Another truth: my small claim to direct labour in the field comes almost entirely from occasional Saturdays spent on a dairy farm just north of Wallenstein. Picking stones was the work, stone-pickers the labourers. Each spring in the waning years of the last millennium, several friends and I found ourselves squatting in the bucket of a front-end loader, riding slow lines across open fields. Every few meters, one of us would jump to scoop a stone and toss it back, the rest of us dodging the projectile with our shins. If a stone proved unexpectedly large, we’d spill out with shovels, levering out of the earth some erratic, glacial rock, its skeletal underside speckled with salmon quartz. These were the rocks for which we were riding.
Though the work was hard, it wasn’t really work because it was volunteer work. We were exchanging our bruised hands for a cash donation to our church youth group, and we called the fundraising effort a Slave Day. Different church members would submit chores and odd tasks that needed doing: a room painted or a basement cleaned out or a field cleared of stones. A week or so later, a group of white, Christian teenagers would show up at various doors on a Saturday morning, “slaves” for the day.
In the summer of 1855, Benjamin Drew, a white American abolitionist, journeyed throughout Canada West, the future province of Ontario, seeking to interview formerly enslaved men and women from the United States. Following the 1834 abolition of slavery across the British Empire, Black communities in Canada West became increasingly appealing to Black Americans. This was especially so following the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, where formerly enslaved people, freedom runners, and even free-born African Americans no longer felt relatively safer in northern cities or out on their own farms. The term “Freedom runner,” following scholars Robyn Maynard and Silvia Hamilton, renames the figure of the “fugitive slave,” a moniker that defined a person by legal status and criminal action, and highlights instead the courage it took to escape enslavement. As thousands of Black Americans re-uprooted themselves and crossed over into Canada West, their migration drew the attention of anti-slavery leagues in Canada and the United States. There was a pressing need, they felt, for accounts of Black freedom that could counterpunch those racist narratives continuing to promote the social good of chattel slavery.