"As if I had entered a paradise": fugitive slave narratives and cross-border literary history.

I then made up my mind that salt and potatoes in Canada, were better than pound-cake and chickens in a state of suspense and anxiety in the United States.--Reverend Alexander Hemsley, Fugitive slave from St. Catherine's, Upper Canada

They thought that I might yet get to Canada, and be free, and suggested a plan by which I might accomplish it; and one way was, to learn to read and write, so that I might write my self a pass ticket, to go just where I pleased, when I was taken out of the prison; and they taught me secretly all that they could while in the prison.--Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures (1849)

One Shall Pass: Reconfiguring Conceptions of Passing and the Color Line

"This is not a story to pass on" (275). Thus concludes Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, a statement that proves to be something of a double ecriture, an utterance with a shadow, or we might justifiably say, a ghost. It suggests the ineffability of the slave's experience and the innate difficulties of assessing the psychic toll on the subject by means of a straightforward, referential language. The imperatives of pausing, reflecting, and grappling with the manacles of traumatic memory remain constant preoccupations. At the core of the sentence lies the issue of narrative representation ("story"/histoire/history) and its attendant, ambiguous verb of reception, "pass on." To "pass on" foreshadows the transmission of these events to a latent audience, one who may alternatively "pass" on (that is, ignore, forget, repudiate, or distort) such a vital historical and literary inheritance. By logical sequence, what should be passed on to posterity instead passes away; it is a ritual of memory foreclosed, an offering refused, and a duty shunned. The recurrence of the ghost, an archetypal figure of incompletion, implies that a self-perpetuating covenant between the living and the dead has been left in limbo. Thus, to "pass on" signifies movement at the same time that it signifies stasis, and gestures to a leave-taking that refuses, with a perverse but apocalyptic momentum, ever to arrive completely.

What relevance does this contradictory episteme of passing--passing on, passing by, passing through, passing over, passing away--have in a discussion of the interplay between African American and African Canadian literary histories? Perhaps at the most intuitive level, passing evokes a sense of inertia, unsettledness, and expectation. One of the most obvious denotations of "pass" is as a verb that gauges a subject's ability to adopt and function under the guise of another racial, class, gender, or sexual identity. (1) The first category, racial passing, plays a foundational role within the African American canon, given its emergence and frequency in such pivotal works as Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (published in 1857, one of the earliest products of the novelistic tradition alongside William Wells Brown's Clotel, Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave, and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig), Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (an effort that combines a template of chivalric romance with the "tragic mulatta" motif), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (a landmark installment from the transitional era that Chesnutt coined "Post-bellum--Pre-Harlem" [Brodhead 1]), and Nella Larsen's Passing (a novel lately revitalized by strategic interventions into the cruces of sexualized race and racialized sexuality). (2)

As these texts, among others, demonstrate, choosing to pass required more than just mimetic or mechanical maneuvering and clever equivocation. A state of ontological suspension, passing demanded the subject's immersion in an environment of precarious self-censorship, continuous surveillance, and highly asymmetrical relations of power. One instance of carelessness could easily cause the already insecure base of racial and class identification to buckle and collapse. In nuce, this discourse of extremity and extremes complicated everyday life for many Americans, free or enslaved, who chose to toe the color line's ideology of racial hierarchy, and yet flaunt its inherently flawed operative premise of transparent black/white racial differentiation at the same time. The ritual of passing existed as a passive-aggressive refusal to accept one's predetermined collocation on this color line, the carefully (but not infallibly) calibrated site of inter- and intra-racial hierarchy and consolidation. Freighted with prejudice against darker complexions, the intricate social stratifications of the line produced such unblinkingly eugenic slogans as "Whiter and whiter, every generation" (29), with this particular example being the Blue Vein Society's motto quoted in Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929). (3) At a macrocosmic level, to believe in the efficacy of passing was to endorse the assumption that mobility and ameliorative (as well as destructive) potential were racially contingent. In other words, given one's circumstances, success or failure was predicated upon one's ability, melanin levels permitting, to "cross over" and "get away" with the elaborate charade. What was a given thus became a chosen.

These last offset phrases--"cross over" and "get away"--invoke the largely negative image of the passer as thief, criminal, or fugitive alongside the more morally ambiguous stances of double agent, trickster, and clever opportunist. However situated these versions are on a moral continuum, they typify the desire of the subject for advancement (or, to continue the metaphor of the journey, to "go somewhere"), which in turn motions to a more general human inclination (or oppressive drive, depending on one's perspective) towards self-improvement and the fulfillment of ambitions. This narrative of transport and elevation remains a pervasive theme in contemporary African American literary and cultural history, from the precarious escapes during the bullwhip days of the Peculiar Institution, the Great Migration that prompted a southern exodus to "better" jobs in usually northern cities, to Rev. Martin Luther King's leitmotiv of mountains that stirred national crowds away from their "swingin' " toward less explicitly violent forms of social action. (4) The imperative to rise up holds sway even in the hegira of the Flying Africans of early folklore, a symbolic flight that has found a latter-day equivalent in another of Morrison's texts, Song of Solomon (1977), but with added social implications about irresponsibility and kinship bonds.

Literary renditions of passing tend to be monopolized by the litmus test of skin color and the egocentric narrative of one individual's psychomachia of racial repudiation versus loyalty to origins. (5) Racial passers straddle the chasm between the "selling out/buying in" duality of situational ethics; taking into account the enterprising spirit of American individualism, at issue is whether a seemingly ruthless doctrine of self-fashioning "at all costs" (as passing appears to be) necessarily deserves such unconditional anathema. If passers are later disposed to feeling, like Johnson's ex-colored man, that they had "chosen the lesser part" and sold "[a] birthright for a mess of pottage" (861), they do so in acknowledgment of their complicity in the white supremacist ideology espoused by the "protectors of the race" and emblematized by the color line. (6) As Chesnutt argues in such passing narratives as Mandy Oxendine, more is at stake in the conscious act(s) of passing than the promise of improved economic status, heightened reputation, advancement prospects, reprieves from de facto and de jure subjugation, and the freedom to pursue a wider spectrum of social relations than was hitherto permitted. (7) The point of contention remains the unpredictability of human behavior--those "mysterious affinities of race"--that collect as residue after having moved through what the author calls the transformative "alembic of nature" (27). Contrary to the objective thrust of this scientific imagery, the phenomenology of passing cannot be construed as a merely mechanical undertaking devoid of moral and intensely agonizing social and personal accountabilities:

