Two Miramichi winters

The house was on the shore, about 100 feet from the water, right where the Black River flows into the Miramichi.

It was a pretty house, weathered grey with sharply pointed gables and gingerbread trim. It looked a little worse for the wear. From a certain angle, it looked as if it were leaning back on its haunches; it had been built many years ago, with no foundation, and was "settling", especially toward the back, where the kitchen was. From the front, it looked as if it were hunching its shoulders against the northeast winds that swept around the point, blowing in from the Miramichi Bay.

It was a cold old house. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

February 17, 1976

I forgot to push the rolled-up blanket against the door before I went to bed so there was snow on the kitchen floor this morning. The wind battered the house all night. It's some cold. The glass of water I took to bed with me was frozen when I got up — frozen solid, not just a little skim of ice like sometimes. The water in the kettle on the stove was frozen too. I got the fire going and waited for the water to melt so I could prime the pump — at least I remembered to drain the pump last night.

After I got the pump working, I filled the big copper boiler on top of the stove to get some hot water. It was wash day and I wanted to get an early start to get the clothes hung outside while there was still some daylight. I had a few dishes to do so I started on them first. The dishwashing detergent wasn't frozen but it had turned into a gel so stiff, it was almost solid. I had to use a knife to get some out of the bottle. I suppose I'll have to start keeping it in the fridge.

The fridge is huge. I saw it advertised in the newspaper and a deal was pretty much made over the phone. I've never had a very good grasp of the size of an object that's described in cubic feet. Anyway, I'm glad now. I keep many things in the fridge. It keeps them from freezing: things like canned goods and ketchup; oils and vinegars; potatoes, pickles and peanut butter — not to mention shampoo and conditioners, moisturizers, makeup and lotions. I think I could — as it used to be expressed — sell refrigerators to Eskimos. They could use them the same way I do.

I almost froze my fingers getting my big washtubs in from the shed. My hands were a little damp and when I reached up to lift the first tub off the hook where it hangs, my fingers stuck to the surface. I peeled them off; no permanent damage but I went and put my gloves on before I dragged the tubs in.

The two tubs sit side by side in the middle of the kitchen floor, one filled with hot soapy water, the other with less hot clear water for rinsing. The steam rises into the still-cold air of the kitchen like you see from those hot springs in Iceland. I sit on a cushion. I have a washboard for scrubbing and a hand-operated wringer that clamps on the side of the tub for wringing. A little shelf at the bottom of the wringer moves back and forth to keep the soapy water draining into the soapy tub and the clear water back into the clear tub. It's very efficient.

I put the newly wrung-out clothes and towels and sheets into a wicker basket on the floor beside me but before I got outside to the clothesline, the bottom layer had already started to freeze up. I put a few layers of newspaper and a folded blanket under the basket until I was ready to go out.

God, it was cold out there. I was already wearing long underwear, heavy pants, wool socks and a couple of sweaters and I added boots, scarves, jacket, mitts and a wool hat plus earmuffs. The wind was still blowing and if the clothes weren't frozen in the basket, they were most certainly frozen by the time I got the clothespin fastened onto the line. It's not that easy to do, wearing gloves and mitts and still having numb fingers. Why do I do it? Well, they'd freeze if I hung them in the house anyway and they dry a little faster outside, especially in that wind.

After the clothes were hung and as long as I was dressed for outdoors, I decided to fill the woodbox and take a trip to the outdoor facility to empty my little private indoor commode. It was frozen too.

I made some bread this afternoon. I had lots of potato cooking water, bottles and bottles of it — in the fridge, of course — and a bag of stone-ground whole wheat flour my sister had given me for Christmas. It has taken me quite a while to find the best way to raise my dough in that cold old kitchen. I tried placing the bowl in the warming oven of the wood stove but it was too warm. It rose too fast and the texture wasn't good. Placing it on the outer edge of the open oven door caused an uneven rise.

I finally worked out a system that involves hot towels, newspapers for insulation, and an enclosed space that holds some heat where I set my big bowl — a medium-sized cardboard box works fine. (I'm quite inventive. I'm the same person who used to bake beautiful loaves of bread in a fireplace that I built on the shore out of flat stones and mud with a refrigerator shelf from the dump as the baking rack.)

