Stephens Gerard Malone
Colonial Canada's most famous slave – Marie-Josèphe Angélique – owns that status because she was hanged for having allegedly torched Montreal in 1734. By similar irony, thanks to its having been obliterated by the City of Halifax between 1964 and 1970, Africville, N.S., is Canada's most famous black settlement.
The history is compelling: Having coalesced between the War of 1812 and the War Between the States, Africville existed a century and a half before the City of Halifax decided to bulldoze properties and move residents in garbage trucks into downtown public housing. Vilified in the 1960s as a "slum by the dump" (a trash site the city had situated on its doorstep), Africville has since been passionately recuperated by Africadian (African-Nova Scotian) activists, artists and intellectuals.
Thus, the Africville relocation scheme – i.e. the dispersal, by municipal fiat, of 80 families (or 400 persons) – has generated innumerable sociology texts, documentaries, memoirs, songs. As a result of these cultural works, the demise of Africville has become, in the past 50 years, shorthand for the historical African-Canadian experience: Canadians say "Africville" as Americans say "slavery" or "segregation."
But the peril of Gothicism – the usual mode of envisioning the Africville relocation (Machiavellian do-gooders push bucolic blacks off "their" land) – is that it can slide into kitsch. In his fourth novel, Big Town: A Novel of Africville, Stephens Gerard Malone does not entirely avoid this fate.
Ambitiously, or perilously, the novel centres on the efforts of a mentally slow white youth, Early Okander, to befriend an Africville schoolboy, Toby Daye, and a white Catholic schoolgirl, Chub, in the face of the vicious depravity of Early's father, D Jay, the befuddled kindness of Toby's caregivers and the greasy social-climbing of Chub's parents.
The three amigos comprise a kind of junior-level Mod Squad, but one plagued by "issues": Early is raped by almost every adult with bared thighs and ready hands, Toby hates his own skin, and Chub suffers an adulterous dad, a dying mom and gender-identity troubles. Chub's got money, but still she lives, like penniless Early, right beside Africville, the "slum."
Throughout Big Town, the adult blacks – excepting a crook or pervert or two – seem nicer than the adult whites, most of who behave disgracefully. Yet, Malone demonstrates that – despite racial feelings and racist policies – sex, drugs and spirited black Baptist singin' can serve to integrate folks in complex ways.
Malone also has an ear for Haligonian speech – that mix of Royal Navy cussin', Boston yink-yank and Africadian backtalk. But the term "closure" was not in use in the early- to mid-1960s.
Malone is adept at details and dialogue, but Big Town's Gothicism seems borrowed from Southern or Midwest U.S. novelists. The subtitle states that Big Town is a novel of Africville, but it's more about juvenile pals, along the lines of Mark Twain's tales, with the roles of Huck, Jim, and Becky being reprised (and somewhat inverted) by Early, Toby and Chub.
But the abused idiot, the mean-drunk papa, the rebel tomboy, the good (and good-for-nothing-but-singing) coloureds, the rednecks and the blackguards are stock characters from Jerry Springer. Their presence here turns Africville into Tobacco-Road-by-the-Sea.
Even as Africville households disappear one by one, we are asked to appreciate – as in white-black buddy flicks – that friendship counts, and that it's tragic when its bonds dissolve. But "all for one and one for all" is an ideal difficult to achieve when one party lacks a brain, another is suicidal and another is feckless.
George Elliott Clarke's great-aunt was Portia White, the famed contralto (1911-1968), who is sketched in Big Town as oblivious to Africville's plight. He disagrees with that depiction, but accepts that fiction is fictitious. His latest book – of poetry – is Red.