the Prairies. Mine doesn’t. That is, it doesn’t align with the history that is seen as emblematic of Alberta’s essence. I am referring to wheat and oil, farmers and homesteaders, cowboys and fur traders. These are the incipient trajectories of our province that launched Alberta into the tax-averse, lone-wolf, MAGA-tempted maverick it is today. And my family story does not fit any of those trajectories. But John Ware does appeal to me. Like Cheryl, I had a revelatory moment of discovering his Blackness and questioning the so-called legitimacy of what I had been taught before. When I think of my family story, I think of Uncle Biola howling at Hockey Night in Canada as his beloved Flames carve out an unlikely victory; I think of the Prairie Africans spinning something new out of Debbie Harry’s reggae inflections and Paul Simon’s claims on Zulu culture, defying gravity on the dance floor. Like my family — like all of the trajectories of Alberta’s colonial history — John Ware came from elsewhere. I like to think that there is something common in our Blackness, an entity that was — and still is — imposed on us. And as a result, we have had to make something common with it.

I think the difference between me and Cheryl is that I never identified with cowboys because I never felt I could. It was so obviously a binary world of white vs. other, good vs. bad, cowboy vs. “Indian,” winner vs. loser, and it was so obvious which side of the equation I was meant to stand on regardless of the actual realities of my being, or the facts of history, or laws of the physical universe for that matter. Cheryl’s family is Albertan and so the fact of this equation of always diminishing returns was, eventually, something she could challenge. But my family story, and its accompanying history, was from a completely different part of the world and seemed to have no connections to this one. Think, then, of my surprise when I one day realized that I had been wrong all of these years. That all of us had been wrong all of these years. That Blackness that I instinctively felt linked us in communal ways in the present also has direct connections to a shared historical past. One of the ways that I came to discover this truth is through my own exploration of cowboy culture.

One thing that you learn very quickly when you do historical research, is that there is always far more beneath the known surface than you could have suspected. If you come across the hint of an unusuality, you are almost guaranteed to find an entire community and longstanding histories underpinning that first hint, if you only keep looking. John Ware immediately proves this point. He is commonly narrated as a lone Black figure conquering the white ranching world. But what is often overlooked is that many of the stories told about him also refer to other Black people who he interacted with. For one thing, John Ware was married and had children. This was possible because an entire family of Black people — the Lewises — had moved from Toronto and had been living near Shepard just south of Calgary when Ware met one of their daughters. Indeed, one of the stories of their courtship includes a double date with another Black couple and involves a startling event in which the democrat they were travelling in was struck by lightning, killing the horses and giving the occupants a huge scare. There is another example in Grant MacEwan’s popular biography, John Ware’s Cow Country, in which MacEwan identifies Pete Smith, a Black friend, who comes to help when Ware had his fatal accident, his horse tripping on a badger hole and falling on top of him. It is also plainly documented that he worked with other Black cowboys, including Green Walters, a popular and industrious hustler who managed to pull off a number of ranching roles.

Grant MacEwan also gets in on this act of normalizing Black presence on the Prairies as unusual. MacEwan’s biography of John Ware is considered the authoritative account of Ware’s life. It was, however, written decades after Ware died and relies on oral accounts recalled from old-timers’ memories as much as documented evidence. MacEwan’s goal as a historian was to create a narrative as enjoyable and compelling as a novel, or what he might refer to as a good yarn.1 If some facts fall by the wayside for the sake of an absorbing drama, the payoff is worth it for MacEwan. Needless to say, the accuracy of John Ware’s Cow Country is questionable in places. Nevertheless, MacEwan can’t help representing Black belonging with that particularly ambivalent understanding that is so commonly assumed here on the Prairies.

At one point in the text, he has John Ware act as an ambassador of the frontier to some upper-class English visitors who had come to view their investment and get a taste of the “Wild West.” The guests are out of their depth and reveal their general incompetence to the point that Ware must actually rescue one “Lord Harold” out of a riding incident. The local horsemen are peeved by the Englishman’s arrogance, but Ware holds his tongue in an act of gentlemanly reserve. The message is clear: the West accommodates all sorts of disparate characters, but it is no place for the likes of “Earls” and “Lords.” In this sense, MacEwan has made Ware exemplary of Western belonging: he is lowborn, unrefined, hard-working, as well as both self-made and selfless; this makes him more of a gentleman than the actual gentlemen. For MacEwan, there is no higher indication of someone who belongs to the Prairie West.2

But then, on the very next page, Ware’s position as a figure of unquestionable belonging is suddenly upended. While leading his horse back to the stable, he is surprised to come across a young, Black man napping nearby. He wakes him and learns the youth is from “Dixie,” the American South. “Man,” Ware exclaims, “you’re sure a long way from home!” 3 Only moments before, MacEwan had held Ware up as a paragon of the West, as a Black man who is at home on the Canadian prairie. Yet, it appears that Blackness itself on the prairie remains the sign of uprootedness, of displacement, of not-home. Here is the crux of ambivalent Black belonging. As a cowboy in Alberta, John Ware is at home; as a Black person in Alberta, he is far from home. In this sense, John Ware is exceptional: he can belong but his Blackness cannot.

