Part One
Margaret Buckingham
I haven't been inside these walls since 1854;
it was a real home then,
one Charlotte Beaver
was proud of ...
good to me she was,
always said my name the German way though:
'Margrit'.
My mama named me Margaret:
the only name I had from birth
til I married Mister Buckingham
in Upper Canada in 1829,
a year before our first child, Temperance,
come to us.
Buckingham was the only name
my husband had from birth too, til coming here, 'cept,
once here, he made it his last name,
his 'past name' he called it, gave himself a new name,
a first name, didn't seem to matter though,
folks all called him Buckingham
til the day he disappeared, 'cepting me, to me,
he was MisterBuckingham,
though I was always Maggie to him.
Mister Buckingham come from a proud line,
broken to the wheel of a cruel man,
a field worker the whole of his chained life,
his mother and sisters badly used, then sold off,
never seen again,
his father whipped dead for protesting their sale;
his older brother murdered by patrolers after running off;
his younger brothers the only ones left after he come away;
an escape he never forgot or forgave himself for having made
the longer he looked back on leaving them...
When my husband first took me as his wife,
he took the modesty I had been allowed to keep
by the goodness of those who'd owned me,
while I traced the whip scars from his neck
to the backs of his thighs like some writing
I might have read if my fingers
had the knowledge of the language,
a story for every lash,
but there was no reading his wounds
beyond what a wife might imagine;
he never spoke of them neither:
his was a different slavery,
as my body knew none of those welts.
Mister Buckingham could be fearful to me and the children,
fearful to strangers,
fearful to those who did good by him,
and there was a lot of folks did good by him,
especially once we come to Puslinch,
but he was a repentant man, a tender man,
a man who taught me the ways of myself, a man
who thanked the local whites for being the kind of folk
they were and for their forgiveness of him,
folks who had hated slavery from the outside
as much as he had hated it from inside...
When I first come away from Maryland,
I left my mother and sister,
ran from a mistress who'd never laid a hand or a whip on me;
left, because my mother, grandmother and sister
knew nothing of the world beyond the laundry
that was our life, we knew five streets in one neighbourhood
of Baltimore; but nothing of what lay beyond those corners,
didn't even have memories of where in Africa
we'd come from, or when we'd been enslaved,
more than a hundred years before was our guess;
my great-grandmother having died giving birth
to my grandmother
who was sold as a girl to the family that owned us ever after.
I wanted my own unborn children to know more than that,
so I ran; ran from the laundry; ran from family,
ran from the woman who'd owned me the thirty years
I'd been in the world;
ran to one of the free black churches in Baltimore;
and folks there helped me run further,
got me across Lake Ontario on a ship;
got a job in Upper Canada doing the only thing I knew how,
washing for white folk.
The African Methodists
had a church started in Toronto:
most congregants was escaped slaves,
which is where I met and married Mister Buckingham;
had our daughters Temperance and Emera, then our son Adam
before coming to Puslinch, where we moved onto land
near John Wetherald's.
John and a lot of whites
like the Beavers in Puslinch
was good to escaped slaves. 'though the township
was too close to America for the comfort of most who'd come away.
What struck me first about elsewhere,
long before reaching freedom,
was the smells:
everything had been lye soaps and starch, scents
of the drying line in the sun, wet wool and cottons,
the burn of the coal heater and pipe tobacco,
pipes we smoked on the porch behind the main house
when the washing was folded
and night was coming down on us,
my family four generations deep in my sister's child,
all of us in the starlight; casting shadows into
the apple orchard beyond, the fragrance
of the dark as rich as cider.
Those days come to me in pieces,
like a quilt falling apart at the stitches...
I never seen nor heard from my mother, grandmother,
sister or niece, since the day I come away,
though Mr. Wetherald got me news,
and mixed news it was after my old mistress died
and her son's wife took over the house and sold off
my mother and sister to some family in Delaware,
there being too many mouths for them to feed
on the money they had.
