AFRICAN MEETING HOUSE

by Kate Foster

(Content Warnings: mentions of racism, slavery and death; intergenerational trauma)

We are the Black and the invisible
We are here and not here
We are gone but never leave

—Maxine Tynes 

Monica arrived at her mother’s house late afternoon, late October. The house was empty, yet the property stirred with activity. Wind swayed trees and swirled decaying leaves around the yellow-clad house. Roused by the warm afternoon, ladybugs flew about the sunny side of the home. The oak tree in the front yard stood tall above the story-and-a-half. A strong gust rained acorns down on the front step. 

Holding the key in her hand, Monica paused to examine the street. The house she’d grown up in looked the same, but all around it was change. With its enclosed porch and small dormer window set in the low-sloped front roof, her mother’s house stood out among newer homes. Had they made the right decision to sell? Monica wondered. Was it foolish to give up good land like this? Land that had been so hard to get, that her ancestors had lived on since 1816. 

Once isolated by forest at the end of a dirt road, the community known as The Avenue had been gradually surrounded: a city dump was placed beside it in the 1940s; a highway extension in the sixties; the construction of a mall and apartment complex in the seventies, and many private homes in the neighbouring subdivision throughout the eighties. Her mother had been one of the last elders to leave the small, historic Black community. Many, like her father, had died or sold, or their children—like Monica—had left Dartmouth and Nova Scotia for work and were unwilling or unable to move back. Her family was gone, but if she looked beyond the renovated and new houses, remnants of her childhood were present, and the memories still lived.  

A small, sharp tightness caught Monica near her left breast. She struggled to breathe in and lifted her head toward the sky. Her eyes met those of a crow perched on a low-hung service wire attached to the house. The bird was so still, it seemed unreal. Its silence, its perfect blackness, calmed her. She exhaled slowly, her chest pain easing.  

Monica let herself in, dropping her suitcase in the kitchen. On her flight from Toronto, she tried not to think about last week’s doctor appointment, the changes coming to her life. She had tried to forget her caseload at Community Services and focus on the tasks awaiting her during her week-long stay back home. She lifted the curtain and peered out the front window. The crow had not moved. Monica shrugged and looked around, half-expecting her mother to greet her, missing the warmth of her mother’s baking. She craved fresh bread with butter and brown sugar.

Monica’s sister, Leslie, who lived across the Halifax harbour with her husband Derrick, had already moved their mother into a nearby seniors’ home. Their mother, Phyllis, wasn’t alone. Her sister Verna, who’d lived with Phyllis for some years after their husbands died, also lived at the home. It was in the north end, close to Leslie and Derrick’s flat, known for its music and as a home for Black elders. They could sing the Mills Brothers songs their parents had sung to them and go to church together. “Are you going to tear down my house?” their mother had asked Monica and Leslie before agreeing to go. They promised they would not let that happen.

•••

The sisters knew some of their extended family did not approve. I did not entirely approve. I was of a time when family, and near-family, took each other in, shared whatever we had, whether we liked each other or not. Whether we were Methodist or Baptist, rural or living in town, self-employed or hired, born a slave in Virginia—like me—or free from God-knows-where. When it came down to it, we were African people, all Black against the rest of the world. We came from many tribes on the African continent. My own mother was born there.

We survived together or not at all.

Monica and Leslie’s mother was in decline, losing her past and present. Couldn’t remember she’d been born here, in this very house. She couldn’t live alone anymore, and neither sister could care for her while working. They had got along well, but their father had been the family unifier. He’d been gone nearly twenty years, and they’d all drifted deeper into their own lives. Monica was a social worker in Toronto, Leslie a nurse at the children’s hospital. To their mother’s disappointment, and mine, neither Monica nor Leslie had children. Soon there would be no one left. No one to come back for me and what lay underfoot, not far from where Monica stood.

It wasn’t just their mama who was losing the past. It was all of us.

I didn’t like it, my descendants so scattered and disconnected, though I could see they’d come a long way from where we started. From my mother abducted from West Africa, to the sisters now. Monica and Leslie were the first of my line to finish university. They did what Father Preston, my own pastor, said we’d do one day. Claim our place prosper.  Now we had choices and rights. But I’d seen that equality could be fleeting and required vigilance, that justice might never come. Some things that are lost are not recovered. Something deeper and more painful than their mother’s decline and empty house possessed me.

