Hugging the Huge Father
by Chad Norman
NS:Grant Block Press, 2011
74 pp., $15
Kids-Tots and Forget-Me-Nots: Childhood Memories
by George Borden
Dorchester, NS: G.A.B. Consulting
Hugging the Huge Father is Truro, NS, poet Chad Norman’s newest book. It is self-published through his significantly titled press because he wants “to bring out books without government money” (usually received as a “bloc grant.”) More important – perhaps – than the enterprise of the enterprise is Norman’s desire to praise, to laud, to celebrate important masculinities – fathers, grandfathers, uncles, workers, farmers, co-workers – as well as boys and sons.
Norma’s mission may be earnest, and his reverence borders on didacticism: We must like his heroes, for they are likeable, and they are heroic, and they are like all men. But his portraits also arrive with whimsy and wistfulness, nostalgia and tender regard. The poet’s son asks, “‘Dad, what if time runs out?’ / I laugh, then hold him / afraid of my answer.” The poet’s father is conjured in a long elegy that moves fitfully, yes (it could be shorter), but ends movingly: “And that dead man, my father, is gone, / to be alive somewhere, and I can tell / the world what it is like to be one, / the recipient of a dead man’s desire.” Norman’s best paeans and elegies and recollections are studded with images that speak volumes.
“Masstown, Nova Scotia” is one such poem. A “farm-house” is “tucked away on acres of history”; “And the empty Governor-General bottles / lined to the back of the cupboard / winked beside the new tube of Brylcreem”; “the herd moved up out of the muck”…. A world is canvassed with miraculous, meticulous economy. “A Branch Over the Path” presents the poet as an unlucky trespasser. A property owner is “unmistakably kind,” but still wants the poet to “stop / using the easy way to the job.” The poet thinks of deer that also “trespass”: “No signs hang from the branch, / and what would it matter, I had / become a deer, and ‘Keep Out’ / wouldn’t have caught my eye.” Norman philosophizes, but is also plain. There’s much to be said for a poet who exalts salt-of-the-earth types and who writes to be read, not to receive cash. His poems could use further editing, but are eminently enjoyable. Seek him out.
Another plain and self-published poet is George Borden, whose latest publication is Kids-Tots and Forget-Me-Nots: Childhood Memories. The Dartmouth, NS, poet dedicates his lavishly illustrated—if lovingly amateurish—book of rhymes to “a community of neighbours, friends and relatives who as playmates, passed their childhood years in peace and harmony unsurpassed elsewhere on this celestial planet.”
The purpose of these homespun rhymes is to recall a world that has passed away – the childhoods of those “who grew up in semi-rural Nova Scotia during the 1940’s and 50’s,” – and to pass on the recollections to today’s children and youth, “so that they may be reminded that preceding generations were not so much unlike themselves.” Charm is the intent; the colourful, crayon, cartoon-style drawings invite; the rhymes are artless and affecting: “he teaches me / so many things / ’bout fishing, sports / an’ broken wings. / He scolds me good / when I am bad / then loves me more… / ’cause he’s my dad.”
An Africadian poet, Borden follows the deliberately simple style of the great African-American poet Langston Hughes. (Norman mentions Hughes too). But these poems are ‘raceless’; they are for kids, anywhere and everywhere. A righteously fun poem is “Nelson Made a Wagon,” which illustrates a boy’s construction of a wagon out of scrap and cast-offs. It’s too creaky to win any races, but its creator loves it to pieces: “It squeaked, it scraped, it looked like junk / and parts were always draggin’; / but not one kid in the town / was prouder of his wagon.” Similar pleasure is available in “Nelson Made a Tent”: “From crooked poles, a cardboard box / and rags not worth a cent, / with torn sheets and flour bags, / our Nelson made his tent.”
The point of these poems is that pluck, luck, imagination, and industry can help anyone fulfil a dream – despite limitations of poverty or material. It’s the power of dream, unleashed in play, which gives one the courage to change one’s circumstances. Seek out this book too.
