Issue # 10: Pulled From the Archives - The Porter and Black Canadian History
A discussion with the creators of the series exploring the movement on the transcontinental railroad that gave birth to the first Black union in the world
Welcome to Shamira Explains It All/Shamira Explique Tout, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions - and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part Francophone. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.
I hope everyone is having as restful and reflective a December as possible. As the year comes to a close, I find myself deeply filled with gratitude, despite being far from complete with the goals I had in mind for 2022.
Part way through the year, my physical health had regressed to the point that I had seriously doubted if I would be able to successfully walk comfortably ever again, and was working towards accepting that reality after walking away from my corporate career. Being held hostage by nothing else but your worst fears and insecurities is a harrowing experience; while I am thankfully on the mend, the lessons I am continuing to learn on allowing myself grace and rest while my body and mind tries to heal while I redefine what success and comfort is have been not just critical, but lifesaving.
I have been fortunate to not only have a strong village who have stuck beside me even when I did my best to shut them out of my lowest points, but have been able to navigate a delicate balancing act of sustaining myself with primarily a freelancing career as I complete my recovery, which isn’t financially viable for most. While I am still far from my professional and personal goals, I try to remind myself that I produced quality work this year under extremely extenuating circumstances instead of wallowing in self-pity for dreams unfulfilled.
Even this newsletter community exists as an unexpected blessing — growing to nearly 1,000 members who want to check my thoughts and cultural musings, which is both flattering and baffling. To that end, this issue is a release of an archived conversation with the creative team behind the Canadian series The Porter, Arnold Pinnock and Marsha Greene, a show that examines the under-discussed history of the Black anglophone community in Montreal through the transcontinental railways. The eight-episode series is available on CBC and BET+.
This will never be a subscription service, but for those who are inclined, please feel free to send a token of appreciation to my CashApp . A few of you have asked for links to Venmo and Paypal as well, which is unbelievably generous but also far from compulsory.
Onto the conversation.
I have a very unexpected connection to this series. Even though I live in New York, I was born in Montreal — my mother was attending University of Montreal at the time — and I grew up in Harlem, so once I heard about The Porter happening, I was excited to hear more about what brought you both to the show. Before you even started developing the show, did you have any knowledge of the history of black porters in Canada and that working class legacy of black unions?
Arnold: Well it’s such a long time ago now. I did not have grey in my beard when this thing first started.
Shamira: I think a lot of us got some greys in the last couple of years, don’t worry.
Arnold: I did not know about black porters or the Union. I knew what I saw on old black and white movies, I knew the satire that went along with that, the buffoonery that aligned itself with it. Once I did find out the truth of the matter, it empowered me even more to go down that path.
None of the books were in the limelight. You could not go to Indigo or your public library and find them. You really had to dig to find tiny little paragraphs or sentences about it. That’s all that I had to feed myself on. But you know, if there’s one thing, my mom used to say, we don’t need much to survive on. I grew up poor. I understand making a big meal on Sunday to last until Friday. For me, just getting these little morsels of information, it didn’t deter me, it empowered me. Trying to find stuff to share with my parents about the black culture here, I was already hungry for it just like so many other people that once I found a little morsel, I was going in. I read books like Stanley Grizzles and [Sarah-Jane Mathieu’s] books. And even more, I read newspapers across the country in the United States. To say that I got obsessed with it would be mild.
Marsha: I often think about the way the Porters were seen in these black-and-white movies, in the background of someone else’s story. You can go back now and look at any movie and they’re serving other people and the story is about the passengers. And now in The Porter, these passengers are the background to the porters’ lives. The show is inspired by the real history and then we took our creative licenses to create hopefully a very exciting and fun experience.
Shamira: I definitely think it was a smart choice to go with the interpretive and fictional route.
Arnold: The thing that I like about this is that everyone will think that this character is based on their relative and this character is based on their friends or someone. I love the fact that the show is empowering people, and I hope we never tell anyone who they are truly inspired by. Really.
Shamira: What have you thought about the fact that you are involved in part of a culture that can affect the sociopolitical present?
Arnold: From junior high to high school to even college, educators have reached out and asked if people in our team could have some sort of educational collaboration. I believe if it makes my back straighter, what would it do to young people knowing that they have stake, they had people that look like them, walking the very streets that they walk today? Just because they’re not in books in schools, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Marsha: Really the show is about how the characters persevere, how they fight, how they overcome these challenges. I feel like Arnold was like the number one person, when things would get hard, he’d say like “the porters didn’t give up, we can’t give up.” It was it was very like motivating to us to, their struggles and how they persevered and also the opportunity for us to honor their contribution to us in our present day circumstances.
Shamira: The general association isn't necessarily covering thematic things that you guys touched on. Not just that it's working class labor, but the overtones of slavery, , the underground railroads, the subtext of the underclass, and how the Underground Railroad turns into, the bootlegging industry, the immigration industry, and those kind of connections that create transnationalism and ends up becoming transnational unions. I don't think that's something that is currently being covered in Canadian education.