Something they needed to remember. 

•••

“You arrive ok? I’ll be there in the morning about 9.”

Monica opened the text from Leslie, and replied: “Everything’s fine, sis. Thanks for feeding me.”

“Remember, you’re eating for two. Rest up.”

Leslie hadn’t been able to leave work to pick up Monica at the airport, but she’d left a small basket of essentials on the counter and a dish of mac-and-cheese in the fridge. Grateful that she didn’t have to go out for groceries, Monica turned on the oven to warm up dinner. Leslie couldn’t have kids and had taken to mothering Monica and others. She liked caring for children at work, and loved the life she and Derrick had built, close to his large family of siblings, nieces, nephews, and aunts and uncles.

Monica had missed Leslie. As teens, they had fought over everything—attention from their parents, friends, to be the smart one, the dominant one. They teased, shouted, shoved, and their parents never intervened. They had also shared practical jokes, a love of rap and reading. They’d grown close as they aged, despite living at a distance.

Monica usually kept her feelings to herself, but she could confide in Leslie. When Monica found out she was pregnant a month after breaking up with Andre, she panicked. Leslie was the first person she called. She was forty-one and had not planned on children. They’d been good friends, but Andre was not Tyrone. Leaving the province after university, for work in Toronto, had helped Monica’s career. She’d been excited for change, a big city and new experiences. She hadn’t known that leaving Tyrone would end their relationship and break her heart. Now change was making her look back.

Monica sighed, sat down and put her feet up. Leslie had also left a to-do list on the kitchen table. She scanned the list, glad to be directed by her older sister. It eased her guilt, for living away, for not being there to help on a daily basis. Monica was to sort the upstairs rooms, box up what should be kept and given away. Leslie had already packed up most of the downstairs save some furniture and kitchen items. Together they would distribute their mother’s remaining belongings, to family, friends, charity. Then Leslie would call the realtor.

Sitting in the half-empty kitchen, Monica remembered how full of people it used to be, with family and neighbours, singing, laughing, carrying on. She wondered how she would raise her child. None of her family lived in Toronto. After so many years of independence and being single, she was afraid of becoming a mother. She didn’t want to do it alone.  

After dinner, Monica walked through the downstairs to see what was left. A box of photo albums sat on the living room floor. Monica pulled out one she’d made in her last year of school. Inside was a photo of her and Tyrone, dressed formally, his arm circling her waist, her smile joyful. She hadn’t meant for their separation to last. Regret surfacing, Monica closed the album wistfully. 

She wandered to the hallway, running her fingers along the plaster walls. A few black-and-white photos still lined the wall below the stairs. In one, her grandmother and great-aunt lean against the open front porch, in beautifully tailored dresses, hair elegantly swept up, arms casually draped across each other. In another photo, her mother’s house—with dark wood shingles, neat white trim, and a picket fence—sits back from the dirt road, small outbuildings behind it. The house sits in an open field with tall grass, a cherry tree, and flowering shrubs. Monica wondered if Leslie couldn’t bear to take the pictures down, they were so much a part of the house.

Monica carried her suitcase upstairs to the bedroom she had shared with Leslie. Most of their belongings were gone, but the twin beds, striped wallpaper, and slim bookcase remained. Suddenly fatigued, she got ready for bed and looked for a book to read. She pulled Invisible Shadows off the shelf and slid under the patchwork quilt her grandmother had hand-stitched. Soon, she fell asleep and into heavy dreaming.

An elderly lady sits at the kitchen table, wearing a long black dress. Her head is covered in a blue cotton headwrap. She pours tea for a younger woman. Monica drinks, then rises from the table and walks out the front door.

She stands beside her mother’s house, its dark wood frame resting on a low mound. A tall Black man, dressed in a black suit and top hat, rides toward her on horseback. Monica tries to step aside but is stuck in the dirt driveway. She faces the house and sees it is now a church. The man calls out to her, preaches something about holy fire and grace of God. The horse leaps past her, now chasing two bandanaed White men who throw fiery sticks into the church windows. Monica feels faint as heat presses upon her. The church is consumed by flames. Fear pushes her forward, freeing her. She runs downhill, toward the lake.