   If the tendency [for a mixed-blood
   individual] were downward toward
   the black substratum there was no
   obstruction to it. But any attempted
   upward movement on the part of those
   who were nearly white, was met by
   the iron barrier of caste, to overleap
   which involved a severance from one's
   former life almost as complete as that
   made by death .... It was a heroic remedy,
   and demanded either great
   courage or great meanness, according
   to the point of view. (Chesnutt 27)

In light of all that has been said about passing as a question of agency within constraint, I propose more explicitly material versions of passing. My first aim is to theorize the significance of the slave pass (and hence, this rather literal interpretation of "passing") as a potentially subversive artifact of American antebellum plantation culture. Using narratives produced from amongst the 30- to 40,000 fugitives who settled in Canada by way of the Underground Railroad, I argue that the pass functioned as a site of rebellion for slaves who desired to appropriate some form of textual authority amid an atmosphere of proscribed literacy and ubiquitous danger. I use as my discursive pool the testimonials compiled by prominent white abolitionist Benjamin Drew in The Refugee: or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada Related By Themselves (1856), first issued in Boston by Uncle Tom's Cabin publisher J. P. Jewett. Probably the most comprehensive collection of Canadian (and as I will argue, cross-border, North American) fugitive slave narratives to date, The Refugee was a conscious response to Nehemiah Adams's pro-slavery litany A Southside View of Slavery (1854), which questioned any desire on the slaves' part to alter their position in the status quo (Jackson 158). My discussion works in tandem with the geographic choices made by Drew, concentrating on those experiences of ex-slaves who settled in the present-day province of Ontario (identified in context both as Upper Canada and the later designation, Canada West). (8) Such accounts have the potential to impact strongly the present parameters of defining and elucidating the intricacies of the slave narrative genre.

While no one can justifiably claim that the African Canadian populace is as historically numerous, or its literary tradition as intellectually diverse as that of black Americans, too often readers and critics neglect or altogether discount Canada's impact on, and investment in, the slave legacy. If Canadians can be taken to task for touting racism as an endemic American problem while underemphasizing ugly manifestations in their own domestic arena, their counterparts south of the border should be chastised for declaring slave narratives an exclusively national genre. (9) Doing so pre-empts more syncretistic efforts to explore, compare, and contrast wider continental interventions into slave culture and its hardly uniform sites of consciousness and knowledge production. America's brand of servitude, typified as bloody cowhides and auction scenes, constitutes a particularly violent discursive terrain; it was not, however, the sole generator of meaningful narratives in the New World African diaspora during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Harriet Beecher Stowe's narrative of the charismatic bondswoman Sojourner Truth includes a song with these lyrics,

   I'm on my way to Canada
      That cold, but happy, land;
      The dire effects of slavery
   I can no longer stand. (1-4)

When the slave reaches "the Canada line," we witness an allegorical crescendo:

   The queen comes down unto the shore,
      With arms extended wide,
      To welcome the poor fugitive
      Safe onto freedom's side. (9-12; qtd.
        in Harris 405)

This hospitable queen, colonial Canada's genius loci, may be a reinscription of America's Lady Liberty, or a vision of the already blindfolded Justice doubling the point with her (seemingly) colorblind generosity to the fleeing "sons of Ham from down in 'Bam" (to borrow one of Langston Hughes's colloquialisms). While her promise of stability and refuge would later prove less stellar, thanks to racism and politics, sanctuary in the "cold but happy hand" was preferable to the specter of the sadistic American master, at least for the time being. Given such rich zones of intersubjective exchange between African American and African Canadian literary history, readers should recognize not only the significance of American phenomena like Nat Turner's rebellion, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Radical Reconstruction, but also that of "Little Africa" (an 1840's settlement offering labor in rail and ferry operations), Oakville (an official port of entry into Upper Canada and an unofficial landing site for stowaways), the Wilberforce Settlement (an 800-acre, self-sufficient colony jointly purchased in 1830 by Cincinnati fugitives and Quakers), and Chatham's First Baptist Church (the site of John Brown and company's last meetings in spring 1858) ("Ontario's Underground Railroad").

The very existence of this list prevents any wholesale denial of Canada's contribution to the overhaul of American slavery. Readers, however, must remain aware that narratives from other regions within Canada--more specifically, beyond central Canada--also merit critical regard, especially in the case of the Maritimes and their post-Revolutionary settlement by black United Empire Loyalists. Readers too often gaze upon the Underground Railroad as the sole epistemic center of black Canadian consciousness. (10) Furthermore, in view of "New Canaanism," the utopian discourse that portrayed Canada as a paradise of free black citizenry, readers should note that approximately half of the original black emigres pursued repatriation to the United States after 1865, and that British Loyalists, after 1783, brought slaves with them to Upper Canada ("Ontario's Underground Railroad"). For Canada was hardly a slave-free zone. Narratives of such Canadian slaves as Sophia Pooley of Queen's Bush, sold by New York traders at Niagara to "old Indian [John] Brant" (Drew 192), refute this popular misperception. A 1793 bill initiated by Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor, was probably most responsible for staunching what could have been the wider dispersion of a northern slave culture, and the premature end to the collective fantasy of Canada as a truly democratic vista where any bondsman or bondswoman could live, in William L. Andrews's words, "to tell a free story."

After considering the slave pass, my discussion will shift to this form of transnational "passing" as an operative term for the cross-border liberation of formerly American, now ostensibly Canadian, ex-slaves. I thus reconfigure passing paradigmatically: crossing the (color) line socially becomes analogous to crossing the (border) line geopolitically, with a better life the ultimate goal for both. Overall, I problematize the assumption that this cross-border migration was a clearly defined allegory of Canadian freedom reigning triumphant over American bondage. In closing, I consider how critic Paul Gilroy's image of a black counterculture situated on the fluid medium of the Atlantic offers a grid that can be replicated in what I term "the wilds" (a combination of "woods" and "wilderness," both literal and metaphorical categories of varying, but sometimes conflated symbolic and practical imports) that link these two countries. By using the "trope of the borderless text" as an African Canadian adjunct to the African American "trope of the talking book," I explore the meaning of "borderlessness" as a model of supranational literary collaboration, breaking down some of the conceptual barriers that have prevented nationally discrete literary histories from converging and merging on the intra-continental reality of a slave past.