Marsha: We think about a lot about how does this series resonate with audiences today and where we are today. What really attracted me to this project was that it was a period piece, but we were really watching, this resistance, and watching people who are the descendants of slaves and are encountering these obstacles, because of their race, because of the time because of their gender. I think that's really powerful for us, and for the audience to watch. We do have a lot of slave narratives, and we were really interested in looking at this time, and like, where are they now? What are they doing? And what is a bit of the legacy of that, but also, how are they pushing forward to where we are today? So I think, you know, our intention is for it to be aspirational. And we certainly felt inspired.
Shamira: So much of the cast is Canadian. They must have a personal investment to reclaim their own history and to empower themselves, their community and legacy.
Marsha: This was a very ambitious show in many ways and I really feel like the cast came with such a passion and commitment. We were shooting during Covid in Winnipeg, we had this huge cast, but even outside of the cast, we had so many background performers. There were around 1800 roles. It was very big, but I do feel like we were all there really feeling the weight of what we were doing, in a positive way.
There’s a lot of important porter history in Winnipeg and so when we were in Winnipeg to recruit people, we wanted them to feel like this is their history too, and got many of them to be a part of this with us.
Shamira: Montreal is called the Harlem of the North, and the West-Indian, Caribbean culture is very strongly embraced in several of the characters and there’s a great amount of dynamism that you add in the vernacular of the show. How is it making sure to embrace that part of Canadian black legacy in your own stories?
Arnold: Anyone being Caribbean will understand this, or anyone being an immigrant will understand this: When you’re at work, you ‘speaky-spokey’ as we call it in Jamaica. You speak the Queen’s english. But when you are at home or amongst your peers, you talk with that vernacular.
When we go back to representation of how black characters have been portrayed in this country, we’re always seeing them at work. One of the things I’m so proud of in this show is that we go home with our characters. We go to places where they would feel safe and they can speak among themselves.
Marsha: The actors were encouraged to connect to that heritage, to bring their dialect to it. For the most part it came as the actors felt it in the scene, and they chose their moments for that to come out. I think it made it feel even more natural.
Shamira: There’s a dominant narrative within Canada and outside of Canada associating whiteness with politeness. Do you think that this series will revisit certain conversations about the dominant narrative about Canadian white stereotypes?
Marsha: Are you saying that the white people aren’t polite in our show?
Shamira: I mean, in the first two episodes there may or may not be a few sentences exchanged.
Arnold: Well that’s just it, the historical facade of there being no Jim Crow in Canada historically, we know that’s not true.
Just like how we go home with black people in our show, we go home with our white characters in the show as well. They get to talk freely and openly when they are in their place of comfortableness.
I think we are disrupting the polite myth a little bit, but we’re reflecting a reality that existed for the porters and that exists from our own personal stories sometimes.
Shamira: When I've read that Black people were literally in the trade contract for the train services as property. Not that is stunned me as that I found it unbelievable. But the fact that it actually existed as part of an actual document, and nobody burned it.
Arnold: After slavery was abolished in the States, George Pullman, you know…they thought, let's bring black men onto the train and do that. And why do you think we did it north of the border? I mean, basically, they wanted someone that would be working for them, you know, for like, 85 hours.
Shamira: The first thing I noticed in the opening scenes were the costumes. You establish the porter uniform itself as its own character: the polish of the suits, the buckles, the hat, and then they enter onto the steam trains, the ‘Cross Continental Railways’. Before going into the jobs that are as demeaning as they are, you’re showing the amount of pride that they take in the dignity of their uniform.
Arnold: If you just had one suit, you would make sure that one suit looks just right. That is something that I know in the sense of us as black people being poor or whatever it may be, there’s still a sense of pride that these men and women had when they went out into the world.
Shamira: How did you bring so much precision to those uniforms and costumes?
Marsha: With everything in this show, we try to honour the essence of the time. We have the porter handbook and there are all these rules they had: they only wore their hats when they were on the platform, but they didn’t wear their hats when they were on the train, and your uniform had to be crisp and buttoned to the top.
The train is kind of a world onto itself and then there’s the community and a whole other life exists there. We did try and create a little bit of a distinction between the styles and colours of what the passengers wearing, and the way the porters and their wives and the women were wearing, which helped to create a distinction between those two worlds.
Shamira: The last observation I wanted to make is a line that struck me in a very moving scene in the church: “we have broken sometimes we’re struggling sometimes, but we are family and what we are is hope.”
Marsha: Everything about the scene sums up a lot about our show.
Arnold: Church for black people now and even more so back then, was a safe refuge. It’s so cool, there are places like that for black people in history that go all across the country. You’ve got negro community center as well in saint antoine, Hogan’s alley in Vancouver, there are places in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and lord knows, there’s a place like that in nova Scotia. There’s communities like that throughout this country.
Hopefully this is a love letter to all those communities throughout Canada, because Lord knows, the team, which is bigger than just the five of us, have put our blood, sweat and tears into this, empowered by passion and to give those that don’t have a voice anymore, just a ray of sunshine every Monday at 9:00pm on CBC.
Marsha: Oh, Arnold, you’re so good.