Transcript of “Who Were the Porters?” – Episode 2
Richard Provencher (RP): This episode contains offensive and potentially harmful language that refers to Black communities in Canada. Some of the stories that are shared also include vivid descriptions of physical and verbal violence that may be difficult for some listeners to hear.
Discover Library and Archives Canada presents “Porter Talk.” This production explores the lived experiences of Black men who laboured as sleeping car porters for both the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways during the twentieth century. Their voices, along with those of their wives and children, relay stories of both hardship and resilience.
This is the first season of Voices Revealed, a series that amplifies the voices of underrepresented and marginalized communities held within Library and Archives Canada’s vast oral history holdings. Narratives of injustice, conflict, persistence, and resolution enable us to understand how the past powerfully defines our present. They also provide compelling insights that push us to imagine new directions for our collective future. My name is Richard Provencher and, as your host of the first season of Voices Revealed, I am pleased to guide you through the stories that are at the heart of “Porter Talk.”
James Laverne Robbins (JLR): I enjoyed the companionship of the porters themselves, but actually working there, it was just a job to get by, so I could raise my family, and Black men couldn’t get a job no place else. Hardly.
Harry Gairey Sr (HGSr): Well, one of the things that I didn’t like about the job, when I first went on, I never did that type of work before. Because it was-was only a glorifying maid, a chambermaid … So I really didn’t like it, but I-I did my best by it because it’s the only thing that I could get at the time.
George Forray (GF): Well, I found it quite an education. I found it an education which I couldn’t have got at no university. An education in, uh, all the, uh, practically that we can say the facts of life all through and something I couldn’t have bought or earned or been taught, except when I went experienced it myself.
Roy Williams (RW): At times I enjoyed it because, um, my aims and object was to try to, uh, be productive, to, uh— for the betterment of myself and my family. And, uh, I enjoyed it at times, and, uh, one thing, it gave me an opportunity to meet people and to go places that otherwise I wouldn’t have-wouldn’t have had.
RP: Black Canadians have always dreamt of a better tomorrow. That tomorrow has long included dreams of equality, an end to anti-Black racism and discrimination, and the opportunity to gain an education that would lead to gainful employment in jobs of their own choosing.
The men you just heard from held on to a variety of dreams too. Harry Gairey Sr. came to Canada from Jamaica, hoping to move beyond the cigar factory where he was employed as a teenager.
George Forray wanted to obtain a university degree that would lead him on a path to financial independence. Roy Williams held on tightly to his entrepreneurial spirit; he, along with his brothers, did everything they could to get a construction company off the ground. The hope was that they would define the terms of their labour, and be their own bosses.
And yet, despite their dreams, all of these men became sleeping car porters because of the limitations that systemic and institutional structures, along with everyday racism, placed on their lives. The friendships they developed among each other helped them endure the exploitative labour situation in which they found themselves. And their pay cheques, however meagre, enabled them to meet the needs of both their families and their communities, making it possible for others to continue to dream, and make change on the ground.
In the nineteenth century, Canadian railways served as vital tools of the British empire, making the settler-colonial framework, upon which our nation was built, possible. The centrality of whiteness in upholding that framework led to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories. It also served as the foundation upon which Canadian railways defined the exploitative labour practices which sustained them. Viewing racialized bodies simply for their extractive potential speaks to the deep inhumanity that led, with the driving of each spike, to the settlement of land and the subsequent exploitation of natural resources in this country. It is only by making race central to this conversation that we may begin to understand the diverse and complicated experiences of porters, all of which were tied to the well-established barriers of oppression that have, for too long, been ignored and even erased from the Canadian narrative.
The Pullman Palace Car Company’s sleeping cars, first introduced to Americans in the wake of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, came to Canada in 1870. Although Canadian labourers manufactured the cars in a shop located in Montreal’s Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood, George Pullman’s model, of hiring African American men to attend to passengers’ every need, remained central to the functioning of this hotel on wheels. Dr. Cecil Foster, Chairman of the Department of Transnational Studies at the University of Buffalo and author of They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, brings us into the specificities that defined Pullman Luxury Service from the outset.