Pass/ion Play: Re-presenting the Slave Pass

In simplest terms, a pass was what slaves typically required for travel in the antebellum South. "No Negro," explains Brown's Clotel (1853), "is permitted to go at large in the Slave States without a written pass from his or her master, except on business in the neighborhood" (147). In some cases, however, even local excursions between plantations required written permission. While individual variations existed, a pass was especially requisite if the visit involved out-of-state (and hence, cross-border) movements. Even having one in hand did not ensure protection against a complex technology of surveillance, fear, and often arbitrary punishment by patrollers, also referred to as night watchmen, line riders, or night riders. The pass was a signature, a short letter, or a note; as a marker of permission or favor, it was a check against conspiracy and subterfuge on the part of the bearer. Its very existence was a precursor to severe beatings, for if lost, the slave was blamed for carelessness; if found by inspectors to be a glaring fabrication, the slave could be blamed for presumption, insurrection, or escape.

John Little, an American who fled to the settlement of Queen's Bush, present-day Ontario, explains of his native state, "there a colored man cannot go without a pass even from an auction" (Drew 199). (11) In Little's case, the denial of his request for a pass results in a rebellious desertion to his mother's house, sans pass, and yet surprisingly, sans souci. His audacious defiance is inflected through gendered outrage, for the refusal signifies to him a disavowal not only of human, but also of masculine commonality on the part of his master. In spite of slavery's dehumanizations, the speaker still finds extreme offense: "[The master's] refusing the pass, naturally made me a little stubborn: I was a man as well as himself .... I was black, but I had the feelings of a man as well as any man" (Drew 201-02). (12)

A new resident of Chatham, Philip Younger reflects upon the gross actions and unlimited liberties of the Alabama night patrols: "If they meet a colored man without a pass, it is thirty-nine lashes; but they don't stop for the law, and if they tie a man up, he is very well if he gets only two hundred" (Drew 249). Other testimonials collected by Drew demonstrate further the randomness of this punitive economy. Mrs. Coleman Freeman of Windsor relates that after meetings held by slaves, "white men would stand with their whips where [the slaves] were coming out, to examine for passes, and those who had passes would go free." The unfortunate few, recalls Freeman, would "break and run, like cattle with hornets after them. I have seen them run into the river" (331). Many other ex-slave testimonies, not just those from fugitives, reveal the ubiquity and insidiousness of the pass system. Eliza Bell, formerly of Pontiac County, Mississippi, recalls, "[T]he line riders was busy all 'round the country. Looking for Negroes and seeing did they have a pass. If they did it was alright, but if the slave was out without one somebody sure to get flogged mighty hard when they get caught" (Baker and Baker 54). Oklahoma resident William Curtis, who labored on a Georgia plantation, corroborates the treatment of the slaves by repeating the oft-cited secular song "Run, Nigger, Run" (or "The Patteroll Song") to his WPA interviewer, and summarizing, "None of us dasn't leave without a pass" (Baker and Baker 96). (13)

By dint of the pass's repeated appearances in these episodes, the power of the system was an apparently indelible one. With a grim eye for religious hypocrisy reminiscent of Douglass's vituperative style, fugitive William L. Humbert scoffs, "I have seen ... the same deacons, acting as patrol, flog one of the brother members within two hours of his administering the sacrament to him, because he met the slave in the road without a passport" (Drew 334). Humbert speaks of "passport" as a synonym for e "pass," but this lexical shift is important since it resonates so strongly with our contemporary era of besieged and paranoid borders. Any mention of passports connotes movement and border-crossings, both integral to the discussion of North American fugitive slave experience. Indeed, the pass (or, as Martin R. Delany describes it in Blake, the novel he wrote while living in Chatham, the "charte volante" [28]) stands as a metonym for the document-strewn textual itinerary that determined and manipulated everything from the slave's age and mental stability to his or her reproductive capabilities (and hence, monetary potential) in the morass of the nation's human marketplace. (14)

The paper trail began with auction signs and bills of sale, descriptive broadsides for the arrest of runaways and renegades, wills that promised freedom and yet suspiciously disappeared upon the master's death, (15) and even books and scriptures that were forbidden as texts to be read, yet quoted pedantically by masters. (16) Later, these paper-bound manacles included the very constitution of the nation. Grandly communitarian in its aims, and yet internally selective of its ideal applicants, this piece of legislation declared to be self-evident and inalienable the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" while whitewashing the implicit inequalities made manifest in subsequent decades by what Congressman John Lewis calls "the hangings, burnings, castrations, and torture of an American holocaust" (7). To be manumitted, slaves required "free papers," even when masters failed to confer these promised documents, either through callousness, unexpected debt, or untimely death. Masters could also bargain with slaves to "earn" such papers through additional labors, although the return on their prolonged investment was rarely a guaranteed or satisfying one. (17)

Fugitive slaves unwittingly prompted the production of warrants and advertisements for their capture, a rather ironical means of having a master admit to--and then calibrate--his slave's value through the legitimizing language of loss, monetary value, and proffered reward. Indirectly, slaves also forced the master to buttress their "passing" into an autonomous selfhood by having him testify in writing and through narrative representation to the failure of his domestic regime. Indeed, by their signifyin(g) absence, slaves demonstrated that their master's house was subject to damage and restructure by certain discursive tools. In a clever inversion, the master who had lost slaves would be compelled to provide a description similar to that which likely attracted him to the chattel in the first place, thereby narrating his own descent from the position of property buyer to that of dispossessed claimant (of errant, absent property). To add to the ignominy, the slave's narrative enunciated both a singular and collective story; when published, it served as a pass/path to prominence in a highly politicized public arena. From the forced abandonment of indigenous languages during the Middle Passage to the emphatic ban on slave literacy, the orations, abolitionist agitation, and gradual movement from primarily oral to written culture ensured that the slave would not be denied textual authority. It is doubtful whether the conferring of the right to write has ever been so contiguous with the establishment of a nascent individuality than at this interface between the ante- and post-bellum eras, and on a geopolitical scale, between the two neighbor nations of Canada and the United States. Ironically, freedom and self-determination--the desired telos of the slaves' flight--fall alongside novelty and mobility as American liberal democracy's most hallowed ideals (West 78). The act of writing was the platform for the collective and future engagement of these ideals.

