1Between the 1830s and the complete abolition of slavery in the USA in 1865, thousands of slaves transported themselves northwards to freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad, which covered much of US territory and ended on Canadian soil. Estimates vary, but around 40.000 runaway slaves may have reached Canada through this sui-generis means of transport.1 And while around 20 % of this contingent returned to the USA after 1865, most of them stayed in Canada for good and added to the relatively small number of Black Canadians whose ancestry had previously entered the country, either as slaves to French or British owners, or as free settlers.2

2 The Underground Railroad was a secretly organised network of communications and routes whose aim was to rescue as many people as possible from slavery, helping them to reach safe territories where slavery had been abolished. One of its protagonists was Harriet Tubman (1820-1913), a runaway slave who was to become one of the most popular Underground Railroad ‘conductors’ or guides. Tubman was born a slave in Maryland, the state she fled when she was thirty and worn out by lifelong pain and humiliation. When she reached safe territories in the North, settling initially in Philadelphia, Tubman decided to go back South to search for her family, to later re-locate them in St Catharines, Ontario. After this, she would spend the rest of her life helping fellowmen and women to escape the ordeal of slavery. She did no less than thirteen trips back to the South in search of new ‘cargo’ to be transported North to freedom, and according to William Still, who in 1871 published his influential memories entitled The Underground Railroad, she must have conducted around 300 people North. Today, Harriet Tubman is revered as a heroine of freedom in the United States and in Canada, especially by Americans and Canadians of African stock.3

3This historical figure is a main motif in the novel for teenagers, Harriet’s Daughter, by Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer and political activist Marlene Nourbese Philip. The novel was published in 1988, and in an interview Nourbese Philip recalls that she wrote it because there were too few books addressed to black Canadian children and teenagers, and therefore she decided to contribute towards filling that empty space.4 Incidentally, it showed that, in spite of the fact that there were no books addressing the concerns so successfully explored in Harriet’s Daughter, the book had to wait a long time to be published.5 Suspicion could arise that, not yet two decades ago, racism still pervaded the policies of publishing houses in Canada.

4Marlene Nourbese Philip’s purpose in writing this novel, then, was providing Canadian black girls with a literary representation of their world, and with a literary model of girl they could admire, identify with and imitate. As a matter of fact, the novel’s pedagogical purposes are sometimes too evident. The text tends too often to over-explain itself and the style is frequently too elaborate —this is all the more noticeable in some dialogues, which the reader would presume of a more casual and negotiated nature, and which occasionally appear as soliloquies in the traditional sense. Besides, the protagonist can sometimes strike the reader as being too self-conscious, too mature for a fourteen-year-old. But if these details can be considered as textual weaknesses, they can also be read as evidence of the author’s unquestionable political commitment, and can be excused on the basis of her need, even her urgency, to foreground a number of concerns. In the aforequoted interview, Nourbese Philip convincingly claims that ‘ [her] job as a writer is to disturb the Status Quo’ (Williamson 1993: 244) In more general terms, the writing of black women in Canada has been defined both as ‘a writing of resistance’ and as one which uses ‘a grammar of dissent’.6 All these statements speak of the need to redress a situation unfair to black women in the Canadian Mosaic, where, although slavery was abolished around two hundred years ago, oppression and discrimination are still daily realities in the lives of Harriet Tubman’s Afro-Canadian heirs.

5Narrated in the first person by Margaret, the protagonist, the story told in Harriet’s Daughter reveals three types of oppression: those exerted on the basis of gender, race, and age. Of these three, child oppression is probably the one least explored in postcolonial literature, because it tends to be read into race, class or gender matters. Saying that this book denounces child oppression is not going too far, attending to the protagonist’s complaint that ‘slaves were much worse off than we are... but... sometimes I feel so helpless, not having any rights or power. Slaves must have felt something like that, don’t you think?’7 Margaret is addressing Mrs Billings, a childless and generous neighbour who enjoys baking delicacies for Margaret and other children on their frequent visits to her place. A few pages later, Mrs. B will reply to the girl: ‘... you right as anybody ever was to say children have no rights, and no power, and Lord help them if some adult take it in mind to abuse them—and abuse is not only physical abuse. They got no recourse...’ (110) Statements like these are frequent throughout the work, making it very likely that any teenager, including those of race or gender different from Margaret’s, feels comforted and less lonely in their alienation from adults. In this sense, the text offers tips like the following:

‘Look mum—damm, blasted, shit, see—my tongue can lift them up. It’s real easy too’. She got all righteous with me and sent me up to my room to finish my homework. That is what I don’t understand about adults, how when you show them they’re doing wrong they always punish you for your mistake. (13)

6But Margaret’s story reaches further than denouncing the oppression of children. In the life of this adolescent, born in Canada to Caribbean parents, two other factors are relevant: her being a girl and her being black. These two factors determine, on the one hand, what is expected of her, and on the other, the reality she is going to encounter in the social sphere. Throughout the novel there are several allusions to the latter:

’It’s not easy out there for young girls, you know’.
‘Me know dat, ma’am’.
‘Specially young, black girls’.
‘Me know that too, ma’am’. (13)

7This is a conversation between Mrs Billings and Zulma, Margaret’s best friend. Before coming to Toronto, Zulma lived in Tobago with her grandmother, since her mother had migrated to Canada. Only recently has her mother been able to bring the child to live with her. The problem—and what sparks the action— is that Zulma, a newcomer in the North, is not happy there. She misses her grandmother and her Caribbean island, and to worsen things, her stepfather’s cruel ways towards her, and especially towards her mother, whom he beats quite often, make her feel even more miserable. On an impulse, Margaret promises Zulma that she will buy her a ticket back to her island and her dear Gran. A promise not easy to keep, because gathering such an important amount of money is practically impossible for a fourteen-year-old, even one so strong-willed as Margaret. But while she is busy trying to find a way to keep her promise, and as we read on, we are given the opportunity to get to know her: her daily routines, her problems, her dreams, and her family relationships.

8Being a girl is supposed to mark her behaviour: ‘My mum thinks that because I am a girl I should like to dress up and wear make-up, like my sister, that I should always be polite and not swear or curse’ (14). Besides wearing dresses—which she hates—, we also learn that she is expected to go to Church every Sunday (while her brother is not), and that she must not let boys touch her.

‘Touch me mum?’...
‘Yes, touch you’.
‘Where mum, where mustn’t they touch me?’
... She acted like she didn’t hear me, and went on slamming things around. (49-50)

9We also learn that her brother is never asked to do the dishes or tidy up the kitchen like herself and her sister. Margaret, of a combatant spirit undoubtedly inspired by that of Harriet Tubman’s, reacts against this injustice, but her mother’s answer is, quite simply, that he is a boy, and has better things to do. When Margaret retorts angrily that her teacher has said that ‘men can do jobs that women do, and women can do jobs like welding and construction’, her mother accuses her of behaving like ‘a real street woman’ (12).

10The problem is apparently settled with her mother threatening to call on her father, which reinforces Margaret’s resentment and her contempt for her mother: ‘That was my mother for you, always having to get HIM involved. She could never settle anything on her own’ (34).

11Behind this strongly gendered education lies a patriarchal ideology whose main instrument is Margaret’s father, the dictator of family rules, who ‘always speaks with capital letters’, as Margaret puts it. The MCP, ‘Male Chauvinist Pig’ as Margaret has privately baptised him, keeps on menacing to send his daughter to his mother in Barbados, to get what he calls ‘Good West Indian Discipline’. ‘You bother him, Margaret’, the girl is told by the same Mrs Billings, ‘... because he doesn’t understand you, can’t quite control your mind like the others; and he has to have control...’ (113)

12Exposed throughout the text and underscored by Margaret’s resistance, this oppressive ideology also informs the discourse of Mr Clarke, Zulma’s stepfather, when he is talking to the MCP at the end of the novel. Mr Clarke relates women’s liberation to Western values and modernity:

13Is this country I tell you, sir, it full up they head with all this feminist talk and make them feel woman is boss. Every day you turn on the T.V. is somebody else talking about how women have to have they rights; they want to wear pants and run man life, and time and again I have to tell my wife that two man-rat can’t live in one hole... Woman have to know their place, don’t it, sir? (134)

14 The burden of womanhood is heavy: this is the message repeated once and again in Harriet’s Daughter. Yet the girls want things to change:

‘Margaret?’
‘Hmmm’.
‘You ever think that it real hard being a woman?’
‘That’s what I was thinking too, Zulma —your mum, my mum. I don’t want to be like them; they have to put up with so much, and give so much, always thinking about someone else’. (142-143)

15With the generational change, then, a new politics of gender is on its way.