Cecil Foster (CF): And George Pullman, what he did was, he said that when the passengers got on board, he wanted them to feel as if they were visiting a great house in the antebellum, the southern United States. They would arrive at the house. They’ll be a guest. They will be taken care of. They’ll have their shoes polished. They’ll have their beds turned up. They’ll have the best in food. They will have the butler to take care of them. They’ll have the maid to take care of them. All of their creation needs would be taken care of and they would get what we would call the white glove service. Literally, the white glove service where there was no dust to be found in those cars. And he said the best people that he could get to do that would have been the previous enslaved Black men in the southern United States who at that time were vastly unemployed. And he went into the United States and he hand-selected, and he trained them and he made them a kind of an army.
RP: Dr. Dorothy Williams, author of the formative texts Blacks in Montreal: 1628-1986 and The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal, builds on Foster’s remarks, noting how George Pullman’s reach extended well beyond his sleeping cars to shape Black Canadian labour, and particularly the CPR workforce.
Dorothy Williams (DW): William Van Horne, who is running the company had been trained by George Pullman. He actually apprenticed there in the United States. I’m not saying he didn’t have an understanding of racial relations in Montreal or in Canada, but his training showed him how to use Black men. So his idea of creating a very much a Canadian model that George Pullman was doing, is based on his training in the United States, right in the heart of that segregated labour market. So he saw the African American as being integral to the idea of luxury travel in Canada.
RP: Modelling antebellum slavery appealed to Canadians as much as it did to those south of the border. Like the theft of Indigenous land, enslavement played a formative role in settler-colonialism. As Dr. Natasha Henry-Dixon, a historian of African Canadian history, argues: “The social construction of race [here] … replicated ideas of race in other colonized places in the New World where white superiority was reinforced by racial difference and the subordination of people of African descent.” Those who settled in Canada “…transplanted aspects of one English slaveholding society to another” … “uproot[ing] their enslaved labourers and institut[ing] economic systems, social practices, and laws similar to those in the United States, premised on the same ideas of labour, racial identity and African bondage.” William Van Horne’s training found favour in the CPR’s corporate culture because the structures to accommodate it were already dominant in Canada. This was yet another form of extractive labour, which continued to bind Black bodies to the nation’s landscape and, by extension, its economy.
The same entrenched belief, in the inferiority of Black men, women, and children, which justified slavery, continued to root anti-Black racism in the years that followed. While Canada did not formalize a legal framework similar to the separate and largely unequal American Jim Crow laws, racial segregation existed here and regulated the everyday experiences of Black folks nevertheless. For Dr. Saje Mathieu, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and author of North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955, the structures that limited Black upward mobility continued to follow the historical patterns we just mapped out.
Saje Mathieu (SM): I think increasingly in Canadian literature, we’re going to hear about Jim Crow. And Jim Crow is a political system upheld by violence, to be very clear, that is predicated on keeping every aspect of life separated along race, white and Black in the case of the United States, largely, but it also included other people of colour. And so in my work, it was so important at the beginning of the book to explain that in Canada, we have what now I refer to as Jacques Crowe. Where, in fact, it’s much more de jour, like in the American North, where we don’t always have outright laws, but we actually have more laws than people realize that are dictating, you know, that are banning Black people from using public skating rinks, going to schools, going to movie theatres, buying homes. All of these are absolutely common practices in the United States. And so Canada has, takes elements of the American Jim Crow model and then retools it to fit within the Canadian political and cultural context. And so in this way, Canada’s Jacques Crow policies are much clearer, much more dangerous, much more harmful than they are in the United States at the same time.
RP: Dr. Steven High, Professor of History at Concordia University and the author of Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class, describes how systemic and institutional Jacques Crow structures took root in Montreal, the birthplace of Canada’s industrial revolution, limiting the employment options available to Black men.