Mobility in particular is a catalytic motif in this constructive relationship between African Canadian and African American literary histories. On the Underground Railroad, a makeshift semiotic of colored flags tied on fence posts or trees throughout southern Ontario townships signaled the fugitive to "pass," "stop and lay low," or "help to be found ahead." (18) Visual or aural clues abounded as submerged communication even before arrival in the new country. J. C. Brown describes a conspiracy for freedom that spread over 300 miles in Virginia "from Maysville to Henderson." Those who were privy to the plot "wore as a mark, a plait in their hair over the left eye. This was discovered--many were whipped, and had the plait cut off" (Drew 240). Conflating the imagery of castration with an act of coercive silencing, this demonstrated zeal shows how the panopticism of slaveholders and their centers of "intelligence" (viz., mistresses, overseers, internal spies, slave breakers, neighboring farm and plantation owners) called for fugitives' audacity and secrecy. Spirituals like "City Called Heaven," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "Steal Away to Jesus" have already been documented to be signal songs for slaves contemplating "freedom-land." These songs have been widely anthologized as part of early African-American literary history, while their role in African-Canadian literary history has received only cursory attention in comparison.

When William Street informed his brother of their runaway plans using the cryptic command, "'When you hear me say to-night, the dog's dead, then we'll put out'" (286), he unconsciously partakes in the accretive tradition of word play and linguistic dexterity that would render black oral forms (from "lies" to jive, the dozens to rap) vehicles with revolutionary capabilities. Anachronism aside, we might even detect in Street's code an embryonic form of the canine imagery so ubiquitous in contemporary urban slang and gangsta poetics, with "dawg" (or "dogg") denoting a close male friend. Between fugitive "brothers," be they siblings or fellow slaves, this closeness was integral to the fugitive project; it was a question of life or--as Douglass's narrative has shown--incarceration and possible death. With the terror and hysterical scapegoating ignited by Turner's 1831 rebellion in mind, there are clearly subversive underpinnings to Street's reference to impending death, even if the dead dog were (as I suspect) merely metaphorical. While no literal pass is being manufactured in this instance, what the code reveals is how the slave's capacity for creative, group-specific, and self-protective manipulations of language took advantage of the immanent instabilities of a (supposedly) well-controlled regime. Because the pass as material object likely had greater immediacy and authority than an ephemeral and potentially esoteric language as is found in Street's example, I would propose that the system of the pass was an occasion for the expression of radically-conceived textual desire predating (and yet making way for) the slave narrative.

What is meant by the "system of the pass" is this: insofar as the semaphores in the wilderness--flags or other guiding signs--could be manipulated by bounty hunters and other unsympathetic whites, a few slaves chose to wield the privileged written language of the master for a deliberate social function: to free themselves and write, essentially, for their lives. They forged their own passes, thereby circumventing the blanket ban on slave literacy. This appropriation of the master's voice, hand, and authority is the real site of radical destabilization, first of the anti-literacy apparatus, and second of a repressive system that fails to acknowledge the everyday ingenuity and survivalist instincts of its "animal" subjects. James Smith of Amherstburg (one of Upper Canada's largest Railroad "terminals") recalls his master's children going off to school while he was left at home. "These children talked about learning me," narrates Smith, "but they said, 'We mustn't--father says he'll write a pass and run off'" (Drew 351). Despite both the stubbornly upheld mental schema that equated bondspeople with childishness, ignorance, and moral vacuity, and the pressure to maintain the prevailing symbolic order (the rule of the white Father), masters could not deny their slaves' innately human inclination towards literacy or liberty. This epistemological double bind of explicit denial and yet implicit knowledge is reminiscent of the Melvillean curse of "the Negro Babo." The 1856 character is the consummate "eye-servant" whose head remains a veritable "hive of subtlety" (258) while his actions express submission and obsequy in the sight of the visiting captain. As Preacher Hontz Snyder of Clotel proclaims during his sententious tirade against slave vice, "eye-servants are such as will work hard, and seem mighty diligent, while they think anybody is taking notice of them; but, when their masters' and mistresses' backs are turned they are idle, and neglect their business" (81). (19)

The racial dynamics of slave narrative production were usually more predictable than those of forged passes. John Sekora (1987) first characterized the black speaker and white editor/ amanuensis relationship as one of "a black message ... sealed within a white envelope" (483). Within the pass system, gaining written permission from the master was a procedure rendered obsolete by the reversal and appropriation of productive power. From the point of view of literary history, the forged pass did not constitute a genre as the slave narrative now does, primarily for lack of material evidence in bulk form. However, the passes foreground the importance of understanding freedom not simply as a mental state or a geographically-determined construct, but as a verb, a series of deliberate discursive practices that required neither the legitimization of publication nor the contingency of white editorship to have existed as a largely unacknowledged part of early black insurgent writing. (20)

Drew's motley collection shows that when slaves seized the limited opportunities to write passes for themselves, they were often facilitating their escape to early Canada. John Warren of London followed the same street-wise method as Douglass, tasting literacy through the expertise of a white boy. But Warren paid for a copy of the alphabet, while the urchins of Douglass's Baltimore shared their knowledge freely, if not simply for the chunks of bread that their black companion pocketed from his master's house. The "bread of knowledge" that Douglass sought while breaking bread with his unwitting white allies gestured to the practical means by which to ensure his freedom, both intellectual and legal: "I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would learn to write" (280). Similarly, Warren relates that upon finally learning how to hold a pen, his immediate response was to "write three passes for myself" (185). Not one pass, but three. This act exemplifies the very industry that Douglass's master, Mr. Auld, feared when he cautioned his wife not to teach young Frederick the rudiments of reading: "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell" (274). It is a particular irony that Douglass, like Warren, eventually writes "several protections" on behalf of his slave party as they attempt to flee. In counterfeiting the (white) hand of his masters, Douglass makes literal the Fanonian oxymoron of "black skin, white mask," declaring, "I, the undersigned, have given the bearer, my servant, full liberty to go to Baltimore, and spend the Easter holidays. Written with mine own hand, &c. 1835" (307).