Monica sat up in bed, damp and chilled. She looked at the clock. 2:30 am. Thin lines of moonlight lit the space between the blinds and window frame, casting vague shapes above her. She lay back down, arms heavy at her side, and breathed out slowly, thinking about the man on horseback, waiting for sleep to return.

It is a calm morning at the lake. Mist hovers above the surface, the sun burns through it. The smell of fresh lilacs perfumes the air. Monica is wearing a Victorian white gown and stands waist-deep in the water. Voices sing, “Take me to the water… going back home…” The tall man prays. Strong arms brace and tip her backward until she is immersed in the cold lake. As she lifts her wet head, she sees others being baptized and people, her people, watching from the shore. The man preaches, “Our time is coming. We will be ready.”

•••

It was I who put Father Preston in Monica’s mind. And my beloved church, the African Meeting House, that he founded. For us who lived beside the Meeting House, it was everything. A place for worship, learning, Sunday school, our gathering place. Reverend preached the word of God and politics. There weren’t any churches or schools or clubs that accepted us. We made our own.

This place, and the road that came up to it, had many names over the years. First Lake, African Meeting House, the Coloured Walk, Crichton Avenue, Tynesville.

Tynes, that was my daughter’s family.

Long after I was gone, it became The Avenue, where the paved road and services ended and the dirt road began. We had to fight for everything, like running water in ‘63. It was only after White folks built houses further up the road that we got other services. A sewage line in ’86, the road paved in ’88.

It all led to one thing: home. I had other homes, but this was my final one, the one that held me the longest. Where I eked out a freedom. Is it still home when none of us are left living here, not a single family member? Just fragments, true fragments.  

You can live in a place a long time and not know its history. You can know the history of a place and never see it. I know this.

I am Rebecca Cassidy.

I lived here until I was ninety-three. But I’ve been awake since the digging started. Since then I’ve watched and waited. For someone to restore me. I speak and no one hears.

I’ve followed Monica since she arrived, trying to get her attention, make her see me. I slid into walls, possessed a crow, stirred up wind. I wore black, tucked myself into her dreams.

Monica couldn’t recognize me—no pictures of me exist. She couldn’t know me, we’re too far apart. But I see her and all that came between us. I wanted to tell her she belongs to this place as I do. That I had always wanted to see the land of my mother, to know where we started and once belonged. I couldn’t go back, but I wanted a piece of Africa, to hold my mother with me here. I was just a child when she was sold away, when her warm hands were forced to let go of me. Since then, I’ve missed her touch, her brown-black eyes on mine. She gave me the headwrap she always wore. For a short time, her smell stayed with me.  I wore her wrap and carried it with me here.

I know Monica feels something in the silence of this house.  

•••

Monica woke early, her dreams fresh. She sat up in bed, trying to remember. She knew some history—had she dreamed of Reverend Richard Preston? She knew her church used to do baptisms at the lake. The original church, the African Meeting House, had burned down long ago. What did her dreams mean? Who was the woman in black? Monica dressed quickly, poured a bowl of cereal from the kitchen, and returned upstairs. She ate corn flakes and gazed out her mother’s window into the backyard, thinking. Yesterday’s wind had thrown leaves across the lawn and into the weigela. Maybe she should rake and tidy the yard. This had been a good place to grow up, among cousins and protective neighbours. Promise me you won’t tear down my house. Her mother’s words came back to her. It wasn’t guilt she felt now, but longing. For her mother, for home. Now she had a baby to think about. Should she stay in Toronto close to Andre? Could she come home and find work here? Live in this house? This life inside her changed everything.

Monica checked the time. She’d been daydreaming for an hour. She decided to get to work before Leslie arrived. She opened the closet in her mother’s room. It was filled with clothes from several decades and smelled faintly of mothballs and lavender. Monica sorted, making a large pile to give away, a small one of scarves and jewelry to keep. She looked deeper into the narrow closet and found a shoebox at the back. Inside was a worn black Bible. The cover was frayed, the binding crumbling. 

She sat down on the carpeted floor and carefully opened the book. Tucked inside was a square of faded blue fabric. Behind it a yellowed piece of paper, with inked cursive, read, “This cloth belonged to elder Mrs. Rebecca, from her mother, b. in Africa. Rebecca (d.1885) and Lewis Cassidy (d.1861).” Monica gently felt the cloth. It was thin, antique. She knew the Cassidy name, but she wasn’t sure who Rebecca was. She would ask Leslie, the family historian. Leslie knew their family stories better than anyone; she wrote them down in a journal. She kept in touch with the older generations.

