Forbidden Fruit (12 page)

While the Kennys prospered in Munising, John Anderson, a thirty-five-year-old black
man from Alabama, was cooking in Houghton on a finger of land extending into Lake
Superior. James Thompson cut hair at Barney’s Exchange, a Marquette hotel, while his
wife, Amira, made hats. James S. Brown, occupation unknown, had a personal estate
of nine hundred dollars, one of the largest among all of the blacks. Blacks also worked
as carpenters, joiners and varnishers. Daniel Cooper, a black laborer from Georgia,
worked in a lumber camp in Marquette County. Thomas Foster, a thirty-two-year-old
black Kentuckian, ran a saloon in Marquette. Foster had a personal estate of five
hundred dollars, a lot of money at a time when three hundred dollars bought an eight-room
house. Living with him was his wife, Catharine, and their daughter, six-year-old Alice
F. Foster. Robert Beasly, a twenty-five-year-old black man from Kentucky, waited tables
on Mackinac Island, a four-square-mile island that has been at various times a sacred
spot for Indians, the center of fur trading for the French, the place where Americans
battled the British for control of the Great Lakes region, a playground for the wealthy
and a refuge from the world of automobiles and hurry.

The average age of these black migrants was 24.5 years, and they included thirty-four
males and twenty-six females. Of these African-American travelers, twenty-six came
from Southern or slave states: two from Georgia, six from Virginia, eight from Kentucky,
six from the District of Columbia and one each from Tennessee, North Carolina, South
Carolina and Maryland.

During the Upper Peninsula’s grueling winters, these early pioneers would have eaten
whatever they’d stored during the summer in the cellar, a square hole under the center
of the house. That would have included potatoes, turnips and other root vegetables,
crocks of butter, lard, jars of fruit and wild honey. Some people would butcher a
pig in the fall and then place pieces of the meat in crocks covered with lard, cutting
through the lard to pull out pieces. People often ate whitefish and other types of
fish. In the early 1850s, one woman in the western Upper Peninsula noted that she
had prepared the abundant whitefish baked, fried, boiled, barbecued and in soup, and
winter had just begun. Some might also have eaten siscowets, a fish peculiar to Lake
Superior and delicate in flavor, though no recipes for it survive. Settlers in mining
communities also bought tons of potatoes from the Ojibwa Indians.

To survive, though, black and white settlers mastered snowshoeing and dog-sledding.
Evolution equips many animals, including wolves, foxes and snowshoe hares, for traveling
over deep snow. Humans rely on snowshoes, which distribute weight so evenly that people
can walk on snows eight or more inches deep without sinking more than a few inches.
Traveling on sleds pulled by thick-coated wolflike dogs known as huskies, each one
with a distinct voice and a different role to play, would have been another requirement
for survival. Teams usually travel in silence; however, as dogs prepare to run, they
often wail, the whole team eventually joining in a song of howls and gruff barks,
yodels, whines, whoops, pants and whimpers. Some pioneers apparently became swept
up in the adventure of traveling with a dog team through the hushed, white-washed
wonder of snowed-in woods, a hypnotic journey into nature’s heart. One of them was
the black Canadian who organized the dog races held annually in Marquette.

But the history of blacks in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula began long
before the days when the Upper Peninsula led the country in copper production. The
first African slave identified in the records of the Church of Ste. Anne at Fort Michilimackinac,
once located in Mackinaw City, was a little girl named Veronique, who was baptized
on January 19, 1743. She was the daughter of Bon Coeur and Marguerite, slaves belonging
to a French traveler forced to spend the winter in Michilimackinac, an old name for
Mackinac County, on his way to the Illinois Country. Under the French, slaves did
domestic chores or helped in the fur trade and could be freed at any time. Freed slaves
usually remained in frontier communities. When the British took control of the territory,
the number of African slaves in Canada and Upper Michigan increased. During the 1770s,
John Askin, a merchant at the fort, had three African slaves, all used in the fur
trade. Africans also rafted loads of lumber across the Straits of Mackinac, worked
on construction projects and provided the music for parties and dances popular during
the long winters. A few free blacks also visited and lived at Fort Mackinac, including
Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, an educated trader who founded Chicago. A man known
as Black Piter traded with the Native Americans in the Lower Peninsula. Around this
same time, a small trading vessel manned by an all-black crew operated in the waters
of Lake Michigan.