Steven High (SH): Well, almost every Black family in Montreal that’s been in Montreal for any, you know, any duration has a connection to the railway. Some historians have suggested that 90% of Black men, up until the 1950s, worked for the railway and the reasons are quite clear that anti-Black racism in the city was strong, what that meant was that a lot of those factories along alongside of the Lachine Canal, even though they were located close to where the Black community developed, would not really hire Black labour. And so 90% of men worked as porters, red caps who are carrying luggage within the railway stations, dining room employees, and cooks. Those are really the job categories that were exclusively Black labour. And so you had a very formalized surrogation on the railways that worked against Black people because they couldn’t rise into other positions. They were excluded from a lot of job categories. What it meant though, was that there were certain categories that only employed Black men. And so it was in a way, it forced and again, the railways to hire Black labour.
And within the community, like the porters were actually, almost an aristocracy, in the sense that the railways tended to hire, especially the CPR, tended to hire Black labour in the US Black colleges. These are highly educated men who are getting into these white collar occupations and these are mobile jobs. And so within the community, the porters are really sort of the elite, right, even though on the railway they are perhaps the bottom rung of that employment ladder.
RP: Replicating George Pullman’s Luxury Service in Canada required Black migrants, first from the United States and then from Britain’s Caribbean colonies, to fill the sleeping car porter ranks of both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways. Dr. Steven High continues:
SH: Until the 1960s, Canada had a, you know, a very exclusive, we’ll say, immigration policy that discriminated against people who were not white and not Protestant even. And so, you know, who has access to the country is, of course, highly political and, and people who don’t fit that definition were allowed in under only certain circumstances, right? So Asian or Chinese labour to help build the Canadian National, Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. But the government didn’t want them to stay, and they weren’t allowed to bring family members and there were head taxes and so on.
And there was also of course discrimination against Black migration, whether it was from the United States or from Great Britain or from the Caribbean. But of course, industry wants cheap labour and race plays into that. And so I was mentioning before how the Canadian Pacific Railway would actually recruit in the Black colleges in the United States for porters. And so they, the CPR had an in, right? They had the influence in order to bring those porters, that labour into the country. Whereas if those same people tried to immigrate to Canada on their own, it would have been far more difficult. And so business is a major player, you know. It was and it continues to still be.
RP: According to Dr. Paula Hastings, a historian whose work focuses on the British empire and its colonial relationships with Canada and the Caribbean, Canadian policymakers “…enacted racially discriminatory immigration policies to maintain (the myth of) white homogeneity for nearly a century after Confederation. Despite efforts to maintain the nation’s racial status quo, Dr. Saje Mathieu explains how the CPR skirted Canadian immigration policies to hire African American men who could meet the demands of white glove service.
SM: The reality is that CPR in our imagination was an emblem for Canada itself, right? [T]hey very much felt as though the government should do what they needed as a company. And so there could be rules, immigration rules for other people and other companies, but the CPR should have its own sort of work around. So the CPR would regularly send agents into the United States, even though it was illegal to do so, to court Black, young Black men to work on the railroads, especially during the summer. They were smart about it. They were, I should say, strategic about it. They went to historically Black colleges and universities so that they could get, and this was not easy, they wanted to get like a perfect pitch. He needed to be sort of smart enough to answer questions about the landscape or Canadian history or, you know, politics should a customer want to indulge, you know, the idea of having a conversation with these men, but not too smart that he might be talking about communism and, you know, revolution and the like. He needed to be young. He needed to ideally have a southern accent so as to again make the experience seem even more authentic, even though it’s not happening in the United States. He did not necessarily need to have any experience on the rails in order to get this job. And so the CPR agents would issue out these cards from the company that the new hires were instructed to simply show at the border. They didn’t need other travel documents and that would get them past what were increasingly obstructive measures for keeping Black folks out, right? Whether it’s the Order-in-Council that has adopted banning Black folks for a year, in I believe 1911, or just border agents taking it upon themselves to be the defensive linemen, if you will, on our virtually invisible border.
RP: For Dr. Dorothy Williams, the implications of this situation were clear:
DW: So you get them as educated as you can, you pay them as poorly as you can, perfect recipe for becoming a millionaire in the capitalist system, right? And Blacks played that role coming out of American slavery.
RP: Short-term summer contracts, to meet the demands of Canadian tourism and, later, wartime shortages, led many African American college students north. Clarence Coleman was one of these young men. He may not have fully understood the well-worn patterns of anti-Black racism and oppression that led to his recruitment – rarely can we see the roots of the problems we are in the midst of living – but he fully understood how they drew him to portering nevertheless.