Leslie came in the front door noisily, carrying a thermos of coffee and a box of donuts. “Did you miss me?” she called out, as she climbed upstairs. 

“With that face?” Monica repeated their old greeting.

After a long hug, they examined each other in their careful and loving way. Despite their different styles and hair—Monica wore a short natural, Leslie long braids—they looked more alike than when they were young. Their bodies had grown into a similar fullness, their long legs carried them in the same brisk step. Their faces held the same expressions. They laughed loudly.

“You’re looking good, sis,” Leslie said. “Motherhood suits you.”

“I’m getting used to the idea.”

“I’m going to be the best auntie. I’m already planning my trips to Toronto.”

Monica breathed out and looked anxiously at Leslie. “I’m thinking about moving home. And I’m having second thoughts about us selling the house.”

“Really?” Leslie was surprised, but her face softened and relaxed. “I never wanted to live in this house,” she said slowly. “I like having my own. But I wish we could keep it. Keep our history on this land a little longer. Mum’s in a good place with Aunt Verna. But she still asks about her house. I don’t want to pressure you. You’ve got enough to sort out. But if you come back, I’ll help you. With the baby, the house, everything.”

“I thought I was too old for this, that it was too late.”

Leslie reached for Monica’s hands, “We can do this.”

Monica felt relieved.

“Now, I’ve been meaning to tell you—I ran into Tyrone. He asked about you. He’s still single, you know. It’s just him and his daughter.” Leslie paused. 

Monica felt a rush of joy and sadness. “Did you tell him about me?”

“That’s for you to do,” Leslie said gently. “If you want.”

Monica stared at Leslie for a moment and allowed herself a second of hope. “Yes,” she smiled. Then, wanting to change the subject, she looked around the room and remembered the shoebox.

“I found this in Mum’s closet,” Monica showed Leslie the Bible and cloth.

Leslie grew excited. “I’ll check with Aunt Verna, but Rebecca was a distant grandmother ... I don’t know how many generations. If I remember, she was born in the States and came here as a Refugee.” Maybe she was the lady I dreamt about, Monica mused.

“Is this house haunted?” Monica blurted out. “Because I dreamt up some ghosts last night.” She meant to be funny, but it sounded like a serious question. 

“Maybe,” Leslie laughed at her.

Feeling silly, Monica tried to explain her dreams. “What do you think?”

“It might be the hormones, but you’re really stirring things up here, Monica,” Leslie teased, and went to look up the family tree. 

*

Monica, I died of old age. My husband Lewis from a life of hard work. Our son, a truckman, was killed in a road accident. My daughter raised six children here. Can you imagine, I was born the same year as Father Preston. The same year Maroons and Black Loyalists were shipped back to Africa.

I came to Halifax on a ship in 1815 after the big war. I saw others running to the British ships blockading the Chesapeake. I waited, my mind turning up. When Massa Cassidy died, his son looked to sell his slaves. I could stay a slave in Virginia, or chance freedom and the unknown. I was twenty-three, but I’d already lost my mother and a child. It was riskier to stay than to run. What more could I lose? Lewis. I didn’t realize until I made to go. He stared at me with meaning and questions. I ran toward hope and Lewis followed me.

There were hundreds of us. I worried if getting on a boat could lead anywhere better. We were put in quarantine in Melville Island jail soon after we got here. It was cold and damp, like we were still at sea. I was sickly, tired and scared. I wished for food, something fresh and unsalted. Some of us got looked after there, with clothes and medicine. Some didn’t make it alive, others died on Melville, too sick to recover. After they moved us off the island, we first stayed in Preston. We didn’t have enough land to farm. Then Lewis learned we could settle in Dartmouth on the edge of that town. We hired ourselves out there—Lewis woodworking, me sewing. There were a few Black families already living up there in the woods. 

Lewis was older than me, but we came from the same place and stuck together. He called me his wife and I agreed he was my husband. He worked at clearing land and cutting trees to expand our house. Soon I was pregnant. I knew the signs; it wasn’t my first time—I had a stillborn when I was nineteen. She was buried and left behind on the plantation. I didn’t forget her, but what was I to do? 