16When Margaret comes across an important sum of money which she presumes belongs to her mother, she decides to keep it as a secret and rely only on Mrs Billings. On one of her visits, while enjoying a delicious piece of chocolate cake, Margaret asks Mrs Billings whether it is honest to use the money she has just found to buy Zulma a plane ticket back home. Of course, the lady answers that it is not honest, since the money is not actually hers, but something good comes out of this confession: that Mrs Billings, a sort of a fairy godmother in the flesh, offers herself to try and help Margaret and Zulma.

17By now, the girls’ problems include not only family oppression and, in Zulma’s case, deep homesickness, but also the horrifying decision made by Margaret’s father to send the girl to Barbados once and for all, so that she can get the GWID (‘Good West Indian Discipline’) which according to him she badly needs. Thanks to Mrs Billings’s providential intervention, though, everything will finally be solved.

18 The generous neighbour will start by having serious conversations with the two girls’ mothers to make them aware of their children’s unhappiness, managing to change their position from antagonists to collaborators in their contestation of patriarchal power. Margaret will then say of Mrs Billings that she is ‘a modern Harriet Tubman’ (105). The comparison is sound, since Mrs Billings is on her way to rescuing the teens from male tyranny, if only momentarily, and clearing paths for the two girls’ enjoyment of freedom.

19The problem is that neither Margaret’s father nor Zulma’s stepfather are ready to negotiate any kind of solution, being too used to imposing their own solutions and unquestionable truths. The patronizing dimension of their attitude is highlighted in Mrs Billings’ explanation of their pigheadedness: ‘I know they believe they are doing the best for you, but they’re beyond reasoning with; their best is final, absolute...’ (112) A solution will have to be reached with the only help of the mothers, who eventually agree to send both girls to Zulma’s grandmother in Tobago— Margaret only on holidays—without their husbands’ consent.

20‘How did you know they would agree, Mrs B?’ Margaret asks Mrs Billings in connection with the women’s change of attitude. Our fictitious Harriet Tubman’s answer is celebration: ‘Well at the risk of stating the obvious and being accused of being partial, we’re all women aren’t we?’ (127) Is it thus their shared status as oppressed individuals that which unites women, we may ask? Maybe, but in any case, Harriet’s Daughter makes it clear that women become stronger when they gather forces. It is their only way to resist men’s tyranny. From now on, Zulma’s mother will find help in Mrs Billings if ever her husband tries to beat her again.

21 Let us now reflect on race, and on how race is experienced by Margaret and her relatives. In this sense, her father’s position is again absolutist, but, paradoxically, at the same time it is certainly ambivalent. A tyrant towards his family, Cuthbert Cruishank seems to have absorbed white oppression, since he accepts discrimination in the social sphere without discussion. To begin with, to speak about himself and his family he uses a definition which marks them, for it takes white skin as the norm and theirs as the exception: ‘My father, writes Margaret, is always going on about HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO DO WELL AT SCHOOL... because being COLOURED PEOPLE we have to be twice as good to get anywhere’ (15, author’s capitals, my emphasis). This man’s tragedy is that, apparently unaware, he lives in a deep contradiction: he accuses his wife of sticking to ‘primitive’ habits and of not being able to ‘move into the modern age and leave the past behind her, ’yet he idealises life in Barbados and once a week he goes to Mr Billing’s place to play dominoes, a traditional Caribbean game, with his fellow countrymen. Margaret writes about this: ‘He likes the game, but wishes he didn’t like it. I’ve heard him telling my mother that he has done the best of all the men he plays with; that he thinks it too lower class, but he still plays...’ (16-17)

22Extremely concerned with being coloured (sic), he forbids his daughter to do a Rasta project at school, thus closing the door to what could become a celebration of blackness, or at least a way to learn about his culture of origin. Later, when Margaret asks him to call her Harriet in the honour of her recently discovered hero Harriet Tubman, he simply refuses, on the basis that ‘it would only give her ideas which were bound to get [her] in trouble’ (73).8

23Neither her father’s position in relation to race or culture nor her mother’s, who lives a similar contradiction,9 are valid for a girl whose only discomfort is that her skin is not dark enough to be an African princess (15). The novel is clearly pedagogical in this sense, since Margaret displays an exemplary assertion of black identity. Never abandoning her afro in spite of her mother’s suggestions that she iron her hair like her sister, Margaret/Harriet keeps glorifying black skin and features: ‘I wish I had Zulma’s kind of dark black skin, it’s just like velvet, and with her long braids—ooh she was beautiful...’ (15)