Clarence Coleman (CC): See, at that time, I think the reason they was coming south to get the porters is because the porters in the south was more domesticated and he– they was trying to keep the railroad on the same order of George Pullman. The George Pullman was had all Black porters and I think the Canadian Pacific wanted all Black porters. So they decided to come south to get their men. They could have gotten them from the west, any of other places, but the-the-the Southern Blacks was more domesticated. And I think that’s what they was after.
RP: Mr. Coleman never returned home to Nashville, Tennessee, despite the fact that he completed two years of theology studies at the National Baptist Theological Seminary, an institution that now has a formidable list of alumni who were active in the Civil Rights Movement. He left in 1946, committing fifteen years of his life to the CPR’s Montreal Division instead. Mr. Coleman did not tell Stanley Grizzle why he stayed in Canada, but others, like Dick Belamy, did.
Essex Silas Richard “Dick” Bellamy (DB): I happened to be going to school at Fisk University. And that year, they sent the Superintendent from Winnipeg to Nashville, Tennessee, to hire men for the summer. And I figured that uh, I needed a job to further my education at Fisk University, so I decided to come to Canada in 1927…
Stanley Grizzle (SG): May I ask what were you studying at Fisk?
DB: I was working for my Bachelor of Arts degree.
SG: Did you ever go back?
DB: No. I had to stay out for one year in order to try to make up- keep up- get a- get enough money to go back. But I wasn’t able to-to do that because my mother. Home was on the mortgage, and the Simmons National Bank held a mortgage on that home. And I knew, that at her age, she wouldn’t be able to work. She told me she could get a little job. My mother has never worked a day in her life outside of the home. I often wondered what kind of job could she get? So in order to keep her from working, after my father died, I took over the reins of looking after my mother. And I did as long as the CPR employed me. And the way the CPR paid me every payday, which was every two weeks, I sent my mother some money, and she never worked another day.
RP: Truth be told, few of these African American men returned home once they began to collect a steady pay cheque from Canadian railway companies. Having access to a host of Black colleges, a vital step to upward mobility that was largely unavailable to them in Canada, was not enough to lure them back. So much more was at stake, determining the decisions they ultimately made. Aurelius Leon Bennett’s words clearly speak to the circumstances he hoped to leave behind:
SG: And, uh, why did you come to Canada?
Aurelius Leon Bennett (ALB): To-to escape uh, discrimination.
SG: Discrimination on account of race, colour?
ALB: Right.
RP: Mr. Bennett’s decision to leave Memphis, Tennessee, in 1944, mirrored many of those that had been made by African Americans in the intervening years. They were not, however, simply trying to escape racial injustice, as Dr. Saje Mathieu, makes clear:
SM: In the case of African-American migrants who are coming to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, they are on the run from racial terror. And the fact that they’re coming from Oklahoma, Kansas, Northern Texas, like that was some of the deadliest area in the United States by the teens, the nineteen-teens. And so, so yes, that’s definitely a powerful push factor for some of these families. But the pull factor is also that this idea, taking very seriously that Canada and British rule affords a very different kind of possibility for Black folks. Some will find that that was more myth than reality, and others will find that to be life-savingly true.
RP: Award-winning Canadian author, documentary film director, screenwriter, and playwright Cheryl Foggo, whose grandfather worked as a porter as did several of her uncles, explains what this meant for her family:
Cheryl Foggo (CF): What was happening, that drove them out, was that as Oklahoma white folks were pushing for statehood, they were disfranchising Indigenous people and Black people were very much in their targets as well. So some of these thriving Black towns were burned down. Black people were forbidden from entering certain communities. Literal physical violence, which, I hesitate to describe because I find it so deeply painful to think of these things happening to my precious grandparents and great grandparents and other family members and other people I knew, that they faced this kind of, you know, the prospect of being murdered and lynched, and terrible things were happening. So on every front, economic and just in terms of physical safety, people’s communities were being attacked. And I think it’s no accident that approximately ten years, a little less than ten years after my great grandparents left Tulsa, the terrible massacre that’s really famous, took place there in Greenwood, in the community of Greenwood. So my grand, my great grandparents got out of there before that massacre took place, but you can see clearly that the conditions that led to that massacre were already in place, and that’s what they were facing.