Beyond MacEwan’s text, though, the mentions of other Black people in history are frequent enough to cause confusion: how is it that this rich Black history has been almost completely forgotten, or at best, reduced to the singularity of John Ware’s story? This misstep in our understanding of the past is partly asserted by common discourse. Often, white people will concede the existence of a “single” Black person or Person of Colour as an exception to the rule that they readily accept: white settlers dominating the land as an unassailable fact. Actually, it’s assailable. Even anecdotally I have come across so many accounts of a “single” Black person here or there that it has made me question why people are unwilling to simply put these various incidences together. Don’t they see what they add up to?

Because the myth of white predominance prevails, though, most white people don’t even think to question the adjacent myth of Black singularity. Indeed, there is a somewhat cynical effect to this assumption: if there is only one Black person — or none at all — recorded in the past, there cannot be any Black history of any substance to note either. After all, one Black cowboy doesn’t equal an entire history. Since most Black history in this part of the world has been buried, this leads to the “logical” presumption that John Ware was very probably the only Black person in Alberta while he was alive. Just don’t mention his wife. Or his children. Or the people he worked with. Or the people he socialized with. Or the fact that one in four cowboys was Black.4

All of these things were facts that I encountered as I dug deep beneath the superficiality of our assumptions. You only have to keep looking. And I kept looking. I’m not a trained historian, but like so many Black people starved of historical legacy, I have had to become my own educator in this regard. I am, however, trained in literary and textual analysis, and those skills are very useful for digging deep, uncovering hidden evidence, separating fact from story. In fact, I felt powerful applying these tools in this context. Words are powerful. Text is powerful. In the case of Black history on the Prairies, text has been used to occlude and exclude Black presence. We have been written over, layer after layer, palimpsestically obscuring our humanity, effectively erasing our complexity, our multi-dimensionality.

For this reason, I have always been interested in recovering examples of Black intellect, thought, and writing. This proves to be a challenging and often painful exercise though. Textual production is largely controlled by white people in our society and this was even more the case in the past. Part of our palimpsestic paving-over involved not having access to the organs of publication. Often, Black communities had to create their own newspaper networks to counter their lack of representation or their misrepresentations in mainstream publications. In historical accounts, if we are included at all, it is at the whim of the white author, who usually rendered Black people in simplistic generalities (to suit their own narrative agenda), rarely detailing individual identifiers, often not even providing a name. These factors are compounded by the fact that literacy itself was regularly denied to Black people. Lacking access to reading or writing, it is no wonder that representations of Blackness in historical accounts are as inadequate as they are. Even in the case of John Ware’s Cow Country, which paints Ware in an unfailingly admirable light, MacEwan still succumbs to this flattening of Black dimensionality. Remember “Sam from Dixie”? Ware is depicted as being surprised at his presence, but this contradicts the readily available facts that MacEwan was surely aware of. There were many Black men in Alberta’s early cattle industry, some of whom Ware worked directly with: Billy Welsh, Lige Abel, Pete Smith, and Green Walters to name a few. Typically, “Sam from Dixie” is simply a figure to suit MacEwan’s dramatic goals. Sam has a name, but not much else. He has no last name. He has no backstory. He has no ongoing presence in the text. Indeed, after one more brief mention, Sam never shows up again in the rest of the book; like so much of Black history in this part of the world, he has no connection to our present-day, because, unfortunately, he simply has no tomorrow.

Because of this tendency of white authors to ignore our plural backstories and thus evaporate the possibility of our futures, I spend a lot of time trying to identify Black-authored texts that have been overlooked. Moreover, I am prepared to consider forms of authorship that normally defy conventional understanding. Why not? Convention defied and denied Black textual engagements. I see it as my job to reconnect lost connections. You might even say that history stole humanity from Black people in rendering us textless, and, in making unconventional claims of authorship, I am stealing it back. You only have to keep looking. So, when it came to Black cowboys, not only was it a no-brainer for me to look beyond the singularity of John Ware’s presence, but it was natural for me to draw an association between textuality, authorship, and the language of cowboys: cattle brands.

Perhaps the easy association I made between Black literacy and cattle brands is a reflection of my childhood obsession. As a teenager, brand culture seemed a newly-emerged force, but clearly that force had been in play long before the 1980s. We can’t forget that our contemporary use of the term in media and marketing is rooted in the original practice of branding cattle. As a teenager, I was already connected to this history and I didn’t even know it.

People are quick to point out John Ware was illiterate. But this is only partially true. He appears to have signed some documents himself, and though the initials look shaky, it’s almost certainly by his own hand. For one thing, his wife Mildred, who probably did write letters on his behalf (or, at the very least, helped him to write letters), was educated and had a confident stroke.

