Pourin' Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West

By Cheryl Foggo

The 30th anniversary edition of Cheryl Foggo’s landmark work about growing up Black on the Canadian prairies

Cheryl Foggo came of age during the 1960s in Calgary, a time when a Black family walking down the street still drew stares from everyone they passed. She grew up in the warm embrace of a community of extended family and friends, with roots in the Black migration of 1910 across the western provinces. But as an adolescent, Cheryl struggled against the negative attitudes towards Blackness she and her family encountered. She struggled against the many ways she was made to feel an outsider in the only place she ever knew as home.

As Cheryl explores her ancestry, what comes to light gives her the confidence to claim her place in the Canadian west as a proud Black woman. In this beautiful, moving work, she celebrates the Black experience and Black resiliency on the prairies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brush Education
• Release date: Jan 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781550598360

Cheryl Foggo

Cheryl Foggo is a multiple award-winning playwright, author and filmmaker, whose work over the last thirty years has focused on the lives of Western Canadians of African descent. Recent works include the release of her NFB feature documentary John Ware Reclaimed, available on nfb.ca, as well as the thirtieth anniversary edition of her book Pourin' Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West. Her plays Heaven and John Ware Reclaimed have received multiple productions, including at The Citadel in Edmonton, Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary, at the Blyth Theatre Festival and in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre. Cheryl is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Outstanding Artist Award, the Doug and Lois Mitchell Outstanding Calgary Artist Award and the Arts, Media and Entertainment Award from the Calgary Black Chambers, all in 2021. She is a 2022 inductee into the Alberta Order of Excellence.

Book preview

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Pourin’ down rain

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pourin’ down rain

A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West

30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

CHERYL FOGGO

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Dedication

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For my Brother, Ronny, who died November 28, 1985,

without having the opportunity

to know my children;

for Noël’s little Josie

and

David L. Smith

For the second edition

So many of my people have died since Pourin’ Down Rain was first published. The most crushing of these losses is that of my sweet sister Noël. A few years ago when her cancer had returned yet again, her daughter Rochelle changed the name of the family text thread to Nontie’s Warriors, Nontie being one of Sis’s nicknames. In the last four months of her life, The Warriors gathered in her beautiful home every day to cook, clean, sing and cry. So this new volume is dedicated to Noël’s memory, to The Warriors and to those days we all had together.

Also, to Julien.

Table of Contents

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Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Meeting Jim Crow

2 Hairday

3 Willis Augustus

4 Ottawa Street

5 In Sharon’s Room

6 The Great-Aunts

7 The March

8 Little Big Man

9 Living in the Middle

10 The Welcome

11 Summer in Winnipeg

12 The Bermudians

13 On the Banks of the Saskatchewan River

14 Belonging

15 Desolation

16 Discoveries

17 The Rumble of Wagons

18 Pin Cherries and Other Berries

Epilogue

Family Tree

Afterword to the Second Edition

About the Author

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Preface to the Second Edition

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Music, drawings and paintings, actors acting in films and plays, dancers dancing, poetry and books are the only actual magic we have. They offer a way for us to figure things out collectively. They allow us to care about a life someone lived in another time or place that wasn’t ours. They inspire us to work on solutions for a future that we won’t occupy, but that will be occupied by people we love. We’re in this together and more than any other creative endeavour of mine over a long career that is still in process, Pourin’ Down Rain is me talking directly to you.

How fortunate I am to have the opportunity to revisit the first book I wrote, my first major literary undertaking. I’ve been able to correct typos that have weighed on my mind for thirty years. I’ve changed awkward phrasing here and there. I’ve added new information that has come to light. I’ve taken out a couple of things that made me shudder. There are cultural references that anyone born after 1995 won’t understand, but luckily there’s the Internet for those. Importantly, I’ve been able to reflect on things I said that I no longer believe to be true. A writer’s life holds many blessings and one curse—you write things that are based on what you think is accurate at the time and there they sit forever. So if even within this new edition I have said things that I change my mind about in the future or if I’ve used language that falls out of fashion, forgive me and carry on.

I’ve also decided to let the silences stand, even if it means I’ve given the impression of a more cohesive family than what we actually are. There are stories in our history that are not mine to tell.

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Acknowledgements

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I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following people and organizations:

First and especially, Daisy Williams

Ellis Smith

Bert and Edith Smith

Sidney and Eileen Smith

Olie and Cathy Smith

David and Barbara Smith

Ethel and Lawrence Lewsey

Edith and Andrew Risby

Pearl and Allen Hayes

Pauline and Roy Foggo

Eva Goodman

Clem Martini

Jill Swartz

Penny Williams

Fil Fraser

David Bercuson

Jon Whyte

Larry Pratt

Howard and Tamara Palmer

The Canada Council

The Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts

Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism

For the second edition:

The late Ted Giles of Detselig/Temeron Books was the original publisher of Pourin’ Down Rain, which was the most important element in the launch of my career. PDR could easily have not made it to print. I had received a number of rejections for the manuscript, which is not uncommon in the early life of writers. But the substance of the rejections was discouraging in a particular way. The one I remember best said There are not enough Black people in Canada to justify us publishing this work. In other words: you don’t belong, you don’t have the right to be heard and your story doesn’t matter. Although I felt terrible after receiving that letter, I believed the publisher to be wrong on every level and persisted in sending the manuscript out. Ted chose it, and if he hadn’t done so I’m not sure what path my life might have taken. I’ll always be grateful to him.

