A rare portrait in the Museum of Fine Arts speaks to a period that Canadians would rather forget.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Before the Underground Railroad, about 4,000 lived in bondage in Quebec
“Sadly, the lingering legacy of slavery and anti-black racism is still in Canadian society.”
MCGILL UNIVERSITY HISTORY PROFESSOR CHARMAINE NELSON
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a rare portrait of a slave woman hanging at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is an important statement about a rarely discussed aspect of Canada’s past.
Slavery existed in the Great White North.
Art historian Charmaine Nelson says it’s a part of history most Canadians would prefer to sweep under the carpet, and there are few public artifacts by which to remember it.
But one work of a young woman posing with a plate of tropical fruit — bearing the innocuous title Portrait of a Haitian Woman — offers a glimpse into a forgotten era, said Nelson, who is one of the laureates for this year’s Black History Month events in Montreal.
“If Canadians know about slavery at all, we’re usually patting ourselves on the back and saying we were so much better than those nasty people in the tropical colonies,” said Nelson, an associate professor at McGill University and author of five books.
In fact, slavery was a fact of life in Canada under the French and British regimes, Nelson said.
New France, and later Quebec, had an estimated 4,000 slaves from 1628 to 1800.
About two-thirds were First Nations captives while a third were blacks, mostly from southern slave colonies.
Slavery was less widespread in Canada than in the tropics because northern agriculture did not require vast numbers of manual labourers, unlike southern sugar or cotton plantations, Nelson said.
“It’s not that we were more benevolent. We still believed that some people were inhuman and worthy of enslavement. So the difference was that the uses of a slave were not as abundant, so we had a smaller population (of slaves),” she said.
Unlike the southern United States, where slave quarters and other artifacts recount the ugly history of slavery, Canada has few visual reminders of human bondage.
In 1786, artist François Malépart de Beaucourt painted a young woman holding a plate of tropical fruit.
Beaucourt was born in La Prairie in 1740 but later moved to France. He moved back to Montreal in 1792 after spending about eight years in the West Indies.
The portrait, on loan from the McCord Museum, is believed to have been painted in St-Domingue, the French colony that is now Haiti.
Nelson believes the woman in the picture might be MarieThérèse Zémire, one of two slaves owned by Beaucourt’s wife, Benoite Gaëtan.
Her theory is that Beaucourt and Gaëtan brought Zémire with them when they came to Montreal in 1792 after leaving St-Domingue at the start of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804.
There is no hard evidence the model was Zémire, who was 15 in 1786 and died in Montreal at age 29.
But Nelson said the work, which depicts the young woman with one breast peeking out of her white blouse, evokes the violent reality underpinning the system of slavery.
In St-Domingue, half of Af- rican-born slaves died within three years of being enslaved, she said.
“We’re probably looking at a woman who was forcibly displaced twice from her homeland. There’s a high chance she was born in Africa because of the high mortality rates of Haitian slaves. If so, we’re talking about somebody who was born on the west coast of Africa, removed to Haiti and removed again to Montreal. Talk about shock in terms of loss of culture, climate, family, food habits, clothing, everything,” she said.
The bare-breasted young woman is also suggestive of the sexual exploitation of slave women, who were often raped by owners who welcomed enslaved offspring, Nelson added.
She objected to the fact that the painting is displayed under the title Portrait of a Haitian Woman. It was previously known as Portrait of a Negro Slave and has also been referred to as Slave with Still Life.
“To me, the new title expels slavery from Canada,” Nelson said.
“The text doesn’t talk about the Haitian Revolution. It doesn’t go into detail about Haitian slavery. It doesn’t mention that the painter owned slaves. It’s a total sanitization,” she said.
Most of the slaves in early Canada worked as domestic servants. The first, Olivier Le Jeune, was a boy from Madagascar brought to Quebec City in 1628. However, slavery did not become relatively common in the colony until the end of the 17th century. The practice of buying and selling First Nations slaves, known as Panis, was wellestablished by the early 18th century.
Slavery disappeared from Quebec (then called Lower Canada) by the early 19th century, said Frank Mackey, author of Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760-1840 (McGill-Queens, 2010). He estimated there were about 400 slaves in the Montreal area from 1760 to 1800.
In 1803, a bill tabled in the Lower Canada Assembly proposed that even though slavery did not exist in the colony, visiting slave-owners should not have their slaves taken away from them, Mackey said. The bill was never passed.
Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout most of the empire in 1834.
In the pre-Civil War era, Canada became a haven for American slaves who fled via the Underground Railroad. While Canadians are justifiably proud of that, it doesn’t erase the fact that Canada has its own story of slavery, Nelson said.
“In Canada, they don’t know that Canadian slavery even existed but they were all taught about the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was just from 1833 to 1861. It was roughly 30 years. But the years when we were slaving, we’ve forgotten about that,” she said.
Even though Canada never had official racial segregation, discrimination persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Nelson said.
“In Canada, a lot of these things were unwritten. In the States they would put up a sign saying this is a white person’s fountain,” she said. “As Canadians, we say, ‘Oh look, we didn’t have those signs’ but we still had the practices.”
Nelson said it’s important to promote awareness of the history of slavery in Canada.
“We haven’t really confronted that history and I think there’s some fear there in terms of exposing the colonial history of the nation,” she said.
“Because sadly, the lingering legacy of slavery and anti-black racism is still in Canadian society.”