I didn’t know what my baby would be. Not American, not a slave. What would we be here in Nova Scotia? British subjects? There were still slaves here when we arrived. My neighbour told me stories—to scare me or to make me cautious, I don’t know—that we could still be forced back into slavery and sold away from here. I couldn’t vote when I came here, and I got two-thirds of a man’s rations. 

But I was free.

We were free.

I’ve hovered above this ground since they turned us up. 

Once, we’d laid peacefully. I’d thought, finally. When the land was being prepared to build the apartments, I was called back by an earthquake. As though I were alive and died again. The excavator tore into our graves and cracked and snapped our bones until they were dust and dirt. I felt all the pain and sorrow and despair of my life in that moment. My bondage, the enslavement of my people, the loss of my mother, the unknowing of my father, the death of my children, the confusion of living. All my losses and gains swirled in the dust. I became a force of grief, unsettled and unsatisfied. 

A few of us were moved and remembered at the new church. The rest of us, we’re stuck here, our Meeting House long gone, our burial ground destroyed, unmarked and unremembered. 

•••

In the afternoon, Monica and Leslie took a break from packing and walked around Lake Banook. On the wooded side, the sweet smell of overripe berries and rotting leaves followed them. From the boardwalk, they looked across the water, past paddlers and rowers, at the bright orange, red, and yellow leaves among the evergreens.

They recalled how their mother and Aunt Verna used to walk the lake, often wearing matching tracksuits, taking their exercise. The older sisters would walk The Avenue road to Birch Cove, remembering their youth, family picnics, swimming in the summer, skating in the winter, and the baptisms the elders often talked about. In recent years, they had stood out as they walked through the neighbourhood. There were fewer Black faces now. Sometimes people gave them questioning looks: who were these deep brown women in red and black jackets, striding easily along? Once a man stopped them to ask, “You’re not from here, are you?”

“Born and raised here,” they’d replied firmly. “Fifth generation, at least.”  

Monica and Leslie stopped just past the mall, along one side of the old community. 

“See these rows of stones. I think they’re from the old church site,” Leslie said. “After the digging and the apartments went up, I remember Mum and Verna talking about it. She felt uneasy. That the land had been gradually sold, that no one had been able to protect our ancestors. That our burial ground was lost.”

“Maybe it’s up to us now,” Monica said. “To mark what happened here. For Mum, for us.”

 Leslie nodded. “Your dreams are telling us something. When I think of what our family went through, to get land and title to it and build a community, I don’t want it forgotten. We could make some calls. See if we can put a memorial where the graveyard was.” 

Monica looked at the open space in front of the apartments. The large rectangular buildings, three stories high, enclosed The Avenue and blocked the view of the neighbourhood.

“There’s something else we can do, tonight.” She smiled.

Leslie raised her eyebrows. She recognized an old determination. 

After dark, the sisters stepped outside, into the cold air, carrying a small wooden jewelry box their father had made them. Wearing thick jackets, they took a spade from the garden shed in the backyard. They crept through the stand of trees at the edge of their property, wound their way through a neighbour’s yard and a tree-lined path between apartment buildings, to where the church had stood and the graveyard had been. The remains of a stone wall ran into the trees along the bottom corner of the property. One direction faced the mall, the other side faced the lake. It was Sunday night and the usually busy intersection was quiet. 

“Here,” Monica pointed gleefully to a small dip in the ground.

“What if someone says something?” Leslie whispered, feeling both bold and self-conscious.

Monica grinned. “We’ll say we’re gardening.”

•••

I see Monica and Leslie hunched over the dirt, laughing, tripping in the dark blue night, reclaiming our land, remembering me, our perseverance, all of us. So that I might rest. I see her carrying hope, planted inside her. I hold it too, that another generation will stay, and our homestead remain.

•••

The ground is damp. Monica pushes the shovel into the ground. She lifts up dirt until she makes a narrow and deep hole. Leslie places the box at the bottom of the hole. Inside is the cloth from the Bible and a single cowrie shell taken from a necklace she’d found in her mother’s things. Together they fill in the hole. They dislodge three stones from the wall remnants and arrange them in a circle over the box. Monica looks to Leslie for words, wisdom. Leslie, the keeper of family history, has no speech. Only a simple Amen. Later, she will thank her sister for coming home.