Rough Crossings

From the Book....

Ten Years after the surrender of George III's army to General Washington at Yorktown, British Freedom was hanging on in North America. Along with a few hundred other souls--Scipio Yearman, Phoebe Barrett, Jeremiah Piggie and Smart Feller among them--he was scratching a living from the stingy soil around Preston, a few miles northeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Like most of the Preston people, British Freedom was black and had come from a warmer place. Now he was a hardscrabbler stuck in a wind-whipped corner of the world between the blue spruce forest and the sea. But he was luckier than most. British Freedom had title to forty acres, and another one and a half of what the lawyers' clerks in Halifax were pleased to call a “town lot.” It didn't look like much of a town, though, just a dirt clearing with rough cabins at the centre and a few chickens strutting around and maybe a mud-caked hog or two. Some of the people who had managed to get a team of oxen to clear the land of bald grey rocks grew patches of beans and corn and cabbages, which they carted to market in Halifax along with building lumber. But even those who prospered--by Preston standards--took themselves off every so often into the wilderness to shoot some birch partridge, or tried their luck on the saltwater ponds south of the village.

What were they doing there? Not just surviving. British Freedom and the rest of the villagers were clinging to more than a scrap of Nova Scotia; they were clinging to a promise.