The rest of the day was uneventful. I brought the clothes in and stood them up around the kitchen until they thawed and fell over. They really do smell good. I read a lot, with my chair pulled close to the stove and my feet on the open oven door. I've drained the pump and I'm ready for bed now. My head got really cold in bed last night. I've put a large thick towel at the bedside so I can wrap it around my head tonight, if necessary.

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The stories I tell about living in the cold old house on the shore are not about poverty or hardship. They're credentials. I tell them because it's fun to tell them. I tell them so I don't feel I have to explain why I love my washing machine.

But I tell them carefully and never with a suggestion of deprivation. Every day I lived in the old house, I thought of the woman who had lived there first, whose husband had built the house in the early part of the century. She had eleven children, most of them born in those very rooms. She had no electricity, no car to take her to town for shopping, no fridge to keep her food from freezing. And her water pump, unlike mine which was conveniently located in the kitchen, was outdoors.

There was another woman I used to think of too, while I was living in that cold old house. She lived in Chatham, where I grew up, and I met her only once.

It was 1950. I was six years old, a sweet little girl with long hair curled into ringlets by my mother every morning, dressed carefully in tiny pleated skirts and crisp white blouses, sent to school with bookbag and accessories — a pencil case, a plastic ruler with a hole in the middle, a soft pink eraser, fresh notebooks, everything I needed. I went to The White School, an old wooden building that must have had another name in the beginning but was never known by another name in my time. It seemed very big to me; today, when I drive by the lot where it used to stand, I realize that it didn't take up much space. The students who went there were mostly working class; a few were middle class; some were very poor.

One day in winter, all of us in grade one, having struggled into our winter duds, were standing in line in the ante-room waiting for the teacher to come around and tie our scarves at the back of our necks so they'd be ready to pull up over mouth and nose for the cold walk home. As she approached me, I saw with dread that she was carrying a small sheaf of papers.

"I want you to take Eddie's lessons home to him," she said. "He was sick today."

My little heart sank. I was scared of Eddie anyway and I had heard all the lurid White School tales about the house where he lived. I didn't understand some of it but I knew what a bootlegger was. This was a grade one nightmare.

I lagged behind the others on the way home. I tried to think of some way of getting out of it. Finally — but much too soon — I turned down the street where Eddie and his family lived, in a ramshackle frame house behind an abandoned building. I picked my way through the rubble in the snowy yard — old car parts, an overturned wheelbarrow, a wagon with no wheels. Before I knocked, the door opened. A woman holding a baby was standing there.

"Who are you? Who sent you 'ere?" she said.

"I brought Eddie's lessons from school."

"Come into the 'ouse."

Oh no oh no. This was not part of the deal. The room she led me into was more like a shed: it had bare board floors, a few old sticks of furniture, an unmade bed in the corner. It was cold. There was no sign of Eddie or any of the older children or the bootlegger but there were small children, a few of them — toddlers and babies.

"What's your name?" she said. I told her.

"I know where you live. A new 'ouse."

It was a new house; it was owned by the power commission where my father worked. It was an ugly house and my mother didn't like it. But it had a furnace and rugs and matching furniture and curtains. To Eddie's mother, it must have seemed like living in a palace.

My childhood experience had not prepared me for her house. How could I have fit that cold hovel, those ragged children, that unkempt woman into my ordered little life where we collected money in Mission Band to buy food for hungry little heathen children in India; where we made little drawstring bags out of facecloths and filled them with soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes and combs and maybe a barrette for deprived children in Africa?

How could it be that there were little children in Chatham living like this? Did they have enough to eat? Did they ever have roast beef on Sunday? Did they have any toys or storybooks? Did anyone ever take them to the beach? Did they have aunties and uncles who visited at Christmas? Was there even a stove in this place?

These specific questions came to me years later; at the time, I asked no questions at all. I don't know why except little children often feel shame and embarrassment when faced with complex situations that are uncomfortable.

I never saw Eddie's mother again. I think they moved away shortly after my visit. I never told anyone I'd been there.