But I say it is only partially true because in another sense Ware was more than a competent reader, expert even: he read cattle brands. This is an indisputable fact that would have been a necessary skill for a cowboy. It’s my feeling that this type of literacy is overlooked because the opposite notion — that he was illiterate — satisfies a yearning to understand Ware as a survivor of slavery. It is very likely that he was enslaved at some point in his life; the evidence points in that direction. But there is no categorical evidence. He doesn’t appear to have said so himself. The vague and curtailed memories his children have of him mentioning his family are attenuated — Nettie once said he never spoke of his family — but they do not directly refer to slavery. If slavery was part of his story, it is clear that he wanted to have nothing more to do with it. How ironic, then, that his storytellers seem obsessed with connecting him to it.

I hardly find this surprising. Many people claim to be progressive and fair-minded when it comes to race, but truly they just mean they don’t hate Black people because of the colour of their skin. This doesn’t stop them from being susceptible to all manner of narratives that construct and circumscribe People of Colour in myriad ways. I experienced this personally throughout my childhood with basketball and athletics coaches chasing me down in the hallways. They knew nothing about me but my Blackness, and my Blackness was all they needed to know. The story was already filled out from there. The denouement, thrilling; the conclusion, inevitable; the introduction, unnecessary. They read me like a book, but they might as well have been illiterate for all the accuracy their reading rendered.

John Ware, on the other hand, was literate in what we might think of today as a lost language. His own brand is elusive. Variously called “Four Nines” or “Four Walking Sticks” (the latter is more accurate to me), its meaning ignites speculation about — you guessed it — slavery.

The dominant story is that Ware was nine years old when slavery was abolished and so nine was his “lucky” number. This is almost certainly a story of white people’s creation. For someone who spoke so little of his past life, and for whom the evils of slavery — if he did live through them — caused a silence in him as deep and dark as a scar, it doesn’t seem likely that he would have memorialized it in a brand. What is more likely, is that they are walking sticks, which is the traditional name of brands that take on that shape. If you peruse historic brand books, you will see that the nine has a shape distinct from the walking stick. The nine is often straighter and has a closed loop. The walking stick is more curved and tends to have a slight opening at the loop. Frustratingly, Ware’s brand is something of a hybrid of these styles, but it fits the walking stick much more closely than the number nine.

There is a code to reading brands that is akin to figurative language. Occasionally it even makes use of figurative language directly. In most cases, it courts certain conceits, certain metaphors. This leaves it open to all manner of interpretations. In this way, again, it is akin to figurative language we might encounter in literature, particularly poetry. It might be said this is what is taking place with John Ware’s brand, which is variously read literally (as four nines), symbolically (traditional walking sticks), or figuratively (slavery). Cattle brands can occur as simple letters, as initials, as stylized letters, or as symbols, or they occur as some combination of letters and symbols. They are read in prioritizing order, depending on the particularities of what they visually display. The hard rules for reading brands are as follows: left to right, top to bottom, outside to inside. A famous brand in Alberta, the Bar U brand, is so called because it has a bar floating over top of a capital letter U. As there is no left/right or outside/inside to read in this brand, we simply defer to the top/bottom rule, thus: Bar U. If we had placed an I after the U, the brand would now read Bar UI. If we had moved the U above the bar, the brand would read U Bar. And, if we had then added an I above that same bar and moved the U below, the brand would now read almost as a sentence: I bar you. Some stylizations also encourage phrases and sentence making. Letters with wings are called “flying” brands, while letters perched within an upward turned quarter circle are called “rocking” brands. These sorts of modifications inspire brands that don’t give a flying F, compared to other brands that appreciate when things are rocking, eh? These sorts of machinations are endless with brands and contribute to the quality of living language that they can convey.

Here, I’d like to turn to a Black cowboy I mentioned earlier, Green Walters, and discuss his brand. I had mentioned the metaphorizing that is possible with cattle brands and I cautioned against the automatic association between John Ware’s brand and its symbolic evocation of slavery. This is because the number nine in and of itself does not evoke any connection to slavery. We, as readers, must force that connection. But with Green Walters, there is a surprisingly strong case that can be made for exactly the interpretation I resent in John Ware’s case.

While John Ware was a cowboy’s cowboy, Green Walters was something of an interloper. He certainly belonged to the cowboy world, and he eventually managed his own ranch alongside his duties working for others. But he was not a horseman in the same way that Ware was. When it comes to the two key tasks we can clearly assign to cowboying — the roundup and the cattle drive — Walters was an adjacent figure. He participated in these expeditions, but he was often a supporting cast member: cook, wrangler, supply wagon driver. It is clear that he knew the cowboy world and often lived in it; indeed, we must assume that he performed typical cowboy skills when he ran his own ranch — the Gap Ranch — but just as often he found work alongside the conventional cowboy roles.