Colored Zion: The History of Zion Baptist Church and the Black Community of Truro, Nova Scotia
by Donna Byard Sealey
Self-published, 2000
294pp. $15
Africa’s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia
by Sharon Robart-Johnson
Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 2009
240 pp. $29
The late great amateur historian Pearleen Oliver (1917-2008) started an intellectual revolution in African-Nova Scotia (Africadia) when she published A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nova Scotia in 1953. She was building upon the history written by Peter E. McKerrow and published in Halifax in 1895, and she was also issuing a call, if silently, for other Africadians to follow. And they have, and they have mainly been women.
Since Oliver (and her own subsequent history of the Beechville United Baptist Church [1994]), other women have scribed histories of various Africadian communities, focussing on churches. One fine example is Donna Byard Sealey’s Colored Zion (2001), her lovingly researched history of the Zion Baptist Church in Truro, NS, and also of its several Africadian neighbourhoods. It is a model for other church/community histories. Less ambitious examples of the excellent efforts of Oliver and Sealey are Shernera D. Colley’s history of the East Preston United Baptist Church (1996), Cherry Paris’s history of the Windsor Plains United Baptist Church (2001), and Edith Cromwell’s Inglewood, My Community (1993). (One notable male work is a history of the Emmanuel Baptist Church of Upper Hammonds Plains, Whatever Your Will, Lord [1984], by Willard P. Clayton [1922-2007].)
Amid all the salacious commentary on the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children and the allegations of various crimes, it is good to remember that that institution—and the one-and-only African (United) Baptist Association of Nova Scotia were born out of a redemptive dream of liberty and equality and faithfulness. Lest we forget… Africadian history is not only about trials and suffering. It is also about triumph and success. That’s what the little church histories and community chronicles trumpet.
Sometimes folks wonder, “What have you African-Nova Scotians achieved, anyway?” One can answer by narrating bios and listing names: Richard Preston, Maxine Tynes, George Dixon, Sam Langford, Rocky Jones, Portia White, Capt. Rev. Dr. William Andrew White, Dr. Daurene Lewis, Dr. Leslie H. Oliver, Hon. Donald Oliver, Q.C. (a senator), Viola Desmond, Delmore Buddy Daye, Sylvia Hamilton, Pearleen Oliver, Dr. Mayann Francis, Hon. Donald Oliver, etc. But another answer is also – historically speaking – transcendent: Our ancestors created black communities – without outside help – in a colony, a province, that didn’t want them – except as the cheapest labour, located on the poorest land, segregated in society and geography and both patronized and terrorized by the law.
That our ancestors founded and maintained forty-plus black communities, over generations and centuries, in something like Third-World poverty and common illiteracy, but survived – to produce divines, lawyers, doctors, artists, politicians, entrepreneurs, persons-of-state, pugilists, track stars, provincial cabinet ministers, etc., is an excellent testament. One more proof of this legacy is Sharon Robart-Johnson’s Africa’s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Published in 2009, Robart-Johnson’s book is not only a chronicle of the African Methodist Episcopal Disney Chapel or Greenville United Baptist Church, it is as ambitious a history as those penned by Oliver and Sealey and McKerrow.
Indeed, Robart-Johnson examines the records of slavery in Yarmouth County, and finds court records of maltreatment (torture) and the general misery of human bondage. As she writes, “Negroes in Yarmouth were bought and sold like cattle at an auction” and were given, “in some cases, only bread to eat and stagnant water to drink.” When slave owners hastily buried a slave girl, Jude, on their property, in 1800, her injuries were so severe, even after exhumation for a coroner’s examination, the men responsible were charged with murder, though they were later acquitted. Robart-Johnson traces the careers of Yarmouth born-and-bred Africadian heroes, heroines, and a few villains too. Her careful research and lively prose establish, once again, that we Africadians descend from hardy, inventive, and resourceful souls. We ought to value the culture that they established.