Jean and Marie Bonga were among thirteen slaves carried away by the British during
an attack on Spanish forces in St. Louis. Brought to Fort Michilimackinac, they were
held by Captain Daniel Robertson, who freed them. They married in the Church of Ste.
Anne on June 26, 1794, and lived on Mackinac Island for years, purchasing a home,
opening a tavern and raising a family. Eventually, they moved to Detroit, but a number
of the Bonga children became fur traders in the North Country. In another version
of the story, the British officer sold Bonga to a French fur trader with five Indian
wives. Bonga became a favorite among the Mackinac Indians, who called him “Black Meat,”
or “Mu-Ko-Da-Weas,” and declared himself free when the fur trader died. He then married
the youngest of the trader’s widows and left for what is now Superior, Wisconsin,
and Duluth, Minnesota. About three miles north of the Bonga River, now called the
St. Louis River, he built a trading post and home where his son, Pierre, was born
about 1784 and other children later. Bonga, according to some historians, discovered
Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River, and “took a horseback ride to the
Pacific in 1815.”

Under the terms of the treaty that ended the American War of Independence, Michigan
inhabitants could keep their slaves as private property, but couldn’t introduce new
slaves. Gradually those who remained were either freed or died. By 1810, Michigan
had 120 free Africans and 24 slaves in a population of 4,762 people. In the area that
included the entire Upper Peninsula and all the territory westward to the Missouri
River, there lived 615 people, including fifteen Africans and one slave. Ten years
later, there were 819 whites in the area that included the Upper Peninsula, but only
five free blacks. In 1830, there were only five free blacks and in 1840 only six.

In the heyday of its mining years, the Upper Peninsula became a kind of cultural goulash,
enriched by a population boom and the sights and smells and sounds of foreign-born
miners. Many came from Cornwall, a famous mining area in the southwestern part of
Great Britain. They also flocked to the Upper Peninsula from Ireland, Scotland, Wales,
France, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Poland, Hungary, Austria
and, especially, Finland, bringing their folk beliefs and food, their thirst for land
and their languages. In fact, the Upper Peninsula still has one of the largest populations
of Finns in the country: somecluster in little enclaves like the iron-mining town
of Palmer near Marquette, where people celebrate Little Christmas a week before December
25 and serve fruit and berry soup at feasts.

More blacks came as well, some free and some fugitives, who found freedom in Michigan
wildernesses, where runaway slave laws weren’t enforced. At one time, blacks enslaved
in Canada ran to Michigan for freedom, too, knowing the laws against runaway slaves
wouldn’t touch them. In an 1897 survey of schools in Houghton’s Calumet County, there
were only 201 students with American-born parents out of 2,725. In one classroom,
a black student “was the only American,” according to author Arthur W. Thurner.

Blacks did not escape the stigma of inferiority created by slavery. In 1825 in Sault
Ste. Marie, it became illegal for Indians and blacks and mixed bloods to vote. In
Clifton, schoolmaster Hobart describes an incident in which a drunken Irish woman
cursed out a black man whitewashing a house, believing he had muttered something insulting
about her while he had actually simply sneezed. Hobart attributed the incident to
drunkenness. Whatever difficulties they faced, though, the black settlers developed
ways of coping, relying on each other for help.