In this sense he was more of a hustler than typical cowboys because he was prepared to do almost anything to earn a living, not just ride a horse. He is noted in various sources for working as a cook, a hay contractor, a ranch hand, a servant, and a cleaner, among others. I called him a hustler, but more refined Albertans might think of him as a serial entrepreneur. The Gap Ranch, which was located near Billy Cochrane’s ranch in the Highwood River valley region in Southern Alberta, was literally a venture to fill in the gaps between gigs with other more established ranchers, like Cochrane’s CC Ranch. Walters was well-liked and had an eye for opportunity. But these things were held in an ambivalent tension. He seemed to be a comic figure. J.L. Douglas, a visitor from England, encountered Walters at the Cochrane (or CC) Ranch and called him “very droll,” pointing out that “he kept us in roars of laughter all the time.” 5 People liked to remark on his body size. Fred Ings, a young ranch hand at the time, said he looked “as broad as he was long.” 6 They liked to point out his mannerisms, which they found abrupt and unschooled in a humorous way. They loved to revel in his singing, which they took to reflect the authenticity of his Blackness. In short, they enjoyed having an authentically Black figure of entertainment in their midst.

Perhaps I am being harsh. But I’m sure that Walters saw opportunity in these perceptions of him. In one account, while spending the night at a neighbouring ranch, he is said to have come across boxes of silk pyjamas sent from England that did not fit the owners and so were not used. Aware of the situation, Walters secretly donned layer upon layer until he looked “so round and fat,” Fred Ings claimed, “that he was a laughable little figure.” 7 When his deception was revealed, he begged clemency, claiming the Englishmen never wore them anyway. Given the tone of the story, it is clear that “the comical little fellow” kept his haul.8 This is not quite the usual Black “thief” story, but you can see how it courts it, humorously. In yet another account, he is said to have prepared mashed potatoes at the Cochrane Ranch with his fists, pummelling the tubers in a pot, raising the eyebrows of others around him as to the cleanliness of his hands. Mainly, though, his acts are viewed as antics. He was comic relief on the Prairies. One has to wonder how much this master hustler, who so adeptly shifted from vocation to vocation to make his living, subsisted on the Canadian prairies by ensuring he had a valued place in this society of white people who saw him but didn’t quite see him as one of them. Laughter is almost always a balm of appeasement that Black folks have necessarily invoked or performed in the company of white power brokers. It was one more hustle for Walters; it was, if anything, his brand.

But he contained sadness, too. The most striking account of Walters-the-performer is of him singing a spiritual, “Climbing Up the Golden Stairs.” We have to recall that this is a period that marked a shift in public perception toward “Negro Spirituals,” as they were then called. In the 1880s, when Green Walters arrived in Alberta, the Fisk Jubilee Singers (formed in 1871) had started to carve out a name for themselves and for the legitimacy of spirituals as an art form. Prior to that, these songs were seen as “Negro folk” music, strongly tied to slave plantations. Indeed, they were simply called “slave songs,” and so hardly merited anything close to artistic value to the general (white) public. They had been used in entertainment as vehicles for minstrel shows, where the lives of enslaved Africans were caricatured and the horrors of slavery itself minimized for the sake of laughs. We can see, then, how these various accounts of Walters characterize him as reminiscent of minstrel entertainment: from his singing of spirituals to his brutish cooking techniques, he is seen as bombastic, unrefined, hectic, jovial, and disruptive in both comic and tragic ways. Here is how A.E. Cross — who went on to become one of the Big Four who founded the Calgary Stampede — describes Walters singing “Climbing Up the Golden Stairs” to a group of rapt onlookers: “He would start with a low note, gradually getting higher and higher until his emotional feeling would overcome him. With tears streaming down his cheeks he wound up exhausted.” 9

Walters’s brand as a performer to white audiences was a reasonable response to his marginalized position in society. But when you consider his cattle brand, you have to conclude he was either a nihilist or a poet. Maybe the two are connected. As with John Ware’s brand, there is some mystery as to its inherent symbolism. By this I mean that Ware’s brand is recognizable as one of two symbols (nine or walking stick), but it is not clear which one he intended to invoke; similarly, Walter’s brand is a recognizable symbol (at least recognizable to his contemporaries) but it was unclear what he intended to invoke with it. Here it might be useful to remind ourselves that the original purpose of cattle brands was to establish distinct ownership. In the early days of the cattle industry, fences were disdained and cattle roamed free to pasture where they wanted for much of the time. Twice during the year, they were gathered together (the process called the “roundup” ) and inventoried, in fall, to prepare for transport to a cattle market, and in spring, to account for new calves. Because cattle were free to roam wherever they chose, part of the roundup involved separating and sorting cattle with different owners. My brand — B let’s say — would be burned into the hide of all my cattle, so that when it came for the sorting, I could separate out and claim the ones with my B visibly on some part of their torso. Equally, if any one of the cows with my B emblazoned on their side was milking calves, I could reasonably claim the calves as well.