I will say for him - for the son of my mistress - for
my half brother, that I was the first of my family
not to mother a child by one of them,
even my niece was his, but it seems that having that girl
done him some good, so he never took me, and I suppose
his wife making him keep only
my grandmother and niece
was a mercy decided on between him and her
over the sin within him and his coloured kin,
least that was the comfort
I took from the split of what was his family and mine.
After Mister Buckingham was murdered in 1850,
I moved in with my daughter Temperance
and her husband Sam Bush:
lived in a shanty owned by Nicholas and Charlotte,
not this place, but a shack on the back lot of where these logs
first stood, further south from here, close to Morriston.
The Beavers was German with some French in them
from somewheres called the Alsace:
least ways Old Peter and his sons spoke three languages
with their English too...
They wasn't much better off than me or mine though.
There was plenty of Germans in south Puslinch back then,
religious too they was... Beavers used to be Lutheran
before and after some war in Europe that lasted 30 years,
though they was Quakers when I first knew them.
Some preacher named Joseph Harlacher,
who knew Mrs. Charlotte from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
got sent up to preach in Canada in 1841
by something just started,
calling itself the Evangelical Association,
Harlacher come to Puslinch looking for Mrs. Charlotte;
arrived around supper time...she got so excited
she invited everyone to hear him preach...
folks started showing up from all over the township;
had themselves a high, holy time of it here,
but the Beavers went back to Quaking after that,
though they was Lutherans again by the time I died.
I was Independent myself, told the census man
as much in '51, kept my beliefs to myself since my mistress
read Moses demanding Pharaoh let his “people go”
while giving us religion one Sunday before I come away:
that verse split the seam of belief in me for good ...
I liked the Quakers: the Society of Friends
they called themselves in full,
some of who, locally, was Germans, like the Beavers,
while others was Irish, Welsh and English;
the oldest being my neighbour John Wetherald,
who knew Old Hickory himself,
Old Hickory being Elias Hicks,
the man who caused what the Quakers called
their Great Separation.
Hicks lived in Wilmington, Delaware
along with John's brother Thomas
and father Joseph
and between them they knew just about every anti-slaver
there was to know, Quaker or not.
Wetherald, the Beavers, Howitts and others were all friends
to local coloureds and those passing through
on their way to the Queen's Bush Settlement,
a days walk northwest of Guelph.
So many self-freed slaves come this way,
by the late '40's so say there was more than a thousand
squatting and clearing farms up there.
The Queen's Bush was land no one could own
by squatting though,
it was meant to be sold for the good of the Church of England,
the church of Upper Canada, but the Anglicans hated slavery,
so they never complained about the squatters,
though later, the land was divided
and sold by the government; so
most of the squatters left 'cause few could afford
to buy what they'd worked.
There only ever was a handful of blacks around here,
here being Puslinch township, not the here
in the Valley of the Grand
where these rooms are now, but back then,
here was also where
parts of my life was lived, not long before I died,
seeing as the Beavers had used me as their washwoman.
My family was one of just seven coloured families
living in Puslinch. Beyond us, near by Wetherald...
where we first lived, was Old Jane Nelson and her line.
Ben Bowlen, who died frozen to death beside his ox
in the winter of '42 left kin;
there was also a big family of Waldens
who had their own share of sorrows,
their Rachel being murdered over in Rockwood
by a drunk named George Harris;
Rach was no more than seventeen
when she was found beaten to death.
They hung poor George
in Guelph, but proper, through the courts,
once they judged him guilty on evidence,
him going to the gallows reconciled to his Maker;
repentant for the drunken ways that led to him killing the girl,
them both living man and life for.
There was also the Rames, Claude himself
was a white man from Charleston
who fled with his family of freed children,
after his wife, Aurora, his former slave died.
Other than them,
there was a few other unmarried coloured folk around,
like Sam Banks,
who some called lazy, but
he really just wanted the life of the lilies of the field,
neither labouring nor toiling
once he escaped his master's whip,
and then there was Jeremiah Collins
(who asked me to marry him
the day before they found me dead.)
There was some white folks in Puslinch that hated us, some
that especially hated those of us who was able
to pass for white, like my Em,
but slavery was gone for good in the British Empire
with the Emancipation Act of 1833,
so that was a freedom's worth of difference
to anyone born a slave like me,
besides, those who hated us weren't much loved
by anyone here, white or black.