There was something else I never told anyone. The day I went to Eddie's was the third time the teacher had asked me to take his lessons to his house. The first time, I tore the pages into little pieces and buried them under a rock in a swampy ditch on the way home. The second time, I put them at the bottom of the box where I kept my supplies for playing school. No one ever found them.

'As good as any, better than most'

February is Black History Month; March is Women's History Month. Either one is an appropriate time to look back at the life of Dr. Carrie Best.

In the history of Nova Scotia — home of the largest indigenous Black community in Canada — Dr. Best was well-known and admired for her many years of work on behalf of her people. She died in 2001 but not before she had made her mark and helped to dispel some of the egregious racism that existed throughout her life.

She was born in New Glasgow in 1903. In 1946, she founded The Clarion, the first newspaper for Blacks in Nova Scotia. She wrote for newspapers and magazines and was a weekly columnist with The Pictou Advocate. She was the author of an autobiography, That Lonesome Road (which is also a social history of Nova Scotian Blacks.)

She was well-known across the country as an equal rights activist and was a founding member of the Kay Livingstone Visible Minority Women of Nova Scotia, an organization which works with women and young people to promote a sense of identity and pride of race, integrity and self-discipline “and to lift others, as we ourselves climb toward dignity and self-respect.”

Her last doctorate was awarded in 1992 by the University of King's College in Halifax. In 1970, she was awarded the Lloyd MacInnis Memorial Award for her work in social justice. In 1973, she received the first annual award of the National Black Coalition of Canada. In 1974, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. In 1975, she was granted the degree Doctor of Laws by St. Francis Xavier University.

In December of 1991, she received an award for outstanding contributions to human rights on the anniversary of the day the United Nations ratified the Declaration of Human Rights.

I interviewed her a few years before her death at her home in New Glasgow. She scoffed at my tape recorder and refused to let me turn it on, telling me she didn't want to talk into "that thing." I returned to the time-honoured tradition of taking notes. Her words are in italics. My occasional comments are not.

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The 'religious hobo'

Dr. Best is in perpetual motion, rummaging in her well-packed briefcase for a pertinent document, punctuating her remarks with a gentle jab to her interviewer's shoulder or a soothing pat to the knee. Her energy and vitality are infectious. She often speaks with tongue in cheek.

* * *

I was invited to give the convocation address to the Atlantic School of Theology. I nearly dropped dead when they asked me! They can't mean me, I said. Do they know I don't go to church? Well, I slept on it. I do live close to God — I'm a born-again Christian — but I consider Christianity and “churchianity” two different things.

In the end, I accepted. I described my religious background to them and told them I was a “religious hobo.” When I was born, my parents were Salvationists and that's how I was registered at birth. When I was a young child, they left the Army because the first “black church” had been established in Pictou County. That was Baptist.

When I grew up, I had the bad taste to marry an Anglican but he was good enough to go to the Baptist church with me. After a time though, he missed the Anglican way of worshipping so ... he had accommodated me and I thought it was my turn to accommodate him so I went to the Anglican Church with him. But I missed the Baptists. The Baptists clap and laugh and sing and really know how to praise the Lord. So I went back to the Baptists. You can see I'm a religious hobo.

As I got older, I met so many wonderful people of all religions. I began to accept people for what they are — colour and creed don't matter. I believe that all roads that lead to God are good.

The root of my faith is Mother Earth. I think of all the little creeds as just different ways of interpreting God.

So that's what I told the graduates of the Atlantic School of Theology!

* * *

That Lonesome Road is dedicated to her mother. On the dedication page, she wrote, “Society Said: You are an inferior being,/born to be a hewer of wood/ and a drawer of water/ because you are Black.... My Mother Said: You are a person, separate/ and apart from all other/ persons on earth. The pathway/to your destiny is hidden.../ you alone must find it./ ...And then she said.../ Take the first turn right,/ and go straight ahead...”

* * *

It's very painful to talk about some of the practices of the past. When I was growing up in New Glasgow, you couldn't eat in a restaurant. You couldn't get your hair cut. I went to jail. My son and I were at the movies; we sat downstairs, we went to the movies three times a week and we'd sat in the same seats for years. Then one day, the usher came to me and said, “You can't sit here. You have to go into the balcony.” I refused. They called the police; they had to drag me out of there. I was in jail for an hour. I was charged with causing a disturbance.