So, at bottom, branding was about ownership. And what more fraught system of ownership existed in Walters’s lifetime than that of slavery? It was a system that abrogated freedom, stripped humanity from human beings, and conferred the category of chattel, all of which were understood as inheritable traits. There is no conclusive evidence about it, but, as with John Ware, it is very likely that Green Walters was enslaved at some point in his life. Though he had enormous talents, he was what economists today would call “unskilled.” This is corroborated by his transient life and his many and restless labour roles. I called him a hustler, yes, because he was forced to find whatever means he could to make a living — because he had very likely been deprived of any education or vocational training that could have assured him a profession in life. On censuses, he is regularly noted as lacking literacy. He also consistently indicates he was born in Missouri, which was a slave state, and his parents were born in Kentucky, also a slave state. In fact, many proponents of slavery moved from Kentucky (and other slave states) to establish plantations in northern Missouri, along the Missouri River as part of westward expansion. The region was colloquially known as Little Dixie, acknowledging the culture of the planters who settled there from the 1820s to the 1850s. So the geographic trajectory fits the timeline of Walters’s family story. The glaring piece of evidence, however, is the fact that he is only present in American census records after the Civil War. Other than to count them, and perhaps note their gender and age, enslaved Africans were almost never mentioned in censuses. (In fact, most of this accounting was done in official Slave Schedules, which were distinct from the formal censuses you’re familiar with.) This lacuna in the historical record is a blotch that also appends itself to the living life of Blackness on this continent, and so, too, it has appended itself to Green Walters.

His ascendancy, then, within the cattle industry, from itinerant labourer to ranch owner is a triumph. Yes, it was a “small” ranch, we are repeatedly told in the records, but this should not take away from the achievement. Green Walters was an owner. And here his brand courts a puzzling if not powerful meaning. Also called Ox Yoke, the Double Yoke brand was a familiar symbol to cattle folk and agrarians alike. The curved humps represented the bows in the wooden yokes fastened to oxen’s necks for them to pull ploughs or other implements. The symbolism of such shackling was not lost on anyone, and during Walters’s lifetime it was common to refer to the “yoke” of slavery. The language is seeded deep in our social consciousness: it shows up in the Bible in Ephesians 26, and like so much of Christian religious tradition, it was taken up and adapted by enslaved Africans in the Americas. Frederick Douglass, the most celebrated and influential abolitionist of the nineteenth century, regularly invoked the “yoke of slavery” in his talks. Formerly enslaved himself, his trajectory represents a success along the lines of Walters’s, though to considerably wider public effect.

My point is, in Walters’s lifetime, the association between an ox yoke and slavery would have been a given for Black people. What then to make of his cattle brand? I choose to think of it as poetry. If the figuring capacity of brands has in the past invited white people to understand Ware’s brand as a sign in relation to his victimhood — that is, as an object of slavery whose “lucky” number can only reflect either bondage or freedom as states imposed on him beyond his control — then I can choose to understand Walters’s brand as an assertion of his agency, his control, his state of ownership within a social and economic system whose capital, potentially, used to assert him as owned. This is an entirely different kind of figurative play; he remains attached to the symbolizing of slavery that appears to have permanently associated itself with Blackness on this continent, but he has reconfigured the association; he has doubled down on its meaning and thus doubled its meaning; he has re-metaphorized what it means to be yoked. This is his poetry, his personal brand, his Double Yoke.

You may say that all of this speculation is purely subjective on my part, that I am forcing my meanings. I don’t deny this. I simply suggest another way of looking at it: I am not forcing meaning; I am stealing it. And I do so out of the historical legacy of Blackness that I can claim in a doubled way, like Green Walters: I claim the category of thief that was imposed on me, on my Blackness, and I claim the process of thievery that I inherited through my family’s historical legacy.

Long before I ever knew about Black cowboys on the Prairies, or their metaphorizing powers with branding irons, I was a confused teenager shoplifting my way into a stereotype. Somehow, I felt powerful doing so, even though I also felt trapped at the same time. One source of confusion for me had to do with my dubious sense of belonging. To this day, I am not convinced that I am justified in claiming the history of Black cowboys (I do so despite the doubt), nor was I convinced as a teenager that I could claim the authenticity of my African identity. Growing up, I certainly felt Canadian, particularly Albertan, but that sense of belonging was regularly challenged by other Canadians, other Albertans, who clearly did not see me in this way. This was confusing to me, but despite my thoroughly Canadian experiences, my upbringing was actually hybrid.

At school and out in public, I lived an ordinary Canadian life, racism notwithstanding. When I stepped inside my home, though, things changed. For much of my childhood, my home was African. The longer my parents lived here, the more our household morphed into something more recognizably Canadian, but during my early years my parents’ African sensibilities dominated. We ate African food, spoke an African language, played African music, and regularly visited with the wider Afro-Caribbean community, such as it existed in Edmonton and Calgary in the seventies and eighties. The experience was distinct enough that I would occasionally feel things were amiss at my friends’ homes when, for example, people would just sit around the table, quietly speaking, or sit in the living room merely talking, until it was time to go, and rarely did anyone even suggest turning on music, let alone bust out onto the dance floor to celebrate the miracle of rhythm.

At the same time, however, I struggled to see our version of African culture as authentically African at all. Our “African” foods were laced with bizarre delicacies. One of our signature “ethnic” foods was a salad called “Salon Salad.” This concoction featured oddities mixed together like baked beans and canned salmon. Once in a while this had me raising an eyebrow. Baked beans? How is that African? There were other “traditional” foods that baffled me, like tinned sardines, roast beef, and marmalade sandwiches. Weren’t these foods I also regularly saw in the kitchens of my white friends?