John Wetherald and other Puslinch folks was Quakers
the first anniversary of Emancipation Day,
I wasn't in the township then, but they say the Day
was celebrated under this roof too, because it wasn't
just Quakers celebrating here:
it was Methodists and Presbyterians, Anglicans and
Lutherans as well - there was lots of folks in Puslinch
who saw to it that enslaved folks
got as far away from their masters as made them feel safe.
And it wasn't just Puslinch whites who helped: up in Guelph,
there was a man named William Groat,
part white,
African and Indian; born free to loyalists
down at the head of the Lake by Burlington Bay,
related to Tuscarora on the Six Nations reserve,
the ones who first took escaped slaves up the Grand River
to the Queen's Bush before there was roads to walk there.
Groat taught us freedom was finding your true self,
but then the Groats was griots, had the old tales
in their bones to keep themselves true.
One of the men who caused the roads to be planked
from Lake Ontario north
was a Scot named Thomas Sandilands:
he run a store out of a stone building
on the market square in Guelph.
Like the Beavers, Sandilands come to the County
in 1832 but was part of George Brown's
Anti-Slavery Society in the 1850's;
in all that time between, he worked with John Wetherald,
though we never called ourselves conductors
or station masters or anything railroad,
we was neighbours was all, helpful to strangers,
and everything went good 'til 1850,
when the Americans passed their second
Fugitive Slave Act.
Mister Buckingham got so wild
about that change, there was no stopping him
from going back to find his brothers …
Wetherald's people say he was hung by patrolers,
left on a tree where the Friends couldn't get him,
so they never was sure it was him,
but I knew he was dead,
told the census taker the year after
that I was a widow and no one said I wasn't.
After that, I'd stay some nights with Temperance,
and some with Emera and her David King,
a grandmother to newborns...
but without Mister Buckingham, I... lost my way,
'til I turned up dead out back of Archie Little's Inn,
six days before Christmas, the day after Jerry Collins
asked me to marry him that early winter of '54.
Part Two
Nicholas Beaver
my brother Pete und me served on the jury that Doc Howitt
empaneled to find the cause. Towards the end,
Margrit had seemed haunted
alone with her ghosts among the sheets und clothes,
so maybe she'd died on purpose,
but that was one of the things we needed to learn.
Margrit used to have... 'rituals' she'd do while laundering,
it was the way she had of remembering those she'd left
when she 'come away' as she called it, but
once Buckingham was gone,
she was like a clothes line breaking;
everything falling in the dirt
und her not having the strength to wash it again.
Buckingham had been her great comfort, but when he died,
he left a hole too big for even their children's children to fill.
After news was found by John Wetherald
about her Maryland kin
she started drinking, und though some folks
thought she gave herself
to some of the newly-freed men passing through Puslinch
on their way north, I never believed such stories,
even after her last days with Jerry Collins was told
during the inquest:
Collins himself never made such a claim,
and he'd wanted to marry her,
but I think no man but Buckingham
knew the pleasures of her bed
all the days of her life.
John Wetherald taught us by example that we was one people,
but what troubled most of the former slaves
we knew back then was the fears und shames
they was trained in by their old masters.
John had a great patience for the newly freed
und no one needed patience more than Buckingham,
yet when the Fugitive Slave Act was re-enacted in the States,
to see Buckingham's grief was hard for those who knew him,
und no one doubted he would go back for his brothers
but not return.
That Slave Act killed John Wetherald too I believe,
though he was already old in 1850.
Turning America into a slave prison was too much
for his good heart;
und it broke him when he had to tell Margrit
what he'd learned had happened to Buckingham,
und then about the sale of her family.
In the end, for those of us on the inquest jury,
all we really had to worry over was whether Jerry Collins
had killed Margrit Buckingham; whether she'd killed herself,
or whether it might have been a tongue swallowing fit
(since she was known to have those on nights
when the moon was rising,
which had been the case the last night of her life.)
For all of us who knew her, on or off the jury,
the day of her inquest was a trial we all faced,
and a quiet Christmas it made for each of us
when all was said and done.
