Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover portrait: Bazoline Estelle Usher, Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-2231.
Cover background: Detail from The Underground Railroad, Charles T. Webber, Cincinnati Art Museum, Subscription Fund Purchase, Accession #: 1927.26.
Image 1: Row of slave cabins on a southern plantation, 1800s; hand-colored woodcut, North Wind Picture Archives, SOCI3A-00179.
Image 2: “A Slave Auction in Virginia,” Illustrated London News, February 16, 1861, courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Image 3: Slave Dealer’s Price Listing. Richmond, Virginia: Johnson, Snyder and Adams, September 20, 1860, courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Image 4: Slaves escaping to the North through southern swamps during US Civil War; woodcut, North Wind Picture Archives, SOCI3A-00080.
Image 5: Operations of the fugitive-slave law, Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 807834.
Image 6: Fortress Monroe, February 1862, Ferdinand Mayer & Co., Lithographers.
Image 7: Advertisement for Queen’s Hotel, Statistics Canada, The Canada Year Book, 1874.
Image 8: D135 CT 1863; Colored Troop Div. Letters Received; Record Group 94; National Archives & Record Administration, Washington, DC.
Image 9: 54th Massachusetts (black) Regiment assaulting Confederate stronghold at Fort Wagner, SC, North Wind Picture Archives, EVCW3A-00063.
Image 10: 333 4th Avenue East, Sheldon Place, The Grey Roots Archival Collection, PF49S14F28I3.
Image 11: John “Daddy” Hall, The Grey Roots Archival Collection 1976.020.019.
Image 12: Father William Miller [Father Thomas Henry Miller], The Grey Roots Archival Collection, 1968.061.016.
Image 13: BME Church, Owen Sound, The Grey Roots Archival Collection A2006.070.001.
Image 14: Owen Sound harbour (S.S. Alberta in port; CPR tracks), The Grey Roots Archival Collection 1980.273.001.
Image 15: Unidentified school group, The Grey Roots Archival Collection A2006.073.082.
Image 16: West Rocks, courtesy of George Kraemer.
Images 17 and 18: Maps by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 2002 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
Thanks to Greg McKinnon, Toronto District School Board Archivist, for routing us to the research of Joel Weiss and Robert S. Brown, which provided helpful information on the duration and timing of the school years in Toronto and elsewhere in the 1860s.
For Jan Andrews
and
Rachna Gilmore
Author’s Note
I would like to thank Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes, for his support and encouragement, and for his careful reading of the manuscript in its early stages. I would also like to thank Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost, author of I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land, for her advice and expertise, and Barbara Hehner for her meticulous fact-checking.
Thanks, also, to Diane Kerner and to Sandy Bogart Johnston, who guided and pushed me into writing the best book I possibly could. Sandy is the heart and soul of the Dear Canada books, and she works as hard on them as do the authors.
My gratitude to Bonita Johnson de Matteis and Terri Jackson for their help in finding information about the early Black community in Owen Sound; Mary Smith and Mindy Gill-Sitoski at the Owen Sound Marine & Rail Museum; Trevor Parsons, Amelia Ferguson and Karin Foster at the Grey Roots Museum & Archives; Judy Armstrong, Beth Hall and Margaret Hodgins at the Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library; and John Shragge, The Road Scholar, Ontario.
About the Author
Karleen Bradford’s ties to Owen Sound are strong. Her father was born and brought up there, as was her husband. Her parents met in Owen Sound, and Karleen met her husband there. It was only natural, then, that when Karleen’s husband retired, they would return from a number of overseas postings to live in Owen Sound.
After moving back, Karleen began learning more about the African Canadian community in the city and exploring its history as a terminus of the Underground Railroad. Her father’s brother was ninety-two by then, and she spent many hours listening to stories of his youth. One story was of his mother Bessie Scott’s friendship with a young woman named Julia Miller. Julia was the daughter of slaves who had escaped on the Underground Railroad and eventually settled in Canada. Karleen’s uncle told of how shocked some of Bessie’s neighbours were when they would drop in for a visit and find her and Julia sharing a cup of coffee at the dining-room table. Although escaped slaves were originally welcomed into the city, racism had soon raised its head when jobs became scarce for all the men there.
To learn more about the Underground Railroad connection, Karleen attended a Black History Conference in the nearby town of Durham, Ontario. Many attendees at this conference were African Americans who had come north to try and trace ancestors who had fled to Canada to escape slavery. “At this conference,” Karleen says, “I found myself sitting beside a woman from Pennsylvania who had come up to search for information about her great-great-aunt. That great-great-aunt turned out to be the very person who had befriended my grandmother.”
Karleen was able to tell the woman the story of the friendship between Julia Miller and Bessie Scott. Never much of a believer in coincidences, this “chance” meeting convinced Karleen that she was meant to write about the courageous people who had faced such terrible hardships to find freedom in Canada, and this book was born.
Many of its characters are historical people. Karleen’s great-aunt, Emma Scott Nasmith, knew Father Miller when she was a child. She wrote an essay which has been reprinted in Northern Terminus: The African Canadian History Journal, vol.4/2007. In this essay Emma Scott Nasmith recounts her memories of Saturday afternoons when she and her friends were free to play and explore the meadows, the high rocks and the caves surrounding the city. If they tarried too long they were often found by Father Miller, who gently hurried them on their way home. She speaks lovingly of what a kind man he was.
Karleen was writing the final drafts of this book during the 2008 electoral campaign in the United States. “I was writing about a time when African Americans were enslaved, beaten, tortured and murdered,” she says. “When they were not even considered to be human, but property. Who could ever have imagined that less than a hundred and fifty years later an African American would become president of the United States?”
Karleen Bradford is the award-winning author of twenty-four works of fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. Her many historical novels include With Nothing But Our Courage in the Dear Canada series; The Nine Days Queen; and a series of five novels about the crusades, including There Will Be Wolves, which won the CLA Best Young Adult Novel Award. She has also won the Saskatchewan Young Readers’ Choice Shining Willow Award, and the Max and Greta Ebel Award. Karleen’s Shadows on a Sword was nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, as was Angeline. Her books have also been nominated for the Silver Birch Award, the Red Maple Award, and several other readers’ choice awards. In 2006 she won the Allan Sangster Award for outstanding dedication and service to the Canadian Authors Association. A Desperate Road to Freedom was shortlisted for the 2011/2012 Red Cedar Award.
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Julia May Jackson is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2009 by Karleen Bradford.
Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
SCHOLASTIC and DEAR CANADA and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-4431-2408-9
First eBook edition: September 2012
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