Something seldom seen in the lands once occupied by the community of Africville appeared on Tuesday: a Halifax city bus. Back in the day, you see, only the occasional Acadian Lines bus stopped in this community that has become synonymous with racial injustice.
Kids from Africville attending one of the north end schools had to walk a mile or so to where the city transit bus made a big turn.
“Up by the old Rockhead Prison,” recalled Lyle Grant, who lived in Africville until the age of 13, when the bulldozers arrived.
But Tuesday there he sat in the parking lot of the Africville Museum — not far from where the Grant home once stood — with his brother George Junior, sister Paula Grant-Smith and their 89-year-old mother Rose, aboard Halifax Transit bus number 1125, for one day only the Africville Bus.
The bus was on loan because this was a special day: the unveiling of a new installation to celebrate Nova Scotia’s most fabled black community at Halifax Stanfield International Airport.
The Grants wanted to be there to celebrate this place that no longer physically exists but lives on in their collective memory, and soul.
But so did Bernice Arsenault-Byers, whose picture, as a little girl, graces a Canadian stamp commemorating Africville, and Beatrice Wilkins (nee West), who grew up singing spirituals and old-time gospel hymns with her sisters at Seaview Baptist Church, a replica of which now houses the Africville Museum.
So did Irvine Carvery, the north-end Halifax man-about-town, who remembers the good life in the close-knit community before he became a self-described “displaced kid,” growing up in the public housing of Uniacke Square.
And so, sitting beside him, did Linda Mantley and her childhood friend, Brenda Steed-Ross, residents of Africville until the age of 18, and who, years later, co-founded the Africville Genealogy Society, which has done as much as any organization to keep the spirit of their former home alive.
Inside the Africville bus — bound for the airport where they weren’t sure quite what waited — I heard stories about folks descended from Africville’s original landowners who arrived here after the War of 1812, as well as about a lot of people who carried the honorific name auntie and uncle, because that was how community elders, even unrelated ones, were addressed in Africville.
Read on at the Halifax Chronicle Herald