It wasn’t taught in school. Curtis Bell learned about Hamilton’s Black history around the table
The statues in Gore Park tell one part of our past, and Curtis Bell, with the clay and art of his words, fired in the kiln of his passionate historical intelligence, is striving to balance the account.
I mention statues, because the figures in Curtis's two new books, their specific braveries, loom so large, they seem cast in bronze, and yet their history pulses with life in his hands.
Curtis has given shape to people who gave shape to us and our world. People like John C. Holland, Rose Washington (Jackie's mother), Lincoln Alexander, Edith Lewis, Margaret Felson; so many others. The backlog of the unsung - or not sung enough - is piled high when you're trying, as Curtis is, to redress centuries of racism and wilful disregard.
In his book, Trail Train 13," he sculpts their stories not onto pedestals but into the knowledge and feelings of students and readers, a more enduring foundation. Living monuments to his ancestry - awake and moving in our sense of ourselves. If we'd known that ancestry better, known it as ours, there might be other statues in Gore Park, to keep company with Queen Victoria and Sir John A.
Curtis is ensuring we learn it deeper, feel it stronger.
He's well equipped for the work, not only by virtue of his far-reaching grasp of Black and Indigenous history (locally, nationally, continentally) but by claim of kinship.
I grew up immersed in the stories and histories (much of it centred around Stewart Memorial Church), and I got to hear it firsthand," says Curtis, an ex-Toronto Argonaut wide receiver.
I was blessed to have not only grandparents, but great-grandparents as well, so the stories I heard went almost back to slavery days." This is how he learned Black history - around the table, in Hamilton. It wasn't taught at schools or enshrined in statuary.
Curtis is related to John C. Holland, Hamilton's first Black citizen of the year; to Lincoln Alexander; to Ray Lewis (who competed with Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and Pinky Lewis.
His mother is Sandi Bell, Ontario's first Black school trustee. In his grandparents' house in Hamilton, Black visitors to the city would often stay, for lack of other places that would have them, and so Curtis met people like Ray Charles. Others who came through include Dionne Warwick, Richard Pryor, Duke Ellington.
Curtis also has Indigenous heritage through 19th-century (possibly earlier) intermarriage of Black and First Nations people, the link between Black and Indigenous being an often underrecognized part of North American history.
Curtis, who named his daughter Cree, traces his lineage, through his great-grandmother Margaret Felson to the Erie Nation and through other relatives to the Chippewa and Potawatami.
These roots and so much else, including his great-great grandfather William Holland's flight from slavery along the Underground Railroad, are the subject of Trail Train 13," which along with a companion volume, Holland's Heroes: Coping With COVID Wellness Workbook," is being launched soon.
Trail Train 13" is a remarkable parade of Canadian, North American and world history routed through the high streets, back alleys and underground passages of one Hamilton man's extended family. It's both personal memoir for Curtis and Pan-American mythology" - true" mythology.
Curtis calls the principal figures in his book superheroes" and trailblazers." Hyperbole? No. You try walking 720 miles from Maryland to Canada through fiercest weather when you're a 19-year-old plantation slave, dogged at every turn by killer hounds, bounty hunters and others who'd punish you, if caught, by amputating a limb, or worse.
This was the journey of Curtis's great-great grandfather William Henson Holland.
Curtis goes back even further, to Polly, born in 1796, the first relative he has any record of, a transaction in which she, 17 at the time, was sold with a seven-year-old girl, for $300 to a Maryland doctor.
Trail Train 13" goes further yet, to roots in the Yoruban people of West Africa from whence his ancestors were wrenched onto slave ships. The book does a lively job of moving us back and forth in time, connecting the stories and anecdotes of Curtis's ancestors with larger currents and historical figures like Harriet Tubman.
I did not want this to read like an encyclopedia, as dry history," he says.
He tells of Black war heroes from the two world wars. He tells of men, already freed from slavery, who returned to fight the Civil War for the freedom of others. He writes of the role of Stewart Memorial Church as a hub of the Black community in Hamilton.
He also recounts, in engaging anecdotes, some of the lighter side of the history.
One time, in 1948, 15 Harlem Globetrotters, showed up at The House (his grandparents' aforementioned place, on Victoria Avenue), and they found a restaurant where they could all get food," Curtis tells me.
He writes of his father, Robert (Buck) Bell, a distinguished boxer.
The history, of course, continues, though not all of it in the book, and Curtis and his family are a part of it. He coaches at Cathedral and his daughter Cree, sprinter, and son Darius, football, are both on athletic scholarships in the United States. Cree did the art work for Curtis's book.
The other book, Holland's Heroes: Coping With COVID Wellness Workbook," uses the lessons of his ancestors to explore strategies and mechanisms to deal with anxiety, depression and other mental wellness funded by United Way
It grows out of work Curtis has done for decades, in the school system and community, here and in Toronto, promoting black history and motivating and counselling youth, around issues like substance abuse and gangs. He has written other books, fiction and nonfiction, such as Street Wolf" and Hood Habits." His first book, Road Toad," quickly became a resource in the field.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. Reach him via email: jmahoney@thespec.com