Cheryl Foggo documents the Black presence in Canada's West
March 30, 2020
Tired of being asked ‘Where are you from’? followed by the probing ‘Where are you really from, you can’t possibly be from here’? prompted Cheryl Foggo to set the record straight.
The descendant of the 1910 Black migration to Western Canada addressed the repeatedly asked question in ‘Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West’ that was released three decades ago.
Foggo’s first major literary undertaking explores her ancestry and upbringing in the warm embrace of a community of extended family and friends with ties to the exodus to Canada along with the Black experience on the prairies.
Growing up among a family of storytellers, the sexagenarian enjoyed listening to relatives talk about their early lives in Western Canada.
“I also relished talking to my grandparents about their lives and family experiences in the Southern United States.,” Foggo said. “I recognized these important stories were absent from the literary canon.”
When it was suggested that the best way to capture the historical narrative was through family members, she went to Winnipeg, Calgary, Regina and Vancouver to get first-hand accounts.
It was while interviewing her grandfather’s sister, Daisy Williams who was the keeper of the family’s stories, that Foggo got the idea for part of the book’s title.
“She told me the day she left Oklahoma as a five year-old, ‘it was pouring down rain when we pulled out of the train station in Tulsa and it was pouring down rain when we pulled into the station in Dalmeny, Saskatchewan’,” the 2008 Harry Jerome Award recipient recalled.
To mark the 30th anniversary, the book was re-released this year.
“The reason this book has never died is because it documented a history that was not told before and it was a seminal text for many young Black Albertans in its day,” Foggo said. “Given the opportunity to revisit the book has also allowed me to add photos and footnotes and comment on things I had written about 30 years ago that I either have more information on or don’t feel the same way that I did back then. There’s a lot of new material.”
The book’s front, however, has remained the same with her mother, Pauline Foggo and her twin-sister Pearl Hayes who just celebrated their 90th birthdays, gracing the cover.
The sisters had a close relationship with Violet King-Henry whose descendants also migrated from the United States and was the first Black person to graduate from law school in Alberta in 1953.
Foggo, who grew up in Bowness which was amalgamated into the City of Calgary in 1964, said her mother planted the seed that led to her interest in reading and the creative arts.
“My mom was an avid reader, she belonged to a book club and our house was always filled with books,” she said. “I also lived in an economically depressed area, so reading became a great escape and way to experience other worlds I wasn’t exposed to in my day to day life. As I got older, I was exposed to theatre through my high school drama classes and I developed a very strong friendship with the person I married who was a theatre artist. I always had a lot of exposure to music which is probably my favourite art form and even though I am not a musician, I use music in almost all my works.”
Foggo is collaborating with Edmontonian Leander Lane on a book about historical Black life in Western Canada.
Lane’s great grandfather, Julius Caesar Lane who died in 1913, was among the African-American families from Oklahoma who arrived in Saskatchewan 120 years ago after the federal government offered them free homestead land in the West.
A dozen families, including the Lanes, settled in Eldon while others went west to found the northern Alberta community of Amber Valley.
Leander Lane is telling the story of his family and the Black migration to Saskatchewan while Foggo’s focus is on Blacks in Calgary and Southern Alberta.
In addition, she’s in the editing stage of a National Film Board documentary, ‘John Ware Reclaimed’, that’s expected to be released later this year.
Born into slavery, Ware brought the first cattle to Southern Alberta in 1882, helping to start that province’s ranching industry. He died in a horse farming accident in 1905, five months after his wife succumbed to typhoid and pneumonia.
Cheryl Foggo has an interest in the history of the Black pioneers in the Prairies
His story is one that Foggo, who enjoys the Calgary Stampede, longed to tell.
“John Ware’s children were elders in my community when I was a child,” she said. “I heard the name but had no idea of the significance of the family until one of my brothers went to the Glenbow Museum when he was about 12 years old and came back home, telling me that John Ware was a Black cowboy. When I was in my late teens and early 20s thinking about pursuing writing as a career, my John Ware file was the one I started working on. I had been collecting information on him for decades, but my knowledge of the man has grown so much and become so deep. I recognize that what I thought I knew about him wasn’t accurate and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to make a film to reclaim his narrative from what I feel are a lot of inaccuracies that people have about him. Many of the records that were available were based on a book published in 1960 long after he died. What I did was go to sources that weren’t explored before and weren’t available in any other archives.”
Amanda ‘Nettie’ Ware, the eldest of the Ware’s six children who died in 1989 at age 96, entrusted her archives with family members in Kirkcaldy, Alberta.
“I had to do the kind of research that’s difficult to do,” said Foggo. “It’s through that process of finding people like the Mallory family (Don Mallory, who died in 2005, was a genealogist who helped Amanda Ware with her research) who have Nettie’s records and learning about other people from reading those records that I kind of expanded my sources. The process was very painstaking and difficult, but also very rewarding.”
Foggo’s work extends to creating theatre as a playwright and producer.
Married to award-winning author, playwright and university professor Clem Martini, the couple has partnered on several projects, including ‘Turnaround’ which is a play based on a young person who goes to court to officially separate from her troubled mother and ‘The Devil We Know’ which is about two young Black girls who are forced to defend themselves when a stranger arrives at their home looking for a hidden package.
The co-producer of Alberta’s first Black Canadian Theatre Series, Foggo and her husband have two daughters.
While pursuing a Master’s of English at the University of British Columbia, Chandra Martini discovered the history of midwifery regulation in Canada as she was researching representations of birthing bodies in science fiction and fantasy. The 2019 Bachelor of Midwifery graduate is part of the Calgary Midwives Collective that provides a safe, compassionate and woman-centred birthing experience.
Cheryl Foggo and her husband Clem Martini with their children Chandra and Miranda Martini
Younger sister Miranda Martini has undergraduate degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature and a Master’s in Songwriting. She and her mother have collaborated on many occasions on incarnations of Foggo’s play, ‘John Ware Reimagined’, that won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award.