In each of these examples, and many others, the allegorical theme of intellectual bondage dismantling alongside literal bondage maintains its centrality. Because Warren writes as an emigrant to Canada, however, the system of the pass must be understood as integral to the discourse of national borders. Another slave, John Little, vividly details how he and his wife were "hunted like a wolf in the mountains" on their way up, compelled to steal food because their desire to ask for sustenance was tempered by the fear of being confronted with the inveterate question, "Where is your pass?" (Drew 222) It is poetic justice that after they established themselves in the "good country" (220) of Canada, Little's wife is able to boast, "We have horses and a pleasure-wagon, and I can ride out when and where I please, without a pass" (Drew 233). Recalling West's definition, was this not novelty and mobility indeed?

Re[ite]rating the Motions of the Fugitive Slave

   "Are you a runaway?" I said, "No--
   I am walking away."

   "Where do you live?" "I live here now."

   "Are you a free man?" "Why should I be
   here, if I am not a free man?--this is a
   free country."

   "Where do you live, anyhow?" "I live
   here, don't you understand me?"

   "You are a free man, are you?" "Don't
   you see he is a free man, who walks in a
   free country?"

   "Show me your pass--I s'pose you've
   got one." "Do you suppose men need
   a pass in a free country? This is a free
   country."

   "I suppose you run away--a good
   many fugitives go through here,
   and do mischief." "I am doing no
   mischief--I am a man peaceable, going
   about my own business; when I am
   doing mischief, persecute me--while I
   am peaceable, let no man trouble me."
   --"The Narrative of William A.
   Hall" (Drew 217)

The above exchange between American fugitive William A. Hall and an anonymous Canadian is memorable for two reasons: first, because the pass (as remnant of the immediate slave past) reasserts its importance belatedly, and second, because the new freeman's declaration of independence is so simple and yet so rhetorically potent. In quasi-Socratic fashion, the white passerby interrogates the apparent fugitive, demanding his status and his place, both of which are coterminous with his national identity. The imperative to produce a pass is an American slavery custom; as this is Canada, Hall reasons, that is no longer a valid legal register. The white man's clipped, authoritative tone, in conjunction with his implicit accusation that Hall has emigrated to Canada with the express purpose of "doling] mischief," may remind some readers of a present-day police or customs interrogation that veers in the direction of what we now call racial profiling. Yet the ex-slave's voice, with its lack of contractions, lucid philosophical tone, and fluidly repetitive cadences, suggests self-assurance, rationality, even suaveness. His survival depends heavily upon his ability to sound free, and that to cross-examine him for purposes of ascertaining what is more or less axiomatic not only proves ridiculous, it is akin to the tautology of Huck's Jim: freeing an already free man. For each interlocutor, to be American implies that the black man is still in bondage; to be Canadian means the obverse. When the former twice repeats the questions, "Are you a free man?" and "Where do you live?" Hall's answer achieves performatively what should be obvious--that is, the direct correlation between topos and freedom. Simply stated, he speaks himself into a national identity. It is the act of language, no longer spoken but written, that cements the newly adopted, lately defended ontological position. Through iteration, the interlocutor is made to realize that the apparatus of the slave pass (that is, text-as-policing-power) has lost both its legitimacy and its necessity.

Establishing the link between discursive forms and human desires, as well as portraying the personal interactions that presage all political and social change, this conversation's tactics of repetition and variation enact the fugitive's trek north. While the journey was replicated by so many like Hall, a danger remains in attempting to homogenize the experience. Certainly, aspects of "coming away" such as trudging through the wilderness and fear of slave-catchers have, in narrative form, demonstrated striking similarities. We only have to look at the convergence of the words "iteration" and "itinerary," for both pertain to the cross-border experience (Latin iter literally denoting "journey, path, or road," and figuratively connoting "way, course, or method"). Contemporary readers of this collective history, however, often forget that there were more circuits of Underground Railroad activity than those directly into Canada, with dealings and networks all over the continent (including fugitives settling in Mexico). Furthermore, such a uniformly positive national semiotic as Canada's (as safe haven and New Canaan) inevitably invites contestation on some level. The flight to Canada may have elided legally and geographically the immediacy of American slavery, but we cannot assume that these immensities ended with the simple crossing of a border. Such an act of foreclosure fails to account for the aforementioned return of slaves to post-bellum America, as well as more intangible factors such as the nostalgic and nationalistic desires to return home. As Aaron Siddles of Chatham confesses, "Excepting for the oppressive laws, I would rather have remained in Indiana. I left one of the most beautiful places in that country" (Drew 273). Some convey a feeling of entitlement that resulted from having worked on the land for so long, while others harbored a sense of familial haunting given that their kin, however estranged, remained in America, and that further migration would frustrate attempts at future contact or possible reunion. While unlikely, this latter point undoubtedly remained a secret hope of many. Voicing his ambivalence about the move north, William Grose reflects with ironical understatement, "I intended to stay in my native country--but I saw so many mean-looking men, that I did not dare to stay" (Drew 86). An unnamed slave also from St. Catherine's qualifies her own sense of massive dislocation: "We were comfortably settled in the States, and were broken up by the fugitive slave law--compelled to leave our home and friends, and to go at later than middle life into a foreign country among strangers" (Drew 31). (21) As would be expected of a pluralistic discourse, others claimed their new home with alacrity: "I would rather die than go back," enthuses William L. Humbert, "that's a settled point with me" (Drew 333). A fellow citizen of Windsor, Ben Blackburn chimes in, "I got here ... and spent the Fourth of July in Canada. I felt as big and free as any man could feel, and I worked part of the day for my own benefit: I guess my master's time is out" (Drew 333).