RP: The Tulsa race massacre continues to be viewed as one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. Foggo’s family members were literally fleeing for their lives. So were Robert Jamerson’s, though this cannot be inferred from the conversation he had with Stanley Grizzle:
SG: Where were you born?
Robert Jamerson (RJ): Texas.
SG: Whereabouts?
RJ: Tennessee Colony.
SG: Tennessee Colony? Uh, when were you born? What’s your birthday?
RJ: Uh, February 7th, 9- 1894.
SG: And, uh, when did you come to Canada?
RJ: 1910.
SG: Uh-huh. And, uh, when you came to Canada, where did you first live?
RJ: Uh, Athabasca.
SG: Athabasca?
RJ: Yeah, Alberta.
SG: With your parents?
RJ: Mm-hmm.
SG: Where were your- Where was your mother? Born?
RJ: Texas.
SG: And your father?
RJ: Texas
SG: Uh-huh. All right.
RJ: I don’t know what- what part of Texas. I just know they was born in Texas.
RP: Mr. Jamerson was sixteen years old when his family left Texas and settled in Alberta. He would have been keenly aware of the dire and dangerous circumstances that drove his family, along with others, to participate in what has since become known as the Black Migration of 1910. And yet, he mentioned nothing about these defining moments. Like the other men to whom Grizzle spoke, he continued to put one foot in front of the other, a strategy that remained vital to negotiating the various barriers he faced throughout his long life. Regardless of his silences, Mr. Jamerson was part of a substantial migratory movement that, as Cheryl Foggo points out, reshaped Western Canada.
CF: Both sets of my maternal great grandparents were a part of what has become known as the Black Migration of 1910. It’s a migration of African American farming people, mostly from Oklahoma, but from some other southern places as well, that actually began with scouters coming up to the prairies in 1905, and more or less ended in 1912. But, for convenience sake, we call it the Black Migration of 1910. My great grandparents’ names were William and Katie Glover, and Rufus and Drucilla Smith. They went to a place near Maidstone, Saskatchewan, along with about 150, 200 other people who formed a small Black community there. They were very closely connected to the four Alberta Black communities that were created out of that same migration. The largest and best known of those communities is Amber Valley, Alberta, but there was also Keystone, Alberta, which is now Breton, Campsie Alberta, and Junkins, Alberta, which is now Wildwood. So those four communities and the Maidstone community were a family really, a very extended network of kin and friends and lots of people who didn’t know each other, but all came there for the same reason, because they were experiencing increasing brutality that was based on their race where they were living in the Southern US … And, I will go on to say, when those small farming communities started to disperse, more or less around the time of the Second World War, which was not uncommon for small communities on the prairies, many people went to the cities to live and for work, and the railroads were a source of work for several.
RP: Cheryl Foggo’s family’s experience is similar to the trajectory laid out by Mr. Jamerson in his interview. The hardships of farming made it nearly impossible for this to be a multigenerational exploit. Obtaining unfavourable plots of land with poor soil quality when these Black migrants arrived in Canada led to years of poor yields. This, coupled with being cheated out of fair compensation for the crops they managed to grow, made it hard for the farms to remain sustainable. The onset of the Depression, a decade characterized by faltering crop prices, drought, and insect infestations, was the final nail in the coffin that led many away from their family farms. The outbreak of the Second World War, and the labour shortages that followed, presented a new opportunity, bringing many young Black men to major cities across western Canada where they hoped to obtain steady employment in a range of sectors. However, anti-Black racism and discrimination continued to limit their job opportunities, leading most to portering.
This profession led not only African Americans to migrate to Canada, but also those descended from British colonies in the Caribbean. While the circumstances that led Harry Gairey Sr. and Harold Osburn Eastman here were different, the lives they remade were both shaped by their experiences on the rails. Listen as they share their stories with an interviewer named Kay, a woman about whom we have little information but whose conversations with porters are also part of Grizzle’s collection at Library and Archives Canada.