24While it denounces oppression, the novel deconstructs the notion of oppression based on race or, rather, skin colour. Harriet Blewchamp is a white woman for whom Margaret’s mother worked before getting married. This woman, her mother tells the child, didn’t behave in the openly racist or subtly patronising ways of most white people, and thus the two women could become friends.10 That she was a Jew who had survived a concentration camp in Europe is a reminder that white people can be aggressive not only to black people, but also to whites.11 On the other hand, Mrs. Billings’ sad life story, the fact that members of her own family abused her, shows that the same applies to black people (99-101).12

25The book goes so far as to deconstruct slavery. Inspired by her admired Railroad conductor to the point that, as we have seen, she would like to be called like her, Margaret/Harriet organises the Underground Railroad Game, a children’s entertainment which actually turns out to be a re-presentation of history through play—a game which is indeed post-modern. In it, children not only black, but of all colours and cultures, have the chance to play slaves running away towards freedom. Importantly, they can choose freely which side to play on: either as slaves, or as slave-owners—or dogs—who run after them.

26After some months of enjoyment, having managed to organize a steady net of safe-houses, stations, conductors, and other items which reproduce the original Underground Railroad, the game starts needing supplementary loads of emotion. The children now decide to start playing by night, and then, very soon, as one can imagine, they are discovered. Margaret is rightly identified as being responsible for the whole scheme, and she is severely reprimanded by the school Principal and, of course, her parents. The main outcome of her adventurousness is her father’s punishment (which as I mentioned consists in sending her to Barbados to get her dose of GWID), on the basis that she has made herself too visible. Sadly, her wish to denounce and redress black oppression is again curtailed.

27Besides challenging her father’s attitude of submission to social discrimination, though, another result of the Underground Railroad Game is that the experience arouses interesting and pedagogical reflections on slavery. For instance, when Margaret is setting the rules and wonders if slaves could be white:

‘Can slaves be white?’ I asked this out loud, to myself more than to either Zulma or Ti-cush. They were watching me and not saying anything. Could slaves be white, could they? I asked myself. Why not? I had answered my own question. ‘Hell, anybody can be a slave, right? It just so happened that black people were for a while—I mean slaves—right? You guys agree?’ (64)

28With these apparently naïve questions, Margaret (and obviously the author) are challenging any essentialist notion which might inform race or skin colour hierarchies.

29Once the game has been proposed to other children, we read about the kids’ thoughts and reactions:

As we went back into school, I could hear them talking about who was going to be a slave, or a dog or a slave-owner, and why it was better to be a slave rather than a slave-owner or dog. I heard one kid say, ‘Well, we can’t all be slaves; ’ and another one that dogs were ‘better than slave-owners, because they didn’t have minds of their own’. (68)

30 ... Of course, no child is willing to be a slave-owner!

31As a means of conclusion, I shall go back to my initial contentions: Harriet’s Daughter is a novel which speaks a grammar of dissent, of resistance. Challenging race and gender stereotypes, the protagonist overcomes the intellectual passivity expected of her as a black girl. But it would be unfair to see Margaret’s strength as only devoted to contesting or challenging the Status Quo, or, in other words, as existing in subordination to a social order which oppresses and discriminates her. Indeed, the novel gives us a chance to read at first hand a subjectivity which is complete in itself, not merely oppositional. Harriet’s Daughter provides the affirmation, through literary representation, of a gendered—though not stereotyped—Caribbean-Canadian adolescent identity. A multiple-diasporic identity whose roots lie deep in African soil, lie across the Atlantic to reach the Caribbean islands and end up solidly entrenched on Canadian land, on the very Canadian snow where Margaret and Zulma play angels the day they meet each other.

32In a playful and light-hearted tone, the novel re-enacts in the contemporary the dramatic events of the Underground Railroad. This is a way to suggest that situations of oppression and discrimination which are a direct legacy of slavery and of the ideology which sustained it are far from over. Racism, in other words, still pervades Canadian society by and large. Courageous Margaret Cruishank, with her adamant celebration of black race and culture, becomes herself a modern Harriet Tubman in her provision of a full-size model for alienated teenagers to follow, even to copy. In creating Margaret, Marlene Nourbese Philip also collaborates in this emulation of Harriet Tubman, and in the symbolic rescue for disoriented teenagers that her novel represents.