Not an original title. Name of a book by Edward Ball we read some time ago in book group. The writer’s family had been slave-owners in the American south.  It came to his attention that this was not ancient history and that the family still owned records, archives of the slave-owners’ business transactions, including the holding of human property. There were family member still alive who had heard talk of the plantations and their owners – better times for the family, until the Civil war. The family, based in South Carolina, was also involved in the slave trade.

The records contained names, dates of purchase, dates of sale. That’s where I learned it was the fashion to give slaves old Greek and Roman names, Apollo, Zeus, Odysseus, etc.  Ball learned, too, bits and pieces of the stories about those people. And he came to the realization that these archives were the only documented histories of the slaves – the only way their descendants might learn their own family history, besides the oral histories, which have also frayed with time - the great black migrations and difficult economic circumstances that continued to break up families.

So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to learn my cousins’ family, the ones whose mother grew up in North Carolina tobacco country, were slave-owners. But I was surprised, while doing family research, when I saw on the census documents the names of my aunt’s great-great grandparents, and the number of people that they owned – three or four. My cousin and I were working on the joint Maloney genealogy, and I had been thinking of connecting the trees – sharing our knowledge.  He got busy, left the country; I got involved with other family history and never pursued it; perhaps never wanted to. 

 And yet, poking around in the past, you never know what might turn up. Irish on one side, after the time of the famine (and the Civil War), and Canadian French on the other, I thought we were safe, pure from the taint of slavery. After all, the Irish were the “niggers of Europe” according to a character in the movie, The Commitments – as he’s trying to sell soul music in Dublin; and the French Canadians during British rule were the “white niggers of the north”, according to Pierre Vallieres, Quebec activist. In other words, more oppressed than oppressing.

But in my research, I stumbled across a book by Afua Cooper - The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal  – about a slave woman who had burned down the greater part of Montreal in the 1730’s, and who was hung for it. Intriguing: first of all, the idea of slavery in Canada – come to find, it existed from early on, both black and Indian slavery (panis); come to find also, that the owner of that slave, Angelique, was a relative of ours.  His name was Francois Poulin, first cousin of our ancestor, and raised together as children when our ancestor’s mother died. Their mother’s were sisters from a successful fur trading family. Angelique was a household slave, and became almost unmanageable after Francois died, leaving his wife in charge. It’s hard to imagine that our ancestors didn’t know Angelique personally, and the trouble she was accused of – burning a city, although miraculously, no one was killed. Except Angelique, for her crime.

I’m fascinated with her story for many reasons, foremost her rebellious spirit and her open, determined attempts to escape. She had been born in Portugal, it seems, sold to a Flemish man, brought west to New England area, and then sold to our ancestors in Montreal. She’d traveled; she’d seen something of the world, and she said she wanted to go back to her warm place of birth. She had three children, including a set of twins, with a man most likely a slave; all of them died. She had a white lover, a man who betrayed her and disappeared from history. The testimony of the trial is available and compelling; a play has been made of the story, too: her rage and bad temper, her threats against her mistress, her aborted first escape, her suspicious behavior on the day of the fire – it reads like a crime drama. And then, her torture and refusal to name an accomplice; the route she was taken in a cart through the burned city, past the church to the place she was hung.

To this day, the verdict is contested, the evidence circumstantial. What stays with me are her intractable spirit, her desperation to get away, and her fury at being a slave.  And how she died in public without a friend, no one in the New World or the Old to fight for her, pray for her, care for her. And that she lived with my family, who owned her.