850 miles to the north, the peninsula was a logical refuge for Virginians. Trading ships had long shuttled between Nova Scotian and Tidewater ports. Moreover, though Canada had for many years been a haven for runaway slaves, it served Southern whites too as a shelter from the approaching apocalypse. Slavery had been abolished in Canada, but slaveholders could import their chattel as “servants.” In the months just before the Civil War, hundreds of Southern whites and their Negroes arrived in Canada.
Landing on the Bay of Fundy, the Jenkinses and their masters soon settled thirteen miles to the south in the village of West Nictaux, which was populated by New Englanders who had arrived there soon after the British expelled the original French settlers. By 1861, West Nictaux was a tiny farming community, its hills dotted with orchards which produced apples for export to Boston, New York, even London.
The Jenkinses were the only black family in town. Elsewhere in the Annapolis Valley were remnants of earlier waves of black immigration—“loyalist” blacks who had gone over to the British cause during the Revolution and were later settled in Nova Scotia; the slaves of American Tories, brought by their masters to the peninsula; and Negroes who had served in British units during the War of 1812—but these Negroes had clung together in tight little settlements.
While remaining in the service of their “masters,” the Jenkinses didn’t feel free to join one of these black enclaves. Even after the master-servant relationship dissolved, they stayed on in West Nictaux, doing odd jobs for white farmers and orchardmen: butchering pigs, threshing buckwheat, sawing wood, splitting birches for the hoops on apple barrels. At first they lived on the Nictaux road next door to the two-room schoolhouse, where the Jenkins children were the only blacks. In class, they were regarded as quaint curiosities, the white kids chanting, “Thick lips, flat nose / On the head, the wool grows.” The family attended the Nictaux United Baptist Church, where they were assigned a special pew on the side aisle.
Soon after George Jenkins died at ninety-one, his family moved from the schoolhouse site to the Middle Road, a desolate track where the village’s poorest residents lived in tar-paper shacks. But they retained a sense of their own uniqueness, their special relationship with white folks. They never mixed with the blacks of North Street in Middleton, a settlement barely four miles away. North Street was called “the bog,” partly because it was built on swampy ground, partly because it was the home of indigent 1812 refugees known for their drinking and other “low behavior.” Charlotte Jenkins would warn her kids, “Stay away from those niggers in the bog!” It was a strange life. Embracedby neither whites nor blacks, they occupied a sort of racial no-man’s-land in which conventional allegiances were suspended.
By 1885, Frederick Jenkins, Jr.—then twenty-five—was growing restless. He had become a lumberman, cutting white ash, black birch, and rock maples, then riding the logs down the river to a sawmill in the valley. But there wasn’t much money in that, and other opportunities were scant. Black Nova Scotians had begun migrating to New England, where jobs were more plentiful, and when Frederick heard of a job with a Massachusetts lumber company, he packed his meager belongings and took the overnight ferry to Boston. When the job fell through, he worked successively at a tannery, a coal yard, and an asphalt company, while moonlighting as a janitor and rag merchant. Eventually, he settled in Lower Roxbury, where he married Rachel Baker, a recent migrant from Virginia. In 1905, their only child—Helen—was born.
The Jenkinses lived in Lower Roxbury for more than thirty years, nineteen of them on Flagg Street. Predominantly Irish and Italian, their block had only a smattering of blacks, and the races lived side by side with little
Landing on the Bay of Fundy, the Jenkinses and their masters soon settled thirteen miles to the south in the village of West Nictaux, which was populated by New Englanders who had arrived there soon after the British expelled the original French settlers. By 1861, West Nictaux was a tiny farming community, its hills dotted with orchards which produced apples for export to Boston, New York, even London.
The Jenkinses were the only black family in town. Elsewhere in the Annapolis Valley were remnants of earlier waves of black immigration—“loyalist” blacks who had gone over to the British cause during the Revolution and were later settled in Nova Scotia; the slaves of American Tories, brought by their masters to the peninsula; and Negroes who had served in British units during the War of 1812—but these Negroes had clung together in tight little settlements.
While remaining in the service of their “masters,” the Jenkinses didn’t feel free to join one of these black enclaves. Even after the master-servant relationship dissolved, they stayed on in West Nictaux, doing odd jobs for white farmers and orchardmen: butchering pigs, threshing buckwheat, sawing wood, splitting birches for the hoops on apple barrels. At first they lived on the Nictaux road next door to the two-room schoolhouse, where the Jenkins children were the only blacks. In class, they were regarded as quaint curiosities, the white kids chanting, “Thick lips, flat nose / On the head, the wool grows.” The family attended the Nictaux United Baptist Church, where they were assigned a special pew on the side aisle.
Soon after George Jenkins died at ninety-one, his family moved from the schoolhouse site to the Middle Road, a desolate track where the village’s poorest residents lived in tar-paper shacks. But they retained a sense of their own uniqueness, their special relationship with white folks. They never mixed with the blacks of North Street in Middleton, a settlement barely four miles away. North Street was called “the bog,” partly because it was built on swampy ground, partly because it was the home of indigent 1812 refugees known for their drinking and other “low behavior.” Charlotte Jenkins would warn her kids, “Stay away from those niggers in the bog!” It was a strange life. Embracedby neither whites nor blacks, they occupied a sort of racial no-man’s-land in which conventional allegiances were suspended.
By 1885, Frederick Jenkins, Jr.—then twenty-five—was growing restless. He had become a lumberman, cutting white ash, black birch, and rock maples, then riding the logs down the river to a sawmill in the valley. But there wasn’t much money in that, and other opportunities were scant. Black Nova Scotians had begun migrating to New England, where jobs were more plentiful, and when Frederick heard of a job with a Massachusetts lumber company, he packed his meager belongings and took the overnight ferry to Boston. When the job fell through, he worked successively at a tannery, a coal yard, and an asphalt company, while moonlighting as a janitor and rag merchant. Eventually, he settled in Lower Roxbury, where he married Rachel Baker, a recent migrant from Virginia. In 1905, their only child—Helen—was born.
The Jenkinses lived in Lower Roxbury for more than thirty years, nineteen of them on Flagg Street. Predominantly Irish and Italian, their block had only a smattering of blacks, and the races lived side by side with little
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