The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery
By Jon Tattrie
Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield, 2010
206 pp. $20
Lost Tongues
By Rudyard Fearon
Toronto, ON: RWF Publishing, 2013
In the wake of the passing, last July, of Dr. Burnley “Rocky” Jones, O.N.S., LLD, the superb human rights champion and civil rights lawyer, I knew I could no longer neglect to read Jon Tattrie’s The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery: Carvery was one of the many who worked with Jones and one of the very few to put public protest to personal test. Published in 2010, Tattrie’s chronicle underlines the multi-generational social and familial dislocation that occurred as a result of the City of Halifax’s Africville Relocation program, 1964-70, that razed a historic African-Nova Scotian community and trucked most of its former home-owner residents into municipal rental units or into actual, downtown slum housing.
Far from being a benign effort to support racial integration and social uplift goals, the so-called Relocation was, “As Rocky saw it,” the result of “race struggle” that mandated Africville’s “destruction.” In Tattrie’s own words, “Africville was … beaten to death.” But the most eloquent testimony about the history of Africville is that of the persistent protestor, Carvery, who has spent the last 45 years fighting for apologies, the reconstruction of the Seaview Baptist Church, compensation or reparations for the former residents and descendants, as well as a public inquiry into the Relocation. “They couldn’t give us pavement, but they could give us a dump. They couldn’t give us sewage, but we had to receive their sewage. We got evicted. It’s a vicious cycle of racism, what they did to us in Africville….” And Carvery concludes: “I’m still in Africville. Right today, anybody driving by will see my little caravan of freedom fighters, fighting for what we all should be fighting for….”
Carvery emerges as a heroic figure despite himself. He has been an addict, a prison inmate, and violent to his lovers and dangerous to his children. Describing his subject in the 1970s, Tattrie says, with a daub of yellow journalism and a dash of purple prose, “Carvery was a human dump, a walking infectious diseases hospital, a bone prison for one.” In short, for Carvery, the Relocation was a descent into Hell, while his personal salvation has been his dedication to protesting iniquity and inequity enough to help win painfully slow-in-coming apology and partial restitution from the City.
Tattrie’s writing style is colourful, and each chapter in Carvery’s saga, based on interviews and some research, is essentially a “human-interest” J-School story. Even so, Carvery’s flamboyant talk shines through. Not surprisingly, Rocky Jones makes vital appearances in the text, describing black history in Nova Scotia and even helping dig Carvery free of a 2004 blizzard that had swamped his camper. It was quite moving then to see Carvery at Jones’s visitation three weeks ago: One fighter mourning another, as the struggle for justice and equality continues.
One wonders what Halifax might look like now and how socio-economic integration might have been assisted if, rather than being bulldozed down, Africville had been valued as a culturally unique and vibrant, seaside, African-heritage enclave, with proud homeowners occupying prize real-estate on the peninsula. It could have become a tourism must-see as a bucolic Harlem, or as a black adjunct to the city’s Hydrostone district, or as an African-Nova Scotian version of Peggy’s Cove…. But such visions require visionaries. Given the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Dream speech, “now is the time” to revisit the planning of Africville as a once-and-future city estate….
Another notable title is Lost Tongues, a self-published work by Rudyard Fearon, a Jamaican-Canadian poet who has also released CDs of his work. Fearon is a master of the epigram—the pithy poem of wit, in which volumes of thought get distilled into an observation, or a chronicle, sketched out in a handful of lines. Hear “energy”: “the young girl said / i was too old; / and i said / she was too young // but the energy / was strong // and proved us both wrong.” Or try “The Complaint”: “the cat / complained / to the dog: // ‘i live / a dog’s life.” These are poems to reread again and again.