Occasionally, I would also question my parents’ musical choices. When my mother talked about the music she loved when she was young, she rhapsodized about the Beatles and The Byrds. My dad favoured barbershop quartets, swooping his bass notes in chorus with Mitch Miller and the Gang. A family favourite was the soundtracks of popular musicals: My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and above all Fiddler on the Roof. Even at the jubilant parties they threw, the most popular songs were often reggae and African remakes of pop hits. Blondie’s “The Tide is High” reigned for one part of the eighties. Paul Simon’s “Graceland” dominated the next.

While these anomalies disturbed my sense of Africanness somewhere deep beneath the surface of my identity, nothing caused me more struggle than Krio, the Sierra Leonean language we spoke. Whereas my friends would blink in bafflement at what struck them as an utterly foreign language, Krio just sounded like a version of English to me. This was not just my sense of fluency, having been immersed in both English and Krio from infancy; rather, Krio is a creole language that incorporates elements of French, Portuguese, and English. The history of Sierra Leone is such that this mixture is inevitable. The base of Krio is English, but the grammar follows African rules, and many African words have been co-opted from neighbouring ethnic groups, such as Mende and Temne, as well as from other West African countries, like Ghanaian Akan and Nigerian Yoruba.

But all my self-conscious teenage ears could attune themselves to was the English structure that held Krio up. When wide-eyed white kids would ask me to produce a magic word in this other language, the existence of which fascinated their imaginations, I would try to identify the least English-sounding word I could. But it always felt false to me, inauthentic. “Well,” I remember saying to a girl I was trying to impress in eighth grade, “how about mɛk ɛs? It means hurry up or get a move on.” This did produce exactly the kind of awe-struck validation I was hoping for, but it also produced a sense of duplicity in me, a feigning toward Africa that I did not feel justified to claim. To my ears, mɛk ɛs simply sounded like “make haste,” which was just English. Worse, it was English mispronounced, English poorly pronounced by African mouths who had stolen someone else’s language and were trying to pass it off as their own. Recall my struggle with my Uncle Biola pronouncing my name as “Bat.” All of this simply reinforced those struggles. Even my family name, Bickersteth, is European and not an indigenous African name!10

How did this travesty come to be? An entire cultural group stealing someone else’s culture? How was it, I wondered to myself, that I came from a people who had institutionalized thievery to the point of seeing it as a legitimate form of their own identity? How could I possibly call myself African when much of what I understood of my African background seemed to rely so heavily on European — specifically English — cultural references? With this sense of Krio being a stealing culture of stolen artifacts, it is no wonder that I did not feel I could authentically claim my African background as something to root me in a tradition that properly accounted for the clear “non-Canadianness” that white Canadians regularly saw in me.

In fact, I had it backwards. I had accepted the stereotype of Black thief because it gave me an ambivalent sense of power; it was one of the defining identities I was permitted by the dominant white culture to inhabit. But once you understand yourself in a certain light, you begin to understand everything else in that same way. I was a thief; therefore, in my mind, I was descended from a culture of thieves. It never occurred to me, though, that I saw things in this way because society had already yoked me to them. I didn’t know it then, but the thing that would eventually rescue my perspective, and so rescue me from this particular metaphorizing, was a kind of doubling down that I now recognize as Green Walters’s Double Yoke.

The history of Sierra Leone is complex and intertwined with the West through what George Elliott Clarke calls the “crucible of the slave trade.” 11 This may surprise you, but remember, this is how history works: the more you delve past the surface, the more you encounter the essence of that thing deep down that barely bleeds to the surface. When you study slavery, it boggles the mind at how far-reaching and deeply integrated it is with the formation of the modern West and, thus, the alteration of so many peoples and cultures around the world. The key geographical relationship is demonstrated as a triangle between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. This is sometimes known as the triangular trade: Europeans travelled down to Africa, acquired slaves, shipped them to the Americas, and then transferred the wealth they amassed from free, enforced labour back to Europe. At one point during this torrid history, Africans who had been enslaved in the U.S. found themselves in Canada, freed from slavery’s tyranny, as a result of supporting the British cause against the newly formed Americans during the Revolutionary War, 1775–83. It should be pointed out that these Black Loyalists, as they are known, established Canada’s longest-standing populations of Black communities in Canada. Two hundred and fifty years later, their descendants thrive in Nova Scotia today. At the time, though, these early Black Canadians found that slavery was only ambivalently present in Canada; some regions ignored it, some didn’t. Some parts enforced it, others didn’t. That meant there were actual, enslaved Africans on Canadian soil at the same time that these Black Loyalists arrived. Rather than realize the full scope of their anticipated freedom, they entered a territory of confusion. Many European settlers still saw them as people who may, perhaps, be free, but whose Blackness was the mark of their enduring capacity to be enslaved. Effectively, they were viewed as inferior people, even subhuman. As such, they struggled for equal opportunities (the farmland that had been promised to them, for example, was either inadequate or never materialized), and eventually, out of utter frustration, demanded to be returned to Africa. Without providing every detail of this complex history, their request was eventually granted and in 1792 about 1,200 of them sailed in a flotilla of freedom back to Africa, where they founded their capital: Freetown.