I would like to acknowledge the family I have found because Pourin’ Down Rain exists. Somehow it made its way to Smiths across the continent, and I’ve received messages of appreciation from several descendants of my grandfather’s siblings over the years. This, I love.

Chandra and Miranda, thank you for loving our history as you do. You are beacons and the most important teachers I’ve ever had.

Aunt Daisy was the first person I listed in my original acknowledgements. My gratitude toward her has grown. Her faith in the worth of our family story sustained me many times. I am grateful to all the people like her from the Black migration of 1910—the keepers of photos, the chroniclers, the guardians against erasure.

And I’m grateful to all the people who have kept Pourin’ Down Rain alive.

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Introduction

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Upon occasion when I was growing up, we went to eat in Chinatown.

Sometimes the occasion was a visit from an out-of-town relation; sometimes the occasion was unknown to me, perhaps unknown to everyone except Aunt Edie and Uncle Andrew, who acted as co-chairs for these Chinatown excursions. All of my family—my mother, father, sister and brothers; all of our aunts and uncles, cousins and many people who I thought were my aunts, uncles and cousins and a few people who were not Black at all, but were so much a part of my world that I thought they were Black in a different way—all of us went to Chinatown.

We were stared at, of course. In 1965 it was rare to see a large group of mostly Black people in Calgary. I believed that the staring was something we had earned, an acknowledgement of our status as important and beautiful people.

The women wore hats. The men wore long coats and rubber slip-on covers for their shoes. Some faces were dark and shiny; others were light brown and waxy looking. The teenage boy cousins wore stove-pipe pants and had very lean faces; the girls wore white lipstick over textured mouths. I was in love with these people, who were a magnet to the eyes of all who passed them. I loved to hear them laugh and see them point to the menu, saying, I’d like to try some of this here, or The onliest thing about Chinese food is you git hungry again later.

In the early days before he had the church at 1307 10th Avenue SE, Uncle Andrew held services at a number of places, including the Glad Tidings Mission at 409 8th Avenue E and occasionally at the Labor Temple. All the people pictured here and many others would have participated in the Chinese food outings. Left to right: Mayola (Carothers) Richardson, Willa Gotchie (Carothers) Sneed, Cordie (Carothers) Williams, baby Reo Bailey, Nana Bailey, Edie Risby, Edith Wharton, unknown, Pauline Foggo. Little girls in front: Judy Williams, Robin Bailey, Beverly Risby, me holding my mom’s hands.

Photo courtesy of Judy Williams-Graham.

This book is for all of the aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, the friends who I believed to be Black in their own way, and for those who stared at us in Chinatown and wondered what we were doing there—this is so you will know.

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1

Meeting Jim Crow

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Skin is a badge that you will always wear, a form of identification for those in the world who wish to brand you.

There was nothing amiss, nothing lacking in Bowness. In 1958 my parents bought a house there for seven thousand dollars. It had no plumbing, no basement, no porch, an unfinished yard and only five small rooms.

Our street, 70th Street, was gravel and dust. No street lamps. No trees. When the wind blew, which it did frequently, great clouds of sand would whirl up and spin across the road. My brothers and sister and I, and our friends, were delighted by these dust storms. Someone would shriek, It’s a tornado! and we would chase the cloud, madly laughing.

Around the corner and up 46th Avenue was a cluster of businesses—the bakery, the hardware store, Gibson’s Variety, a cafe, the library and the Crystal Grocery, which everyone referred to as Garry’s, after the proprietor, Garry Fong.

At the other end of 70th Street was Bowcroft Elementary, which my brothers attended, and the kindergarten that I attended in the basement of the United Church. Before gaining the church doors, there was a long, wide, grassy field to master. Initially, the crossing of this field required a certain amount of courage-gathering. The grass was, in places, as tall as I and the boulders in the distance might have provided cover for an animal or a bully. Soon, though, bolstered by the company of my friend Ricky Hayes, the field’s gently waving, rainbow-coloured foxtails became a treasured part of a five-year-old’s life.

Richard’s birthday, May 1962. In back: Brian Risby, Ronny Foggo. Standing below them: Richard Foggo, unknown boy in shadow, Lenora Saunders, unknown girl in hat, Kim Hysert, Terry Hysert. Seated: Sherry Garrson, Charlene Visser, me, Bonnie Stewart. Standing in front: Bruce Horne, Randy Hayes, Norlee Stewart, Gale Hysert, Lori Hysert, Noël Foggo.

Photo courtesy of Pauline Foggo.

Our street contained the closest thing to a Black community that one would find in Calgary in 1961. Ricky Hayes’s parents were interracial, but he, his brother Randy and sister Debbie considered themselves Black. The Hayeses, their grandparents across the alley, my family and the Saunders and Lawson families up the road made up what I believe was the largest concentration of Black people in a single Calgary neighbourhood.

This photo (circa 1959 or 1960) of a segment of