Sarah's Journey

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Spanning the period from 1806 to the 1870s, this historical novel traces
the life of Sarah Kinney Lewis, a Virginia slave who escaped from
slavery and eventually settled in Simcoe, Ontario. A “quadroon”
house slave, Sarah begins life with a prosperous and relatively kind
family. In spite of this, she suffers the uncertainties and dangers of
slave life: her “free” husband is a fugitive slave who is recaptured
and her children are literally the property of her master. After her
master’s death, Sarah is subjected to the cruelties of another owner.
She flees with her youngest children, both fathered by white men and one
the product of a rape. The novel traces the fate of both Sarah and her
children through the 1837 rebellion, the influx of African-American
refugees, and the subsequent rise of anti-black sentiment in the
Canadas.

The author notes that Sarah’s Journey is drawn from life. As such, it
suffers from one fault historical novels are prone to: every date, every
morsel of research has been accounted for. For this reason, the novel,
though crammed with incident, is strangely flat. Life-changing events
are passed over as quickly as small incidents. The author’s
unemotional, though competent, prose is also wanting: the characters
move, but do not live.

Attempts to explore the vagaries of race also fall flat, chiefly
because Beasley does not deal with black identity and its construction
with any degree of sophistication. By North American custom, persons
with “any known blood”—that is, any known African ancestry—are
classified as black. Beasley, however, writes that the light-skinned
Sarah “did not have to pretend to be white because she felt white by
inheritance.” In spite of being white-identified, Sarah does not
“pass” once she reaches Canada. Still, Beasley’s insistence on his
characters’ whiteness, and his decision to preface his book with a
quotation exoticizing the “peculiar style of beauty” of
light-skinned black women suggests that he may, however subconsciously,
deem whiteness more attractive and more sympathetic.