Escape to Canada, a new life
Toronto also played a key role in the abolitionist movement, its part in Ontario’s designation as ‘the most desirable place of resort for coloured people’
She’s reported to have lived at 691 Markham St. in Seaton Village, between the Annex and Christie Pits.
What stands there now is a three-storey Edwardian house, with Doric columns framing a front veranda.
This is obviously not the home where fugitive slave Deborah Brown and her husband Perry lived for more than 50 years, after a perilous flight from slavery via the Underground Railroad. She died in 1898, reputedly aged 111. The Browns’ house was instead a one-storey, wood-frame cottage, with enough land around it to keep a vegetable garden and a couple of pigs. They’d fled here from Maryland after learning that Perry was to be sold off.
Once in Toronto, she worked as a washerwoman, he as a labourer; neither could read.
“The situation for many people coming to Canada is that, within a week, they could find a job, they could find a place to live.” ROSEMARY SADLIER ONTARIO BLACK HISTORY SOCIETY
We know Deborah Brown had at least one child born in the United States, a Sarah Brooks, who in turn had a daughter named Amelia. By the 1881 census, the latter two were living in St. John’s Ward, a part of town now roughly centred on Nathan Phillips Square, and the heart of Toronto’s 2,000-strong black community more than 150 years ago.
But the details of the lives Sarah and Amelia lived, and how they arrived here, are unclear. Did Deborah Brown play some part in their escape from slavery? Or did they come later, after the U.S. Civil War?
Such questions remain a painfully central feature of black history across North America. There are fragments, clues and inferences, but hardly the meaty stuff around which family narratives can be built.
There is so much uncertainty, such a dearth of thorough accounts, it’s as if escaped slaves were ghostly figures moving like smoke through a forest, leaving little trace of their passage.
WILLIAM STILL knew that such a void would someday exist, knew it at the height of the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century.
And he was prepared, at great personal risk, to do as much as he could to fill at least some of that void, to leave enough recorded clues about individual escapees for their kin and descendants to follow.
A free black living in Philadelphia, Still started work in 1847 with the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery, initially as a janitor and clerk. But he soon became a key “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, sheltering runaways on their flight north to freedom.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, intended as a compromise between the South and an abolitionist North, made this all the more risky. United States federal marshals now had a duty to arrest fugitive slaves and anyone caught helping runaways could be thrown in jail.
It also meant that, if they wanted to be completely safe, slaves had to escape all the way to distant Upper Canada, where in1793 Governor John Graves Simcoe had made it illegal to import slaves. Any runaway would automatically be free upon touching Canadian soil.
Still not only continued his work with escapees, he started keeping detailed notes about all the people who passed through his “station.”
If found, that journal would endanger his own life and those of everyone he’d helped. But Still believed it was important for posterity, something he’d come to understand personally.
In 1850, a man came to Still’s office seeking information about
“When it comes to black history, in some ways the border is meaningless. But on the other hand, the border is everything, the line between freedom and the threat of slavery.” BRYAN PRINCE DIRECTOR OF THE BUXTON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE AND MUSEUM
his own family. As the man talked, Still’s mind raced. “My feelings were unutterable,” Still wrote. “I could see in the face of my new-found brother, the likeness of my mother.”
The man before him was a brother he’d never met, who had been left behind in slavery when Still’s mother escaped to the north.
By the time the U.S. Civil War ended any need for the Underground Railroad, Still had personally helped more than 400 slaves escape. His secret journal became the basis of his 1872 book on the railroad.
“It’s an incredible example of the amount of difference one person can make in the lives of others,” says Dion Johnstone, the Montreal-born actor who portrays Still in Underground Railroad: The William Still Story, a documentary airing Feb. 6 on PBS.
Before taking on the role, Johnstone ad- mits he only had “sort of a basic understanding” of the Underground Railroad. “I didn’t know the more extensive history,” he says. “That was all new to me.” IN THE MID-1850S, Still travelled through southwestern Ontario to see how escaped slaves were faring. At the time, slave owners were busy spreading stories about how Canada had snow for 10 months of the year, how famine was rife.
Still’s reports about life here were mostly as glowing as those that appeared in abolitionist newspapers throughout the northern states.
Although former slaves might still face racism, they could vote and sit on juries. All public schools were open to blacks, at least in places like Toronto.
“The situation for many people coming to Canada is that, within a week, they could find a job, they could find a place to live,” says Rosemary the Ontario Black Hi
There were regular across the province Day, celebrating the abolition of slavery t pire in 1833. Blacks attend en masse, rub senior politicians.