In an effort to channel these themes into a more explicitly literary context, I turn now to Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Passing of Grandison" (1899), which offers a fictional engagement with both the discontents and the joys of this mobile, or "cross-over," generation of black Americans. As a satire, its objective is to play upon the romanticized partnership of an indulgent master with his obedient slave ("this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other" [536]). The very naming of the slave who passes into Canada not once but twice merits comparison with "grandson" (suggesting the paternalistic master-slave relation, or more specifically, the former's participation in a long line of slave descendants), as well as the imperative form of the French verb grandir ("grandisons"--"let us grow/increase/develop," something that the South could not do if its primary labor force were being siphoned off to the north). In order to ingratiate himself to his beloved, the loafer cum law student Dick Owens plans to prove himself by "running" one of his father's numerous slaves off to Canada. Although unaware of his son's scheme, Colonel Owens warns his pet slave Grandison that Canada is "a dreary country, where the woods are full of wildcats and wolves and bears, where the snow lies up to the eaves of the houses for six months of the year, and the cold is so severe that it freezes your breath and curdles your blood" (537). So vividly topocentric, this rhetoric is symptomatic of a grand anti-utopian mythos that functioned counter-discursively to the abolitionists' deliberate portrayal of Canada as an unrivaled slave sanctuary. (22) The elder Owens selects Grandison to accompany his son north because he appears to be the slave most contented, and hence the most immune to abolitionist rhetoric. The idea of Canada becomes a temptation that he resists too soundly, however, prompting the young master (at the cross-border impasse of Niagara Falls) to hire thugs to arrest and retain his charge in this country "where he would be legally free" (540). This episode offers the humorous but freighted configuration of a young white man's forcing freedom upon an unwilling black one. Dick's use of the slave as a catalyst for his own desires renders the liberatory act more self-serving than humanitarian, while Grandison's stance (at this point, at least) corroborates the anti-abolitionist contention that happiness in slavery was indeed possible in the oppressive plantation South.

The "passing" of Grandison in the title signals to a recursive movement between two countries and two human environments. He returns from Canada to his master, "keeping his back steadily to the North star," only to retrace his path shortly thereafter with his entire family in tow (543). Why he does so despite having been the victim of human theft and no small anguish ("They actually kidnapped him ... and carried him into the gloomy depths of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut" [543]) emerges as partial jest and partial imitation of the complexities of the migrating slave psyche. The jest works on an intertextual level if we recall how Douglass laments the abandonment of his grandmother after her master's death: "her present owners finding she was of but little value ... they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!" (283-84). Chesnutt toys with the extended scene of sentimentality that his predecessor conveys (with Grandison occupying what is essentially the female subject position), but does so while identifying that manumission takes many forms, and that loneliness exists as another, perhaps fatal form of human bondage.

The complexity of the slave psyche is most pronounced in Grandison's highly convincing performance of obedience. While for some a trickster pantomime, his geographic double-take reveals both a deeply survivalist instinct and a pronounced familial devotion. (23) His return to the Owens plantation, like Henry Bibb's numerous excursions in search of Malinda, exists as a dry run of his final journey, one that would include his wife and extended family. The show of loyalty to the senior Owens that leads to his local apotheosis ("His fame spread throughout the county, and the colonel gave him a permanent place among the house servants" [544]) plays on the white man's surrender to a state of complacency, and his failure to read signs with the scrutiny that was, in the popular eye, befitting for a slave master to have over a master slave. The title's "passing" as a metaphor for the fluctuation and eventual deliquescence of Grandison's feelings towards Colonel Owens euphemizes the cheerful self-slaughter of the prodigal slave (indeed, the colonel "kill[s] the fatted calf" for him) and replaces him with a resolute freedman. In the proleptic spirit of the 20th-century pronouncement "Uncle Tom is dead!" so, too, is Grandison's tenure amid "the fleshpots of Egypt" (544). Owens no longer "owns," but rather, has been "had" (that is, duped) by his slave. The reversal is as startling as the affirmation that blood is, in this case, indeed thicker than water.

While passing in the chromatic sense was a means by which to test how people read race on an epidermal level, this story uses a parable of betrayal to undermine the transparency and profundity of our professed allegiances, be they personal, racial, or ultimately, national. It enunciates an essentially proto-Baldwinian stance that impugns deterministic readings of identity and argues that the actions of the black body (not merely a reified instrument of labor) can produce a language as unstable, exaggerated, and equivocal as the spoken--indeed, the given--word. (24) Chesnutt's story contends that the artificial division between the two countries (what has now been designated the Forty-Ninth Parallel) was not merely a rubicon through which any slave could, in passing, simply accommodate him- or herself in a Manichean allegory of dystopia (America) and paradise (Canada). If that were the case, Grandison would not have doubled back. The persistence and power of this binary appears even in the late twentieth century, as in the third volume of Maya Angelou's serial autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Getting' Merry Like Christmas (1976). Using a transhistorical lens, she equates the Canada of the popular imagination with her view of contemporary Montreal society, its lack of overt racism forming a stark contrast with the mid-century America temporarily left behind:

      The underground railroad had had
   Canada as its final destination, and
   slaves had created a powerful liturgy
   praising Canada which was sung all
   over the world.... [T]he stated aim to
   get to Canaan land was the slave's way
   of saying he longed to go to Canada,
   and freedom.

      Therefore, Canadians were exempt
   from many Blacks' rejection of whites.
   They were another people. I observed
   their clean streets and the fact that
   their faces did not tighten when they
   saw me. (153)

While flattering, too much credit is allotted to Canada in the totalizing hermeneutic of "Canaan land." The real-life narratives of exodus that probably served as the inspiration for Chesnutt's fin-de-siecle short story testify to terror and sickness during the flight, then post-traumatic stress after it, (25) and the recurrent social scourges of prejudice and discrimination that materialized in the early townships. (26) Furthermore, the circuitous nature of Grandison's "narrative of ascent" (in Robert Stepto's phrase) symbolically enacts the ambivalence of adopting a new land as home. In so doing, it illuminates an oft-overlooked reality of the cross-border experience: multi-directional migration.

Ex-slave Austin Steward's is a case in point. A native Virginian, he recounts in his 1857 autobiography Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman his escape to upstate New York and his career as a successful grocer and race man in Rochester. Choosing in 1831 to move to the Wilberforce Colony (in what is now Lucan, Ontario), Steward served as an active leader despite problems with faulty internal organization. Six years later, he again relocated to Rochester to continue his municipal, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial affairs in that city and its environs (Jackson 155). (27) Unlike Grandison's, Steward's cross-border itinerary neither had Canada as its original destination nor made any provisions to return to the northern nation before, during, or after the Wilberforce settlement's decline in the 1840s. His narrative disputes the assumption that fugitives who reached Canada would settle there permanently. Certainly, such individuals as Samuel Ringgold Ward and the abolitionist lecturer Bibb established more permanent livelihoods in this country, with the latter editing the first black newspaper in Canada, The Voice of the Fugitive, and the former returning only once to America, to board a ship to England from New York harbor (Jackson 154). As with Ward, Canada was but a stopover for Ellen and William Craft on their voyage to Liverpool via Nova Scotia (Jackson 150). Others, like Josiah Henson, whose 1849 autobiography has popularly accrued the distinction of being "the archetypal fugitive experience" (Winks 115), were cosmopolites, traveling frequently between their Canadian settlements and American cities for the purpose of abolitionist campaigning. Explains Henson, "I have made many journeys into New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine, in all of which States I have found or made some friends to the cause" (755). Of further trips to Maryland and Kentucky he declares, "I knew the route pretty well, and had much greater facilities for traveling than when I came out of that Egypt for the first time" (753). Even here, the strategic legacy of Grandison's passing retains its immediacy and rhetorical power.