Kay: Where were you from originally, Mr., uh, Gairey?
HGSr: Jamaica.
Kay: You are?
HGSr: Mm-hmm.
Kay: Uh-huh. Were you a young person when you came to Canada?
HGSr: Yes. I spent my sixteenth birthday here.
Kay: Ah.
HGSr: Mm-hmm.
Kay: Did you?
HGSr: And, uh, my first job was I get in the Grand Trunk as a dishwasher … And that was only $30 a month, Kay.
Kay: Mm-hmm.
HGSr: And, uh, if you missed a day, you deducted, you didn’t get any pay.
Kay: And you were 16 years old.
HGSr: 16 years old. That’s the only job I could get.
Kay: Mm-hmm.
HGSr: Uh, at home, I was a cigar maker by trade, you know. My uncle had a cigar shop, and I used to make cigar with him. But when I come here, I couldn’t get that. So I just adjust myself to do the type of job. And I liked it because I liked the culinary arts. I liked to cook. You know, I liked cooking.
SG: Brother Eastman uh, for the record. give me your full name.
Harold Osburn Eastman (HOE): Harold Osburn Eastman.
SG: Yes. And you were, uh— When is your birth date?
HOE: October the 22nd, 1922.
SG: Oh, and uh, where were you born?
HOE: Barbados.
SG: Uh-huh. When did you come to Canada?
HOE: I came to Canada, the 14th of May, 1942.
SG: Mm-hmm. Why did you come to Canada?
HOE: To join the Canadian Army.
SG: Did you join the Canadian Army?
HOE: No, the-there was thirty-six of us that came up to the Canadian Army, and Eric Gittens and I were exempted from the Army for medical reason…
SG: I see. Uh, you became a sleeping car porter, I understand?
HOE: Yes, I did.
SG: When?
HOE: The 7th of February, 1944.
SG: Which-which railroad?
HOE: Canadian Pacific.
SG: Mm-hmm. And why did you take that job?
HOE: Because after I went lookin’ for jobs at different companies, I was made to understand that CP and CNR had jobs for me as a porter.
RP: As it did with African American migrants, the CPR continued to flout Canadian immigration policies when it recruited these and other men from British colonies in the Caribbean. Dr. Saje Mathieu tells us what this process looked like and how business interests in the region made it a key site for locating an exploitable labour force:
SM: The thing is that the reason why we have these Black men working primarily in that railroad industry is because of these imperial connections, right? It’s precisely because Canada is part of this British Empire and it’s positioned itself as the sort of white guardian in the Americas of the British Empire that it already has a paternalistic relationship with the Caribbean and it’s expanding into the Caribbean precisely in those early decades of the twentieth century when, whether it’s through steamships, so the CPR already has a presence in the Caribbean and realizes early on that this could be an incredible, exploitable pool of labour that would enhance its service, right? That it would position it alongside American companies that are also peddling the fantasy of having an antebellum racial exchange.
And then those relationships create a new community in Canada that is both, that is really Pan-American. These guys are coming from various parts of the Caribbean, various parts of the United States, and the northern parts of South America, right? Central America, they’re coming from present-day Belize, British Guyana, et cetera. So we get a cocktail of Black life in Canada that is very different from what we find elsewhere. Maybe the closest to that would be New York and the various migrant groups who will land in New York again during those first two, three decades of the twentieth century. So it is these original imperial connections that are amplified through transportation networks and sort of companies realizing that this is a lucrative part of their marketing, right, to sell this racialized, servile relationship. And it coincides with when Black folks are on the move.
RP: Despite increased paranoia and hysteric calls to limit Black people from entering the country, the CPR continued to do as it pleased. While the total number of migrants remained relatively low, profits skyrocketed. Many white Canadians viewed these newcomers as aliens who were contributing to the degradation of the nation, but “in 1931, 80% of the nearly 20,000 Blacks in Canada were in fact born [here]” (Mathieu 6). Profits from sleeping and dining car services on the rails amounted to $20 million in 1920 alone, and continued to steadily increase over time (Ibid. 90).