I want to pause here because this is a moment of history’s poetry: the impossible return. Sometimes, we think of figurative language or cultural moments as providing a “turn.” And here, we have the culmination of a “turn” in its repetition, the turn and the return. The African stolen from home now turns back to home. But poetry’s beauty is nothing if not backstabbing. Accomplishing the impossible return after crossing the dreaded Atlantic through the Door of No Return — being turned into objects of labour, etc., only to reclaim that which had been irretrievably lost — is an accomplishment of triumph. But it is also impossible. When one turns, and turns again, one cannot turn one’s back on what was left behind. Indeed, the Africans who remained permanently displaced in the Americas have proven this over time, imbuing so much of American culture with sensibilities that were retained across the Atlantic. Similarly, the Nova Scotians who turned back to Africa could not fully turn their backs on Canada, the U.S., or the West in general.

In fact, the project to relocate them to Africa was itself supported by European financial backers whose argument was that this new colony in Africa would be a beacon of Western achievement on the continent; it would demonstrate to the world that Africans could fashion functioning societies embedded with Western principles; it would prove that Africans could be civilized. This was an experiment to rival the democratic experiment that had also very recently birthed the United States of America. The two are intertwined. So it was that these newest Africans would have a European education, would worship a European God, would dress like Europeans, would hold European values, would speak a European language. Over time, though, African sensibilities would also infiltrate their culture, and this mixture came to define them. Somewhat pejoratively, they were known as Afro-Saxons. They were understood to be a creolized culture.12 Their very name, Krio, was thought to be a creolized derivation of the word Creole itself. (This turns out not to be true; Krio is actually derived from a Yoruba term, Akiriyo>, which was a reference to our tendency to walk about regularly, specifically going to church often.13)

We had been stamped with the marks of so many different layers of culture and history that we appeared to have no original stamp of our own. We were a maverick culture. This maverick nature is to some extent our brand, not in the sense of being rebellious, but in the sense of being distinct for lacking a mark.14 There is something deeply appropriate about having the brand of absence. In a sense, it is how one encounters Blackness over and over again in the dominant perspectives of historical accounts, particularly Western Canadian historical accounts: unremarked, ciphers, absent. When I was young, I had no knowledge of any Black history on the Prairies at all. I also had only the barest understanding of Sierra Leone’s history. I had no idea, for example, that this West African nation that my family was from literally shared history with Canada. To this day, most Canadians have little or no knowledge of the historical links between Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia. But it was like that for everything having to do with Black humanity. The notion of Blackness was presented as opaque and ahistoric. (Now you know why so many people do a double-take when they learn that Egypt is in the Middle East and Africa: Africa is a black amorphous lump of no-history. Egypt is historical and not Black. How could it be in Africa?) It is no surprise that I didn’t even search out Black history on the Prairies, nor that I saw the essence of my African identity — of the Krio people in general — as fraudulent, as empty of history, when in fact it was the complete opposite: the Krio are authentically who we are because of history. On top of that, as I later discovered, Alberta and the Canadian Prairies are rich with Black history. When you scratch the surface, you don’t find a paucity, you rupture opacity; you find a Prairie Blackness that is rife with history.

Here is where my concern with Black history on the Prairies and the history of the Krio of Sierra Leone created surprising and fruitful parallels for me. The nothingness of Black history — that is, the perception that Blackness lacks history — allowed me as a teenager to find a comforting power in becoming a thief, a stereotype. Stereotypes, of course, have no history; they only have story, which is a powerful force that influences us as much as the physical forces of the universe (often more so). And different people see different things in the same story. For me, thievery was access to power because it gave me visibility. All of my life I struggled to be seen in a society that was largely blind to the multi-dimensionality of my humanity. Succumbing to a stereotype of Blackness seemed to solve one side of the equation for me (being seen), even if it problematized the other (being seen as human). This self-perception also conveniently explained my Africanness to me: the Krio stole their culture from others. When you see yourself in a certain light, it is inevitable that you shine that same light on others as well. Slave holders did not originally fear Black revolt and Black violence against them because they saw Blackness as inherently violent, but because they recognized their own enacted violence on innocent people being reflected back at them (thus shaping the story that Blackness was inherently violent). Even Thomas Jefferson who apparently supported some form of freedom for enslaved Africans, could not bring himself to be an out and out abolitionist. He, too, feared a violent uprising. Nobody bothered to ask the enslaved people themselves. This is how the light you shine on yourself becomes the light you shine on others. You displace your own faults onto another.