Wilderness T(r)ips: Cross-border Liminality and the Ambiguities of the Slave Condition

Thus far, the pass has been established as a mobile and volatile signifier that traverses borders and problematizes national affiliations. As a metaphor, it unites the nascent agency of the slave-as-rebellious-writer with the generic idee fixe of gaining intellectual and social freedom through literacy. As tangible object, it reflects a fleeting and prohibited textual apparatus that when claimed by the slave, aided his or her escape to a better domestic situation (domus suggesting "home," both nationally and on an individual scale). The pass, above all, existed as the catalyst for a series of kinepoetic transfers between the individual, the act of writing, and the inveterate search for a safe space. Through the test case of the African Canadian slave narrative, a porous form that such critics as George Elliott Clarke consider to fall unfairly under the exclusive aegis of African American literary history, a collaborative model of cross-border emancipation emerges. This is the domain of the North American slave narrative--a species of hybrid transnational discourse seeking to reform more narrowly defined schemas of theoretical containment, aggressively nationalist sentiment, and exclusionary literary praxis.

By dint of critical treatment by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the "trope of the talking book" has become easily identifiable as a (if not the) seminal motif in the early struggle for black literary presence in the New World. (28) Within the Enlightenment-era narratives that first broadcasted it, this catachrestic but ingenious conceit linked somatic response (orality and aurality) with the realities of racial exclusion, nautical travel, and largely capitalistic transculturation. In support of a more inclusive vision of black migration, Canada's answer to this originally African and now African American figuration is one that takes its cue not from the voyage of slaves on water, but on land: the trope of the borderless text. It is not a metaphor that appears explicitly in slave narratives, but rather one that is enacted through the communal utterances of the writers and indeed, sourced in the peripatetic life choice that "coming away" turned out to be. Critic Paul Gilroy has schematized the culture of the Black Atlantic as "the image of ships in motion" between the continents of the transatlantic slave trade (4). If this image were to be placed on the template of the Canadian American border, we would be viewing the locus of another cross-over generation, a tropological, geographical, and genealogical "passing" of would-be narrative bodies (that is, writers and their latent texts) that does not merely emulate, but rather is the transit of fugitive slaves. This chiasmatic equation of texts to individuals and individuals to texts is the embryonic principle of the autobiographical tradition in African American letters. With Canada involved, however, there must be a revised optic to define another "counterculture of modernity" (quoting Gilroy), since the dynamics of movement between the two neighbor nations functioned on a smaller scale and with different underlying concerns than those of individuals traversing the Black Atlantic community.

This proposed "borderlessness" sounds vague, even contradictory given my attempts thus far to negotiate a specifically cross-border North American literary history. The key factor to understanding this concept is temporality, or the changing career of the border as recognizable marker of difference, and hence its varying capacity to define separate communities, whether extant or imaginary, in either a northerly or southerly direction. If "the border" is the sum of the procedures required to establish a national affiliation and claim an identity as a citizen, one dimension of borderlessness refers then to a significant geographical, conceptual, and narratological inconsistency in many of these testimonials: rarely, if ever, at least in Drew's collection, is the crossing of the Canada-United States border a clearly defined and uniformly executed act.

By "clearly defined," I am not disregarding the at times shattering emotional response depicted by such narratives as Henson's: "When I got on the Canada side, on the morning of the 28th of October, 1830, my first impulse was to throw myself on the ground, and giving way to the riotous exultation of my feelings, to execute sundry antics which excited the astonishment of those who were looking on" (748). Henson's narrative is rather unconventional in its narrative precision. I refer more to the pervasive lack of specificity of events--the narrative elisions and silent "givens"--that make it difficult to register in time and place the shift from American to Canadian territory (and by extension, consciousness). Where does American experience end and Canadian life begin? Regarding these narratives in bulk, readers will notice the structure of departure, travel, and arrival that slave writers portray to be actually quite unstructured, extemporaneous as opposed to premeditated, and hardly as organized as the Underground Railroad is championed to have been. Even in Angelou's recollection of escape in the spirituals, the River Jordan was formed as a composite of the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Ohio rivers, all potential routes north, and not necessarily to Canada either (153). No single, unitary, and foolproof route is readily discernable in these fugitive narratives.

Historical records suggest that some stowaways were crammed in grain vessels that landed in Oakville, while others found their way up the speculative "freedom trail" on ferries of the Niagara River basin (then known as Fallsview), depending on the benevolence of the captain and crew. Still others swam the Detroit River into Amherstburg, made their way by foot to Sandwich (present-day Windsor), or rooted around the farms and neighboring areas in search of tunneled-through houses, kindly inhabitants, and encouraging leads. (29) Converging and merging, it seems, were the free play of individual sensibilities with the unpredictability of circumstance. The slave narrators, however, are hardly this specific. Fugitive David West, for instance, speaks not of the guidance of "kind white men" as a Mrs. Ellis from St. Catherine's does (Drew 44), but rather elliptically of "a plan" studied before his flight (88). An unnamed slave from Chatham divulges how she was instructed to "follow the north star" by her mistress, and then approximate her whereabouts (rather ridiculously, it seems) by "the feel of the trees" and the "side where the moss was longest" (Drew 283). John Warren, in relating that he no longer "stud[ies] all day about running into the woods, nor dream[s] of it nights, as [he] used to" (Drew 186), demonstrates how border-crossing is inextricable from a whole psychological atmosphere of morbid unsettledness and suspended desire. Feeling "uneasy," William Grose divulges, "All this time, I dreamed on nights that I was getting clear.... Sometimes I felt as if I would get clear, and again as if I would not. I had many doubts. I armed myself with an old razor, and made a start alone, telling no one, not even my brother" (Drew 85). This anticipation and indeed, even obsession with the prospects of possible death and its obverse, hoped-for rebirth, may have been American in theory, but it became Canadian in practice.

