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Originally published in the Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada) February 23, 2005 Final Edition

By Jeff Mahoney

Man was not made to be owned

No rich man owns me, nor bears my deed of sale. I call no mortal being "master," and hope upon my soul that the day never comes when I do. I think I should die if I did.

Who need trouble anymore to say such things that even a schoolchild knows? A man is not a dog or a horse who can be owned and tied to a hitch and whipped for running away; whose pups and colts can be sold; who must watch its mate beaten almost to death and then have to fetch or ride for the man who did the beating.

But not so very long ago ... I wonder if we can put ourselves there.

To be owned. To watch two men strike a deal outside a chicken coop as your child scatters corn for the hens, and then one man takes your child away, like that, legal as you please. And you never see the child again. Never feel the child's breath against the hairs on the nape of your neck as you sleep.

What would it be like to run through woods at night, listening to twigs and branches snapping behind you from the force and speed of your flight, and beyond that, the sound of hunting dogs sniffing out your trail.

What would it be like to get dragged back and beaten until you most wished you were dead?

But, watch. One day, if people aren't careful they're going to try to tell us it never happened. What slavery? Wasn't it all just one big Gone With the Wind, stately mansions, happy house slaves playfully scolding genteel white folk?

Amnesia is a convenient cure. But it's not on at the Dundas Historical Museum at 139 Park St. West in Dundas.

They're showing the powerful Passage to Freedom: Secrets of the Underground Railroad until the end of February as part of Black History Month.

My daughter told me about the exhibit. She's in Grade 2, and her class went. For days she was singing The Drinking Gourd. As they explained at the museum, it was a code song.

The drinking gourd was code for The Big Dipper, which the fugitives had to follow to keep north, to Canada. The song refers to Moses, meaning Harriet Tubman, a former slave who, after escaping, went back 19 times to lead other slaves out of captivity.

She had a $5 million bounty on her head. They would have killed her sure. And still she went back.

When I grew up I thought of America as the great beacon of freedom in the world. It was the country everyone was fleeing to, not from.

Turns out that in the 19th century, millions of black Americans were dying to defect. The plantations were their gulags. And slavery, the institution, was their Soviet-style iron curtain.

The American rhetoric of the Cold War, including Reagan's Evil Empire remark, was calculated to contrast the oppression of the Soviet Union with the freedoms of America so starkly that the enemy would seem incomprehensible to the West, and untranslatable into America's terms of historical reference.

But America had only to look at the dehumanizing and totalitarian bureaucracy of slavery to find a natural antecedent for the Soviet model.

Even as American democracy was being born, its fathers, most notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were siring other offspring, namely, children out of wedlock by slave women they owned.

Canada, as it happens, was the true beacon of freedom, at least back then.

In The Drinking Gourd, Canada is the "promised land." But before we congratulate our ancestors, Canada could be hateful to blacks as well. There was some slavery here until 1806.

There is enough blame to go around and enough praise too. Many white Americans, Quakers and other abolitionists fought heroically to get the captives of slavery to freedom and ultimately end the institution altogether.

Black History Month can sometimes seem like another ghetto that we're putting black people in. "Yes, we'll think about your history, but only for 28 days; OK, 29 in leap years."

My colleague Wade Hemsworth told me he was recently interviewing a black woman at Ellis's Kitchen, a Caribbean restaurant in Hamilton. He was busily taking down notes when a tall, dapper young black man walked in, saw him, and said, "Let me guess. Black History Month?"

Wade, who's white, laughed a bit sheepishly and answered yes. He wasn't certain how the man felt about that, but the man assured Wade that he was encouraged by it. Every word helps.

Wade's Black History Month stories are appearing in this week's Spectator. I think you'll truly enjoy them.

As with so much else, to remain human we must remember. In America right now, there is a struggle to build a museum of slavery. It is almost unbelievable one does not yet exist.

But that is the power of lingering denial and willed amnesia in certain quarters. George Bush Jr. has already given much slack to Neo-Confederates.

And he has already shown himself to be a president who is not above stage-managing the historical record.

When they sanitized the Super Bowl pre-game and half-time shows this year, after the Janet Jackson affair in 2004, I thought to myself, "This is a bit 1984. They'll come back from the ads and, if the powers that be are Eagles fans, the score will be changed and no one will say anything. We'll all just look at each other and think, 'Uh-oh.'"

Let's never forget the real score. Slavery -- millions of lives torn apart, generations scarred: Black people -- nothing. No official apology from the American government. Ever. No reparations. Not even the 40 acres and a mule each freed slave was promised at the end of the Civil War.

Black history has much to teach us.