But at all times of my life, I've been a happy person. When I was young, I think we might have been broke but we were never poor. I was personally just as happy no matter what we had. My personal happiness had nothing to do with racial discrimination.

I confront bigotry face on. If I hear — and this has happened — that someone has called me “n****r,” I go right to that person. I look him right in the eye and I say, “did you call me 'n****r'? Now I've heard you did and all I want from you is to tell me if it's true. If you say it isn't, I'll believe you. We'll go together to the person who told me and you will tell him it isn't true.” You could always tell if it was true or not.

I'm not a n****r. I'm as good as anyone and better than most. I love everyone who's worthy of my love — but I won't sit back and take that kind of bigotry.

* * *

Her memory seems unlimited. She quotes long stanzas of poetry, long passages from books, most of which were learned many years ago. She considers poetry to be part of her spiritual nature and part of her search for identity.

“The long hours spent in reading poetry,” she wrote in That Lonesome Road, “and the hundreds of poems memorized during my early childhood, my learning years, my yearning years and even now in later life, are fragrant memories of my journey in Search of an Identity. The irresistible habit of committing poems to memory still persists, and like deposits in a savings account, can be drawn out at will. The fund is never exhausted, for the interest grows both on deposit and withdrawal and is compounded daily.

“Black history was virtually non-existent in Nova Scotia during my learning years ... I remember when I received my cherished volume of the Poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I was ten years old ... I found to my utter astonishment and delight that I could read the Dunbar poems which were written in the Negro dialect as easily as those he had written in classic English. These gave me my first sense of Black Identity.”

* * *

Things have changed — but not enough. The white race has got to start learning from those they feel superior to. The Blacks have to take pride in who they are. When Frederick Douglass was a young slave, the white mistress said, “He's a bright boy. I'd like to teach him to read.” The slave master said, “When you educate a Negro, you unsuit him for a slave.”

Education is very important — more important than ever. We have to start teaching our children ourselves — in “kitchen schools.” We have to get funding from Black churches, Black organizations, and take the time to teach the children where they come from, how far they can go.

Being old now is not a disadvantage to me in all my projects. It's a blessing. God gave me this extra time to accomplish whatever I can, to meet wonderful people of all races. I'm so thankful.

Rita Joe: Creating a beautiful image of her people

Rita Joe died in 2007. In 1994, I spent a day with her in her home and shop, chatting, snacking, crafting. She crafted – she made beautiful earrings and other jewellwey – and I watched. She gave me a pair of earrings to take with me when I left.

Rita Joe is the acclaimed Mi'kmaq poet. She was born in Whycocomagh and now lives in Eskasoni, the largest reserve in Nova Scotia. She is a mother, a grandmother, a weaver of baskets. She sells her crafts and those of her family and community in her Eskasoni shop. What follows are her own words. ...............................................................

I describe myself as Native – Mi'kmaq. I'm 62 years old now. When I started writing, I was in my 30s, and I saw a need: that was to create a beautiful image of my people. When I was a little girl, I was called a little savage, a cannibal. I didn't know what cannibal meant – all these derogatory things I heard when I was a little girl.

When my children used to bring their books home and see something bad like that, they'd point it out to me. “Look Mum, look what it says here,” and I would read it.

And I would hear myself say, we were not the writers of our own history. Then I would say to myself, why aren't any books written about the beautiful part of our culture? So it dawned on me that there has to be somebody to document the beautiful part. So I began to write.

I am the Indian

and the burden lies

just with me.

I have spoken across the nation and when I read that little three-line poem, there is heavy discussion. They're trying to find out, what is the burden, what is the burden that Rita Joe is talking about? I tell them: the burden I'm carrying came from you, the European. You have made me carry my burden because you're the ones who documented our lives and it was not the truth.

In any culture, any culture on this earth, when you look for the good, you'll find the good. That's what I look for so I can present it to the people who look down on us. I have been doing it so long that my own perception of my own culture – to me, it is beautiful. Everything about my life, since I was a little girl and what I have seen since is beautiful.