Borderlessness also refers to a lack of administrative activity surrounding the exit and entry patterns from one country to another. Today, border crossings may conjure up fearful images of bureaucratic precision, assertive or defensive self-identification, and revealing declarations (of origin, intent, destination, and possessions). As with the slave pass, there is also an obligatory exchange of supporting documentation that serves to mitigate the outrage of invasive policing and inspection. On the other hand, migrating slaves were subject to the possibility of one or more of these interactions throughout their journey, not just at any selected checkpoint, border station, or customs office. Thus, to speak of the many forms of borderlessness in these texts does not seek to negate borders, but rather, in questioning their very existence and constitution, to dilate them beyond their supposed station as geographically or phenomenologically fixed points.

Furthermore, while the network of abolitionists and "friends" directing fugitives depended upon the secrecy and unreadability of their enterprise (notwithstanding the criticism of figures like Douglass, who declared it an "upperground railroad" [316] for its intelligence leaks and undue publicity), these narratives emerged well after the writers had fled their native land. Thus, the ambiguities of escape (although their concealment favors the protection of other such networks from external, legally sanctioned dismantling) remain as troubling as the issue of where the ontological shift should occur between "Afro-American" and "Afro-Canadian" in present-day critical discussion and debate.

To understand borderlessness better, the relationship of borders to movement, movement to wilderness, and wilderness to self-improvement must be carefully accentuated. Given the non-regimented dispersal of the aforementioned slaves towards the north, readers of these narratives would be hard-pressed to define a "true" path to Canadian freedom, with "true" encompassing some infrequent definitions. These range from "exactly conforming to a rule or standard," and "accurately placed or delivered," to "in a straight line or direction." (30) The migration over the border, with the border itself so provisional, compels readers to envisage the fusion of spatio-temporal boundaries for the fleeing subjects. It is a liminal no man's land where survival is, homeopathically speaking, both the utmost problem and the utmost relief. Thomas Johnson's comments show a correlation between the fear of the wilderness and the fear of having, and yet not having, self-control: "I hid in the woods. I could not realize it--I sat down on a stump, and said to myself, 'isn't this a dream?'" (Drew 380). Not even knowing the name of his destination, Henry Banks ruminates, "I had heard tell of a free country--but I did not know where it was, nor how to get there. I stayed in the woods three months; I then thought I would start for a free country somewhere" (Drew 75, italics added). While uncertain, this interstitial space of unknowing was refreshing in its dislocation from the daily constraints posed by plantation culture. James Adams traveled in a group by night, meeting (quite symbolically) "many rivers and streams where there were no bridges" (Drew 25). In the woods they resided throughout the day with no need to keep watch: "We did not do this in the wilderness--there we slept safely, and were quite reconciled" (Drew 25).

Interestingly enough, the woods, with their topographically peripheral presence, seem to have been an early site of self-assertion and rebellion even prior to their use as an en route refuge. Although slave narratives often conflate "woods" and "wilderness," a distinction did exist. Coined "slave vagabondage" by Blyden Jackson (134), the shorter leave-takings into the woods that many narratives detail formed the first rights/rites of passage for members of a more actively discontented slave subculture:

   But perhaps one of the anomalies of
   slavery which has probably not been
   awarded the prominence it deserves in
   pictures of the antebellum South is the
   relatively great amount of movement
   in that South by slaves who were following
   their own wishes, not their
   masters'. Some slaves, individually or
   collectively, lived for years, if not for
   most of their entire lives, in southern
   hideaways. Indeed, the slaves who
   established themselves as a permanent
   semioccult presence in the Dismal
   Swamp overlapping the border
   between Virginia and North Carolina
   became, in their own time, a living legend.
   (Jackson 133-34)

We might call these acts "hiding" as some slaves do, or "vacations" as Jackson does, but the relationship of their lingering presence to final flight is more rehearsal to actual performance than a string of short, self-contained appearances. Thomas Hedgebeth divulges that certain slaves used private exiles in the woods as a muted form of protest: "After a whipping, they would often leave and take to the woods for a month or two, and live by taking what they could find" (Drew 277). Compelling overseers and the master to seek them was an opportunity to exert indirect power on the part of the slave despite the punishments that would likely follow (depending, of course, on the utility of the runaways, the temperaments of the master, and the amount of labor lost during their absence). Ex-slave William Street "stayed three days hid in the wheat," then took to the woods where he stayed "eight months without ever going into a house" (Drew 288). Edward Hicks of Chatham followed a more rugged but equally arbitrary path ("I ran; but did not know what way to go, and took into the pines"). His sabbatical included wintering in caves and barns, summering in fields and hollows, and ending up quite auspiciously in "a strange country" (Drew 260-62). A. Siddles "took to the woods" during a sale and continued to wander as a vagrant for five months, sleeping (as the rhetoric of nascent independence goes) "in no man's house nor barn" (Drew 271). John Holmes of London, in resolutely refusing to be whipped, "went off into the woods" all summer. His hiatus extended to the next spring after he sustained an attack by his master's dogs (164-65). When a peer insisted that Holmes could not "stay in the woods always," the frontiersman declares, prophet-like, "If you will go with me, I'll carry you into a free country" (Drew 171).

These excerpts validate the claim that taking to the woods was an antecedent to a more permanent distancing of the self from bondage--that is, the fugitive flight proper. The woods (as temporary respite and repudiation of slavery) and wilderness (as path to Canada and metaphor for the work awaiting the newfound citizen) comprise the transitional zones between planning and execution, dispossession and reclamation, and desire and fulfillment. (31)

The Latitude of Parallels: The "Wilds" and Borderless Textuality

As many of the narratives progress to--or actually begin with--descriptions of settlement, the repeated references to "these woods" often morphs into talk of "this wilderness." Truncated or extended by synecdochal logic, both of these sylvan images characterize Canada as a scene of intense physical labor. Instead of being coterminous with abuse, however, such labor emerges as self-initiated and self-directed. Douglass's fa