Like all of the men we have met so far, those born in Canada also faced anti-Black racism, just as migrants did. Nearly every interview Stanley Grizzle conducted with Black Canadians begins with a lament about unrealized possibilities. And yet, the conversations never linger on subjects about what could have been, dreams they could not achieve. Instead, the men move on, as they did as young adults, sharing stories about the difficulties they encountered when searching for jobs. Noone speaks about the oppressive barriers that limited their opportunities, but it is clear that they felt these forces with every fibre of their being.
Mel Grayson, who worked out of the Canadian National Railway’s (CNR) Toronto Division for nearly two decades, tells us how education did little to help him secure employment, a task made more difficult as a result of the Depression.
Mel Grayson (MG): Well, would you believe that, uh, when I started to work on the railway, there were, jobs were very scarce in those years. And, um, I guess I’ve gotta go back a bit. When I came outta high school and started looking for a job, I found that there weren’t any jobs to be found.
Interviewer: Mm-hmm.
MG: There were jobs possibly, you make a dollar, two dollars a week. As a matter of fact, I did work, uh, with a printer for a while and, um, I made, uh, apprentice to him and I was making two dollars a week. Well, this was just a little, in my opinion, just a little too little to be making after having, uh, accomplished grade thirteen, which in those days was, uh, some sort of accomplishment. The railroad seemed to be the place to go. And, uh, I looked around, tried, and, uh, I tried the CPR, they wouldn’t hire me ’cause I was too short. So I tried the CNR where my father worked and uh, I was successful and uh, gaining work there… he, um, often told me he didn’t want me to go to work for the railroad. And, uh, I figured when I came out of high school that, uh, the world was my oyster because I was– as a matter of fact, in my graduation class, I was considered the boy most likely to succeed. I guess this is the person that never [chuckles] succeeds really. And, uh, but I looked around and there just wasn’t any work. And, uh, I guess as a matter of, um, need, I wanted a job, I wanted to do something with my life. I wanted to try to make some money and, uh, be like some of my friends who were out working in brokerage offices and some worked for Globe and Mail and other places. But, uh, as I say, there was no work for me. So this is why I decided to go to work for the railroad.
RP: Mr. Grayson may not have been able to obtain the job he desired, but as Dr. Saje Mathieu puts it, stability was stability.
SM: [For] the earlier part of the twentieth century, so pre-Great Depression, right, access to work, we have to think about it completely differently than we think about work now. It’s not necessarily that you got your forty hours, it’s that you might’ve gotten two or three days of work per month, where portering offered you much more consistent work, even though it required initially that you stand around until you got a shift and you weren’t paid for that. But if you got a shift and then you could keep getting shifts because you were good at playing, leaning into the mythology, right, the fantasy of life on the rails, then you could in fact have that social and financial mobility that you talked about.
RP: Like Mr. Grayson, Melvin Crump sought employment during the tail end of the Depression. Faced with the harsh realities of farming at this time, he knew that portering was the only viable employment option he had.
SG: Um, I understand that you became a sleeping car porter.
Melvin Crump (MC): Uh, yes. Um, during the hard times, or during the hard years, um, we didn’t have– there weren’t any jobs around that we could depend on. And so the– an opening came, whereas, um-um, the, um, Black generation was called on. The male, uh, was called on to support and, uh, back up the CPR and getting-getting, uh, manpower for– to man their trains. And at the time that this was taking place was during the time– the reason for the-the shortage of manpower was during the time that the war was breaking out. And so, um, I hear-hearing about this, uh, move, I-I put my name in and I was– Um, there was a fellow named Bob Ware that was, uh, scouting Alberta looking for, uh, Black, uh, porters, uh, to, um, uh, to-to come to the rescue of our Canadian Pacific Railway employment, uh, situation. And I put my name in. At the time that I put my name in, I told, uh, Mr. Warer that, uh, “How old do you have to be?” And he says, “Well, you have to be at least 21.” And so I said, “It’s fate, I just turned 21.” I just turned– At the time I was 19. [chuckles] And so, I needed the job so bad that I said I was 21. And he looked at me, but he-he– They needed the manpower. And so he said, “How tall are you?” I said, “How tall you have to be?” He said, “Well, you gotta be at least five foot six.” And so I says, “I’m five foot seven.” I says, “I just so happened to be five foot seven.” And so he understood what I told him, he practically told me what’s necessary. That’s how I got my job.