One of the Black cowboys I have encountered while scratching the surface is Thomas Rife. Rife lived in Southern Alberta at the beginning of the twentieth century and pops up a handful of times in local newspapers. Here is one of the contexts in which I discovered him:

At this point, I didn’t know I had stumbled across a Black cowboy. Unusually for the time, no mention of Rife’s race is made. This is particularly unusual given the criminal context that exists. I may have guessed that Rife was somehow related to the cattle world, at least distantly, because he was involved in an incident of horse-stealing. But that would have been a speculative conclusion. What is clear from the article is that Rife’s role in the caper involved a form of fraudulence: “Thomas Rife [sentenced] one year for obtaining board under false pretences.” Later, when I found references to him being a “negro cow puncher,” I realized I had accidentally discovered another Black cowboy. This is one of the ways in which the rhymes of history hurt. I had identified another forgotten cowboy, but the context was once again criminality, fraudulence. The power of this trope — the thieving Black blank — was demonstrated in its longevity. The consistency of its essence over such a long period of time only reaffirmed its ahistoricity. It’s no wonder it held an appeal for me as a teenager. That power seemed to say that history doesn’t matter; dimensionality is irrelevant: you can be immortal. Yes, the Prairies are rife with Black history, but Black history seems rife with Thomas Rifes.

My Krio history also felt rife with Rifes. Fraudulence seemed everywhere, but nowhere more to me than in the language. Yet it was this collision of rife and Rife that helped to show me another understanding beyond the inevitable thievery. As I pointed out earlier, Krio words, like mɛk ɛs, just sounded like broken English to me. But, truly, because of how taken I was with understanding myself through the lens of a thief, I was missing the point about how the language works and the inherent poetry it can express. For example, I heard the word Krio as a lazy version of Creole with the l sound dropped and the pronunciation altered. Beans became ornamented in Krio with ch at the end, making it binch. And, occasionally, there is the insertion of an Africanization. One of the ways of saying, “I will be [right] back,” is A de kam, where de is a wholly new substitute for “will be” or, more accurately in this case, “am.” In fact, linguists say that this use of de reflects substrate language structures (West African grammatical rules) more so than superstrate (English/colonial) ones.15 The literal translation of A de kam is “I am coming,” but this is a very limited translation and does not at all do justice to the language. For instance, this same sentence can also be used as a statement of departure. In other words, you say it not when you are coming, but when you are leaving. Krio is not the only version of a West African “pidgin” to construct the connotation in this way, but in the case of Krio it is certainly poetic.

It could be said that British involvement in the African slave trade began in Sierra Leone. John Hawkins, a British trader, is one of the first people to sail from England to collect Africans and transport them across the Atlantic to the Americas and transform their lives and multiple continents forever. Hawkins, then, is the first thief on my complicated, implicating family tree. He made three initial visits to what was then known as the Guinea Coast of Africa between 1562 and 1568. On his first trip, he captured roughly 400 Africans along the Sierra Leone river and took them to Hispaniola in the Caribbean, where he made an enormous profit.16 This lucrative introduction kicked off England’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.17 Two centuries later, the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton who had worked on a slave ship as a sailor and also sailed to Sierra Leone to collect slaves. The venture that Hawkins had initiated was now a full-fledged institution. “I once was blind, but now can see” was meant to express Newton’s transformation into a Christian as well as an abolitionist. He didn’t, though, completely extricate himself from the fiendish industry immediately after his conversion, so powerful was its economic pull. From the African perspective, the Atlantic slave trade was a kind of death (often it was literally so). Family members, friends, and loved ones who were taken were never seen again, except in very rare cases. Very much like death, return was impossible.

Except when it wasn’t. When 1,200 disgruntled Black people left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone, they managed the impossible. For some, it was metaphorical; they had been born in the Americas and were bridging generational displacement in re-establishing themselves in Africa. For a small few, it was literal: they had been stolen from Africa in their youth, and years later found themselves returning to their lost home. For everyone, it was an extraordinary feat of reasserting historical agency. What had begun, roughly in 1562–63 with John Hawkins’s first voyage, had finally culminated in 1792 when the first of the Nova Scotian flotilla touched land. The impossible return through the curtain of death. Why shouldn’t they have flipped their language? Why wouldn’t such a poetic legacy express itself in inversions? This simple saying doesn’t allow for departure: A de kam, even when one is leaving, always speaks of the promise of coming. In this way, the people who became the impossible returners, always orient themselves toward home.

This simple poetry of history entirely escaped me in my youth. I could not see this advancement on the European language that had been historically imposed on us. It seemed only to be a broken or substandard version of it to me. I could not hear the history rife with poetry in Krio. It is only now, as an adult, that I can accept that maybe we were thieves of a sort because thieving was forced on us. Because we were stolen, we had English forced on us. And, maybe, because we had English forced on us, we stole English. And then, even more poetically, maybe in stealing it, we returned to it and, in so doing, returned it to poetry. Maybe some ancestor of mine had Bickersteth forced on them. Maybe they stole Bickersteth. Maybe in stealing it, they returned us to it.

Thomas Rife had “thief” forced on him. Maybe he was a thief. Maybe, like me as a teenager, he claimed a difficult poetry, and in so doing carved out a contradictory agency: maybe he chose to be the thief he was expected to be. Maybe he found the impossible return to his humanity. I don’t know. There are very few historical records regarding his life. But he’s not an absence. He made sure of that. Even if he died in a prison in Selkirk, Manitoba.18