On January 31, 1880, the
Weekly Mining Journal
ran an article about the birth of a black self-help group in Marquette. The article
noted:

The “Kansas sufferers” were the Exodusters, former slaves who moved in large numbers
to Kansas between 1870 and 1879 at the urgings of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former
Tennessee slave who envisioned black colonies coexisting with white communities. Many
mostly Southern black migrants moved to Kansas, often arriving without proper clothes
or money for tools, teams of oxen or seed. Some spent their first winter in dugouts,
unable to build homes until the spring.

But no amount of self-help or love could counteract all the harshness of frontier
life in an area that could produce 100-degree summer days and winter lake-effect snows
of six feet or more. Hobart writes page after page about students who died from scarlet
fever and typhoid fever and about miners killed in accidents and about people being
“caged up” throughout long winters.

Samuel Noll knew all about cages and how to break out of them: he had run, stumbled,
sweated and clawed his way to a new life after his old one came apart. Born a slave
in Virginia, Noll grew up on a plantation, married and fathered several children.
Then, in 1858, his life shattered. He got into a fight with an overseer and injured
him. Without knowing the overseer’s condition but fearing it was serious, Sam fled
into a swamp. Little by little, he worked his way north, first stopping in Detroit,
then crossing the Detroit River to Windsor. He married again and after the Civil War
moved to Marquette, where his wife cooked in a local restaurant and he assisted her.
Starting in the 1880s, he became a guide for naturalist and photographer George Shiras
III, who took the first flash photographs and trip-wire photographs of animals at
night.

Eventually, many pioneering black families and their descendants—people such as Sarah
and Richard Kenny, the Jeffrey clan and the Gaines family—moved away from the Upper
Peninsula. By 1880, there were fewer than a dozen black families in Marquette County,
including Sarah Kenny, then fifty-seven; a sixteen-year-old grandchild, Alex; and
two other grandchildren—Adalade Davis, fifteen, and William Davis, nineteen—all born
in Michigan. Joseph L. Smith, born in Amherstburg, Ontario, in 1851, settled in Marquette
in 1877. A year later, he married Ida Bell French and opened a barbershop. He was
known as a person with a genial personality and someone who could spin fascinating
stories about local personalities and events. He promoted and managed sports events
in Marquette, but is best known for organizing the dog races held there annually on
George Washington’s birthday. By the time he died in 1928, his wife and seven of his
ten children were dead. His surviving children left the area. However, as many as
thirty thousand people still come to the city’s downtown every year for the two-hundred-forty-mile
races.

A 1927 newspaper article noted that the winter of 1901 had devastated the Williams
family, part of a Negro colony from Chicago beset by starvation and disillusionment
after settling near Iron River. At county expense, the family was sent back to Chicago.

George C. Preston, a Jamaican, arrived in Marquette in 1865 and opened a barbershop.
He also ran a restaurant and candy shop, and his two daughters, Charlotte and Bessie,
were two of the earliest students at Northern Michigan University. Members of the
Jeffrey family, once residents of Ontonagon and Houghton, worked as barbers in La
Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1870s. In 1879, James Polk arrived in the developing town
of Norway and opened a barbershop. During and even after the slavery era, blacks dominated
the catering, barbering and hairdressing professions, and many black barbers served
white customers. A May 1891 issue of the
Menominee Range
indicated that a “colored bootblack” had returned to town after spending the previous
summer in the mining community.

The three-hundred-room Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, built in 1887, has employed
large numbers of blacks over the years, including college students who come north
in the summer. In 1897, there were 8,726 white miners working in Houghton County,
but only one was black. Blacks, in some areas, continued to be viewed as exotic. The
Copper Country Evening News,
in 1897, noted that a minstrel show was coming to town with “some fifty genuine blacks.”
By the 1920s, Catholics, Jews, immigrants and blacks all had to endure Ku Klux Klan
rallies and parades across the Upper Peninsula. The Grand Hotel even registered a
gathering of Klansmen in the summer of 1924, but they reportedly had to pay double
the usual rates, take their meals in their rooms and not loiter in the lobby.