SG: So, how tall were you actually?
MC: Five foot five and a half.
RP: Humanity and humour made it possible to endure portering. And, as Raymond Coker, tells us, everyday realities trumped the dreams these men long held close.
Raymond Coker (RC): But once you get married and have a family, I mean, you gotta make that buck, you know, so you make it any place, you can make it. And once you get on the railroad, after you pass ten years, you keep saying you’re gonna quit, you’re gonna quit and– but once you get ten years and the children start to come and the bills start to come, you know what I mean, you think twice, you know, so that’s it, you just stay there. [laughs]
RP: Coming up in the third episode of “Porter Talk,” we’ll delve into the dire working conditions porters experienced as their aspirations gave way to the demands of providing luxury service to their white passengers as they traversed the country aboard the hotel on wheels.
SG: How many hours a month did you work before the union?
RW: Well, the-the-the-the hours wasn’t counted, we just worked that’s all, uh, twenty-four hours a day was, um-
SG: Mm-hmm.
RW: -when we were on-on duty, we-we could be called on any-any hour. There was no-there was no time limit.
SG: I see.
RW: It was full-time day.
MC: Even if you were practically asleep on your feet walking through your car checking and testing, you were half asleep doing this, but there was not too much that, uh, you could do about that, because that was part of your duties and part of your job.
RP: If you’re interested in hearing more from Roy Williams, Melvin Crump, and other sleeping car porters who welcomed Stanley Grizzle into their homes in the late 1980s, subscribe to Discover Library and Archives Canada. You’ll receive episodes as they are released, which introduce you to these men as well as their wives and children. Together, they give voice to Black life on and off the rails during the twentieth century. Leading Black scholars and historians help us contextualize porters’ experiences, enabling us to understand the myriad ways these citizens faced obstacles and persisted nevertheless.
Thank you for being with us. I’m Richard Provencher, your host. You’ve been listening to “Porter Talk,” the first season of Voices Revealed.
Special thanks to our guests: Dr. Cecil Foster, Dr. Steven High, Dr. Saje Mathieu, Dr. Dorothy Williams, and Cheryl Foggo. You can find biographies of each person who participated in this episode in the show notes. There you will also find an episode transcript with embedded timestamps that link you to the original interview content in the Grizzle collection. Feel free to explore and share these stories widely!
We also acknowledge those who have done French voiceovers for this episode: Roldson Dieudonné, Alfred Gbidi, Lerntz Joseph, Euphrasie Mujawamungu, and Christelle Tchako Womassom.
Acclaimed musician and producer, Paul Novotny, composed “Jazz Dance,” the theme song for “Porter Talk.” Joe Sealy, famed jazz pianist who is the son of a porter, is also featured on the recording.
All other music in this episode is from the audio library at BlueDotSessions.com.
This episode was produced, written, engineered, and edited by Tom Thompson, Jennifer Woodley, and Stacey Zembrzycki.
If you’re interested in listening to the French equivalent of our podcast episodes, you can find them on our website or your favourite podcast app. Simply search for “Découvrez Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.”
For more information on our podcasts, go to Library and Archives Canada’s homepage, type “podcast” in the search bar in the top right corner, and click on the first link. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, reach out to the podcast team at the email address located at the bottom of the episode page.
References
Cheryl Foggo, John Ware Reclaimed (National Film Board of Canada, 2020).
Cecil Foster, “They call me George”: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019).
Paula Hastings, Dominion over Palm and Pine: A History of Canadian Aspirations in the British Caribbean (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2022).
Natasha Henry-Dixon, “Where, Oh Where, Is Bet? Locating Enslaved Women on the Ontario Landscape,” in Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History, eds. Michele A. Johnson and Funké Aladejebi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 84-112.
Steven High, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
Saje Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Dorothy W. Williams, Blacks in Montreal, 1628-1986, An Urban Demography (Montreal: Les Éditions Yvon Blais Inc, 1989).
Dorothy W. Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1997).