When I was a little girl – my mother died when I was five – I was put in a succession of foster homes, all over Nova Scotia. I can't tell you how many different foster homes I was in but I had a lot of mothers, I had a lot of dads. I came back to live with my own father just before he died. I was nine and I lived with him for a year. I used to see him open a book of hieroglyphics. That's why I say in one of my books, the written part of our life is for us to read which you did not recognize – same with Egyptian writing, that was not recognized. I saw my dad open a book a lot of times and read and I saw him explain these symbols and I know there was a written part of our life – that's why I said in a poem “that the world chooses to deny.”

I was mostly in native homes, not that many non-native homes, and they were as poor as I was. There were times when I didn't have enough to eat.

All these homes, Mi'kmaq was spoken. All my life, I've spoken Mi'kmaq. When my dad died I was 10. I was placed in a home with this woman and she told me, “Go home and pick up your clothes – don't bring them all because I'll make dresses for you.” I loved her, she was a good person. I went home and got my little box. Right at the time I was putting my clothes together, somebody came up the stairs. A woman took me by the hand and told me to come with her.

When you're 10 years old, you listen to older people – especially if your dad is dead and there's no one advising you. So this woman took me by the hand and led me away and put me on the train. They took me to a non-native community and I went to school there. I was 11 when I went to school there and of course, they made fun – they were all non-natives. They jeered and I made a vow at that time that I would get higher learning. I would teach these people that I'm just as good as they are.

I was 12 years old when I put myself into the Shubenacadie Residential School. It was that determination to learn – to learn to cook, to sew and all these things.

When I arrived there, I admired the place. It was so beautiful – the shining floors, the pictures on the walls, the beautiful building. The priest at the time when I was there, we became good friends because he was also from where I just came from – Cumberland County. He would never remember my name, Rita, but he would call me Cumberland County. He was a nice gentle old man, he was so kind.

I had some bad experiences in school but the way I look at life, I forget about the bad things that happened and I look for the good. I always look for the good. I consider it being Christian to be forgiving, not to carry injustices on your shoulder all your life.

I read a book written by an anthropologist about a writer who lived 300 years ago and he wrote this: they have no religion; they have no art. He was observing Native people, and I just threw this book down. The gall of this person to say that we had no religion. We had a beautiful spiritual part of our lives that they did not know.

Me, I never accepted it. When I was told by the nuns, “your religion is no good,” I always knew in my mind sure, it's good, it might even be better than yours.

There's an oral tradition with my people. We're always talking amongst ourselves. My husband's family was from Newfoundland. At the time when my husband-to-be and I met in Boston, he asked me to marry him the second week after we met. At the time when he proposed to me, he said we're not related, are we? Native people are always concerned about that.

The sweat lodge is a very religious experience. Part of the tradition is traditional food – deer meat, or meat of other animals we have killed – moose and deer and salmon, not something that we've bought from the supermarket. Or something that was donated from the people in the community – eels maybe.

The two sweats that I have taken part in, the first one was here in Eskasoni. Everything that I write about, I try to take part in it. I did not know when I went in there what one experiences. So it was very frightening at times what I experienced. The learning I got from the sweat lodge did not come from the live people who were in there with me – there were 13 of us – the teaching I gained from that sweat lodge came from the spirits that were there.

It's very hot, even hotter than a sauna. The medicine woman who was sitting next to me kept touching me and saying are you alright Rita, do you want to leave? I said no, I wanted to stay, and I stayed for two hours and 40 minutes. I stayed in one in Restigouche for five hours. They were all women there. The all-woman sweats are more powerful than the men's. Women have more spiritual power than men. Men have spiritual power too but women have more. Everybody knows that – even the men recognize that.

One time, when I was in Vancouver, I took the baskets that I make with me. Some of them are made from sweet grass. They scolded me for them. You're not supposed to use sweet grass in basket-making, they said. It's a sacred grass and it's supposed to be used only for sacred purposes. The way I explained it was when I make my baskets, I make them for people to enjoy the basket. Because whoever purchases the basket, they do it because they love the little basket and when they're sweet grass, people want them, right away. So I was explaining to the Natives up there, when I use sweet grass in my baskets, it makes people feel good and I don't think our Creator is going to get angry with us for making other people feel good.

Sometimes, I weave sweet grass into braids and I tie them on each end and when I'm doing it, I'm thinking about love.

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