Part 3
Margaret
Jeremiah Collins was no man to equal Mister Buckingham,
he lacked the burning righteousness that kept my husband
true to his wounds.
Jerry was toolike me, mixed-blood;
too well treated by his father - his former master,
too guilty for having fled and left family,
too humbled by men like my husband,
whose sufferings was crimes.
Jerry, like me too, was a man of sorrows, not angers.
We never hated them who owned us,
just hated the idea of being owned by our flesh and blood;
it's what he and I talked about most
that last day: being owned by kin.
I barely knew Jerry, only ever saw him five or six times...
first met him after New Years 1854, then not again til that June
when he turned up at my daughter Em's sick with fever...
He knew Em and David, because Jerry,
being a digger of wells,
had dug one for them.
I nursed him back to health,
and when he was better
Jerry said he'd buy me a dress for tending him.
I didn't see him after that 'til the day before I died,
which is when he proposed... he was a funny man,
a sad man too, but a good man; and
well digging ain't for the lazy neither,
he'd been scarred by it,
his sick fever dreams was full of digging terrors,
some as old as his boyhood
when he was first put to the task of digging for water,
dangling down a hole,
a rope round his waist,
the only task he'd ever had,
digging wells for other folk.
Would I have married him?
It's a fool's question now:
maybe I had the heartache of being alone
those three years since Mister Buckingham'd gone, but
it was too many sheets, too many shrouds, too many ghosts,
too much snow and the earth and woods white
with the billowings of winter;
it was me lost in tobacco smoke around the wood stove
in the general store...
the slow burn of whiskey heating up inside me...
swirling in the knowledge of all the generations
of the same two families inside me:
it was the long drift of my aching thoughts;
and then it was that fence,
not knowing where Jerry was,
lost in the cold out back of the Inn,
talking to myself about who knows what,
while I hiked my skirts to climb the rails...
only that black cloud come down too hard for me
to know whether I could have lived as his wife, or not...
Part Four
Nicholas
It was Doc Howitt examined Margrit's bodyafter she'd been found
by the fence with her skirts up next morning...
The Doc's father, Quaker Howitt,
first come to Upper Canada
on the same ship as John Wetherald, he und John
was good friends ever after, though the Howitts
was Methodists,
even had a church named after them.
Which is to say, that Doc Howitt
was not looking to bury a coloured woman
without knowing the true cause of her dying,
so we talked to anyone who knew anything
that might have helped us.
Und of course, we had to start with the earliest account
we had of her last afternoon. On the stand,
Margrit's son-in-law, Sam Bush,
blamed himself for drinking and wrangling with Collins
before Margrit come home from her washing work.
Sam told us, that when she got to the shanty,
Jerry said he would take her to the store and pay for things...
so they left Sam as the sun was setting,
saying if they didn't return they would go to
David King's - her other son-in-law's...
which was the last Sam saw of her.
When asked by Doc Howitt, Sam said he thought
there was nothing improper in her behaviour with Collins,
but did think the two were on their way to buy whiskey.
Peter Hoffman,
who lived on my brother Peter's land,
testified that he'd come home
und found Margrit und Jerry at his place
saying they was drying out
from getting wet in the deep snow,
und that both of them was merry with drink,
though neither was drinking.
Jerry told Hoffman that he und Margrit
was going to marry, Hoffman said that she said
next to nothing; but seemed in good spirits.
By the time they left, it was almost dark.
They walked to Morriston through the snow, arrived
at McEdward's store around six...
Jerry was hired to unload some sacks,
so Margrit spent time talking to Mrs. McEdward's
in the kitchen; to her, Margrit seemed sober
und in good spirits, which was the same evidence all the folks
who came und went from the store gave about what she did
while waiting for Jerry to finish unloading. When he was done,
Collins bought Margrit a small bottle
of whiskey und said he wanted to take her home,
only she didn't want to go...
