“Says She Was Born Free”
Looking out over the water from Birchtown, NS. 2017.
I’m reading the Book of Negroes. Not the novel by Lawrence Hill, the one with the indomitable Aminata Diallo as main character. No. This time, I’m reading the real thing, the list of Black Loyalists who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783.
As I previously experienced with slave registers and plantation account books, it’s one thing to know that such materials exist. It’s another thing entirely to be reading the real thing, to see the names, to be able to follow the handwriting, to learn what was important to those who documented the 3000 Black Loyalists – free men and women – who made their way to Nova Scotia in the late nineteenth century.
There’s a weightiness here; this history pulls you in and it’s not easy. As a reader, I need to take my time, but more than this, I need to sit with my discomfort and my grief and my hope for all of these people, their histories, their hopes, their griefs, their dreams.
I didn’t know that the Book of Negroes included descriptions of the condition of each person. I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. As commodities, enslaved Black folks were measured by their physical capacity for labour: their gender, age, health, strength, reproductive capacity were all assessed. And yet.
Here in the Book of Negroes, I find annotations that recall those found in fugitive slave advertisements:
“Worn out”
“Stout fellow”
“Fine Wench”
“Ordinary Wench”
“Sickly Wench”
“Fine Lad”
“Fine Boy”
“Stout Girl”
What makes a person fine, ordinary, stout, or sickly? When does a girl become a wench? Or a boy turn into a lad or a fellow? Why were these details important? Why did they even matter?
As a twenty-first century reader, variations on a single phrase stands out in high relief:
“Says She Was Born Free.”
What a statement of agency, and what a promise for the future. She says. Her word mattered. Nobody else’s. Born Free. An almost impossible dream for the generations that preceded her. Where could freedom lead?
Many Black Loyalists settled in Birchtown, a community in Shelburne County. But they found life in Nova Scotia challenging. Many were not granted the land they were promised, and those who did found themselves working on small, rocky plots. While they were promised provisions, some never received them, and as a result of these conditions, many were forced into indentured servitude. In 1784, in neighbouring Shelburne, a community largely settled by white Loyalists (many of whom had brought enslaved Black folks with them), a race riot saw at least ten days of white settler violence targeting free Black Loyalists. The violence also spread to Birchtown. In January 1792, less than a decade after their arrival, some 1200 Black Loyalists boarded fifteen ships in Halifax and left Nova Scotia in search of better lives in Sierra Leone.
Other stayed. Some remained in Birchtown. Others moved to different parts of the province, building strong families and communities and legacies.
“Says She Was Born Free.”
Black Loyalist Heritage Centre, Birchtown, NS, 2017.
