The Hermit of Africville

For many Nova Scotians, the English language has three synonyms for the diabolical excesses of racism. “Cornwallis” (i.e. Governor Edward Cornwallis) is synonymous with the attempted mideighteenth-century extermination of the Mi’kmaqs. “The Expulsion” (also “The Deportation” and “Le Grand Derangement”) refers to the “racial cleansing” of the same period when the Acadian settlements were systematically destroyed and the population was forced to flee its ancestral lands. Lastly, and in contemporary times, there is “Africville”, the centuries old black community on the Bedford Basin which was the target of the 1960s expropriation, demolition, dispersal and resettlement in the name of bridge building, industrial expansion and urban renewal. It is the last of these historical horrors that is central to journalist Jon Tattrie’s monograph, The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery.

 

At the outset, let me explain my description of the publication as a “monograph”. There is no table of contents, index and the limited bibliography is to be found in the “Afterword”. The result is a potpourri of information that loosely extends from the late eighteenth century to the 2010 official apology to the Africville descendants by the mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality, Peter Kelly. Woven throughout the history of the 1960-2010 period and the focus for most of the writing is the story of Eddie Carvery, a descendent of one of the original families and an impassioned advocate for the restoration of the Africville community.

 

The Eddie Carvery story is written as creative non-fiction. Given the limitations of its length there are tempting tidbits of the influence of the Coloured Hockey League, the appearances of Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther leader, Martin Luther King, the immortal civil rights advocate, and jazz legend, Duke Ellington to name only a handful. Similarly, the reader wants to know more about Eddie Carvery’s employment opportunities (and the always present racial discrimination) in the fisheries including a brief time on a Norwegian sealer. Proportionately more space is allotted to the cyclical effects of alcoholism and hard drugs, the resulting bouts of violence, exploitation of women and their sexual abuse followed by failed attempts at rehabilitation. It is not a heart warming tale but rather a patchwork of cameos giving some insight into the life of a driven person, fighting constantly against his own demons and obsessed with the conviction that Africville, as he remembers it from childhood, is still home. —Paul Robinson