No one knew exactly when Jerry left the store
but folks said he gave up trying to get her to leave
after she'd borrowed a pipe und some tobacco
und sat around the wood stove smoking by herself
not talking much with the men, one of who was playing a
fiddle, while she sat sipping her whiskey, though she did dance
one dance with Jackson Dale, the blacksmith, a Morriston man
who soon after left for home.
Jerry by then had got himself a room at Little's Inn,
then come back to look for her, couldn't find her,
und so went to his room und stayed there, thinking
Margrit had walked home without him.
No one saw or heard Margrit after she'd left the store after 8,
other than Annie McCrae, who worked for Little
und maybe heard some whispering out by the shed
between 8 und 9, but she didn't look to see who it was,
und so no one saw Margrit alive again.
Archie Little said he saw Collins go to bed,
but Margrit never entered his tavern, perhaps on account
of her having been cut off from drinking too much there
the week before.
After that, no one knew nothing
'cept the two men who'd found her body in the snow out back
of the Inn near the shed next morning,
her skirts hiked up...
so maybe she'd intended on sleeping the night
in the shed, only left its shelter… for whatever reason,
died falling from the fence on her way back to it.
Part Five
Margaret
The truth is, Jerry Collins made me weak with needs
I wasn't sure I wanted to have, though heaven knows
I thought having them might save me.
...the more I remember it,
the more I see myself hunkered at the wood stove, smoking
and thinking: trying to work it through, knowing I had a fit
coming on - I could always feel them coming, there was a chill
on my neck, a tingle of the hairs...
they always came, warning signs, then my sight would get
so it seemed like
there was nothing but a lace sheet between me and the world,
me and my past...
me and my desires, like the desire for the son of my mistress
and the real reason I come away
because I knew he would never know me
as freely as he wanted to know me, as freely as I wanted
to know him, even knowing he was my white father's son by
my mother, my half brother, the father of my sister's child.
Not sure I remember dancing,
not sure when I got up and left the store,
not sure where I was going or why,
looking for Jerry's my only guess...
the rising moonlight was no more than sickle bright,
casting shadows on the winter around me...
asking Mister Buckingham's forgiveness
the whispering I guess Annie heard
...the rest was snow, softness...
like falling into the laundry pile as a girl...
I never felt the cold, or knew my dying
as something that should've - or could've - been fought...
Part Six
Nicholas
talking to Charlotte,
we both knew the causes of Margrit's death:
they was all the things slavery und escape
had overwrought in a woman who'd lost too much
for her to hang on to the few things she loved that was left:
her family, friends, und neighbours.
Old Jane Nelson who wasn't old, was a former slave
living on John Wetherald's place before he died,
she told Charlotte after Margrit's death,
that when Margrit first come of age:
the cycles of the moon
und her own blood flow
opened some door in her she couldn't close,
und though Margrit lived among women
who took a sensible view of their natural ways,
as a child of the laundry, as Old Jane told it to my wife,
the first time her flow come, Margrit fainted,
afraid of what her mistress might say,
afraid she'd be sent away, which was the one cruelty
Margrit's mistress allowed herself,
the threat of selling the family off,
a threat that the old mistress never carried out;
since they was all related to her,
from Margrit's grandmother to Margrit herself.
According to Old Jane, ever since,
Margrit had been subject to fits
on the rising of the new moon,
she'd swallow her tongue;
then need someone to keep her from choking on it.
The only thing was, there no way of knowing
if a fit had caused her to freeze to death that night,
but Doc Howitt thought it the most likely cause,
though he couldn't prove it,
so we'd ruled her death the result of 'causes not known'...
Margrit Buckingham was loved, und did a chore well
that needed doing right, but slavery
destroyed something inside her:
escaping her family had destroyed most of the rest of her.
Eleven years after her death, slavery was pulled down,
but it didn't die, not then, not since.
Not in my time, not in yours,
slavery is more than hatred of another race,
because, in every age, slavery is grown out of
the root of all evil, the love of money
is how Saint Paul put it: slavery gives some men
an advantage over other men, und from that one fact
grows a world that owes all its power, root und branch,
to the misery of others.
Epilogue
Jerry Collins
almost no one's called me nothing but Jerry.
The inquest into Margaret's death
was one of the times when I was called Jeremiah.
