Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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However, despite these minimal episodes of reality, Canada appears as an honest land of liberty and acceptance opposing the United States. This view, that permeates the collection, is epitomized in Reverend Alexander Hemsley’s powerful statement: “Now I am a regular Britisher. My American blood has been scourged out of me; I have lost my American tastes”. This view is further enhanced when William Grose issues a declaration that, as George Elliott Clarke appropriately notes, “engenders a nascent sociology of African Canadian life that asserts Canadian nationalism” (“Introduction” 15): “As a general thing, the colored people are more sober and industrious than in the States: there they feel when they have money, that they cannot make what use they would like of it, they are so kept down, so looked down upon. Here they have something to do with their money and put it to a good purpose”. Interestingly, this attachment to the Canadian land and the way they resort to their own sense of nationalism through their difference and their new sense of what a Black person is once in freedom, may well represent Clarke’s African Canadianité avant la lettre.