Margaret called me Jerry; I can still hear the way she said it.
Collins was the name of my master,
my father, the man I never wanted to be.
As Peter Hoffman and Sam Bush told Doc Howitt and the jury,
I wanted to marry Margaret, after that, everyone in three counties and
sweet Jesus in heaven knew I wanted to marry her,
but that's something I've no shame for wanting.
What mattered most, was folks knew
I'd done Margaret no harm,
and that was a mercy:
I'd grown up watching coloured men
lynched for crimes they hadn't committed.
I could've known all kinds of terrors from whites,
but the whites in Puslinch was all Quakers and Methodists,
Presbyterians and Lutherans:
the only thing my neighbours wanted from the inquest,
was that it ask questions that needed answering about how
Margaret come to be dead... so the more questions they asked,
and the longer the jury spent trying to find out what folks knew
or didn't know, the further Margaret and I got
from the world we was born to...
her death mattered and so did my life.
People wanted to know why she died, though she
was just a coloured woman living on land cleared no more
than twenty years before. I was never more thankful for those
I called my neighbours than I was that day:
Margaret got her due,
and they gave me an honest hearing.
I never left Puslinch like Sam and Temperance,
or David and Em King done soon after.
It ain't that Temperance or Em was ashamed of their mother:
any more than Margaret's sons was,
Temperance left because she lost both parents too soon apart.
She and Sam and their children headed for Ohio,
though we lost trace of them after the Civil War.
Em and David moved away, no one knows where.
If Margaret had gone back to the shanty with me that night
who knows what would have changed, for her or me, she just
didn't want to go is all...
Margaret never left the store because she had the freedom
to stay until closing... sitting by the wood stove was how she
practiced her Independence that day; on another day, she might
have chose different.
She was what an Irishman at her funeral called
a Deirdre of the Sorrows,
a well of sorrow so deep and sweet,
and me being a well digger,
and having been in places so dark and hard on a man's fear,
I understood the dreams that would come with her fits,
and when they'd come, independence was nothing but an idea
flying from her mind as fast as her past catching up to her.
When we put her in the ground,
Nicholas Beaver come up to me,
which got me seeing that he had lost something too,
and that's when I saw the long view of my life,
from the time I was born the son of a master raised different
from other slaves, to the man I'd become
when Margaret nursed me back to life,
born anew by water cloth and the heart of her kind care...
I remembered her all the days of my life, the day I married,
the day my son was born, the day I could no longer dig wells
and worked for the township digging post holes,
work that never after brought back the terrors
that had begun when I was a boy
dangled into a dry well that first time,
sent to work the bottom til I found water,
til I found the joy and fear of my life.
Every thing I thought unchangeable in me,
had changed forever because of Margaret,
because of her freedom, because I'd done
what Moses would've wanted: I let her go,
left her smoking a pipe around McEdward's stove,
talking small talk
the way a free woman can,
dancing because she felt like dancing,
saying nothing more when she had nothing more to say,
knowing as I did that the new moon was already rising,
and the wild blood of her broken heart was stirring in her eyes
like she was readying herself...
least ways, that's the way I've come to remember leaving her
that night in the store: I let her go, then she walked off
and let herself go,
died while I slept not far from where she fell over that fence,
fell into dreams from which she never woke,
freed from sorrow, bound for glory, and raised from the dead
by the Son of Man who spoke to her bones,
breathed new life into them,
then sent her off with those she'd lost... newly found.
Freedom always overthrows death;
echoes down history like the voices in this place
celebratin' Emancipation Day
as free as they was in 1834
on the anniversary of the passing of that Act of freedom;
the day Margaret was reborn in the light of a new tomorrow.
Freedom don't come from man, it comes from God,
and death got no say in the matter neither.
Freedom's got songs it sings to every generation,
got refrains so old, nothing can stop them being heard.
Freedom's got echoes that drive a flower into blooming;
echoes that stir the mud into birth, echoes
that walked me out the door of that store;
echoes that let her let go.
Freedom is an echo of the beginning,
like the life of the trees
still sounding in the timbers of these walls.
Hear that?
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