Africa's Children. Sharon Robart-Johnson
to face. If they could survive slavery they could survive anything, for being free was all that mattered to them now.
They had lost loved ones through that slavery, yes, but now that they were free they worked side by side to help one another rebuild their broken lives. They worked harder than ever, year after year, diligently tilling the soil with inadequate tools. They planted vegetables, hoping that this year the crop would sustain them through another cold winter. Men and women would have hunted side by side for the sustaining protein that the wild meat provided.
Unfortunately, things did not always go as planned. Babies were stillborn because mothers had to labour at men’s work for long, seemingly unending hours in order to survive. And what of the babies that did make it to full term, only to have their eyes closed forever because of poor crops or scarcity of game? Rickets, malnutrition, and diseases, for which they had no immunity and hence no cure, ran rampant among them.
DEATH
Death stalked them at every turn with little help from the outside communities. Nevertheless, belief in their God was what sustained them through the hell that was their lives. Their hopes, their dreams, their prayers, it seemed, were all they had to cling to. And yet, sometimes even prayers were not enough. Did some of them pray for that dark abyss called death when their new life became unbearable? What became of those who did pass into the next world?
GONE AND SADLY FORGOTTEN
When was the first soul laid to rest beneath the cold, hard ground next to the small, but effective church they had established in the community of Greenville? There are no records to tell us. What family mourned a loved one, only too soon to forget, with no permanent marker laid to identify this soul? The pattern continued for nearly a century. Bury the dead; forget the dead. From the 1850s to the early 1960s at least one hundred infants, toddlers, teenagers, and adults that have been identified were laid to rest in the Greenville Church Cemetery. There was never a cross, a headstone, or foot stone to say, “Oh, yes, Mrs. Falls is buried there. I know her grandchildren.”
Indeed, so closely were the caskets crammed together that when the last bodies were interred, gravediggers had to dig in several places until they found an empty lot in which to lay a soul at rest. As they dug grave after grave, time and time again their shovels would scrape one of the many caskets that were already buried there. Whose casket received the “tap, tap, tap” of the diggers’ shovels as they tried to find space for a new coffin? Did this lost soul’s spirit say “Enough is enough?” Or did it heave a sigh of resignation, knowing that one more was coming home to rest? Even today, parishioners of that tiny church, the Greenville United Baptist Church, park their vehicles on hallowed ground under which is the final resting home of many, a truth that is generally known.
The Greenville Church Cemetery was not the only place in this tiny community to succumb to overcrowding. The African Bethel Cemetery occupies the space on which once stood the African Bethel Church. There, too, may be more than one hundred Blacks, many of whose names are lost to history. Although it is called the African Bethel Cemetery, there are White families buried there, as well.
Unlike the Greenville Church Cemetery, the African Bethel Cemetery had a few stone monuments marking the graves showing us that someone cared enough to tell their loved ones, “You will not be forgotten.” Obviously, poverty played an enormous role in determining whether a family could put a monument on a loved one’s grave. Should makeshift crosses have been erected, the wood would have rotted away with time.
Two cemeteries in the community have been mentioned. How many and where are the people buried who died before the organization of the Greenville United Baptist Church or the African Bethel Church? How many backyards are home to how many dead? We will never know. Is the community of Greenville one huge cemetery? Every time a new basement was dug, did those old bones become backfill in that same basement? Did the building of my own home desecrate the resting ground of one of Greenville’s former residents? One can ask a million questions, but there will be no answers.
A story was told to me by Arvella Johnson (Mrs. George Johnson), a trustee for the Greenville Church. Before the church was enlarged, allowing for some change to the layout, whenever there was a funeral the caskets had to be lifted in and out through a side window. Because of where the door had been installed, it was impossible to manoeuvre the caskets through the door and around the corner. Ms. Belle (as she is affectionately called) also told me that the church cemetery surrounds the church like a horseshoe and the graves are almost to the road’s edge and as far as the church’s well to the right. To the left, the cemetery may have gone beyond the yellow house that now sits next to the church property.
MIDWIVES
It is recorded that Greenville had three midwives, the only three whose existence has been recorded. There would have been earlier midwives. In their turn, they took charge when babies could no longer wait for a doctor to come from town (Yarmouth). Nearly all babies born in Greenville, until the time that women were forced to go to the hospital, were brought into this world by midwives. Three of the women known to be the saviours of some of these pregnant women were: Ruth Hannah Johnson, Deborah Ann (Herbert) Wesley, and Mary Agnes (Jones) Johnson, affectionately known by all as “Nanny.”
Ruth Hannah Johnson, a midwife, photo circa 1941, was the matriarch of her family in the small community of Greenville. She loved children and family was all important to her. She helped raise, or indeed did raise, the children of one of her daughters. Ruth Hannah was my husband’s grandmother.
Ruth Hannah Johnson, born circa 1847, died on June 2, 1945, at age ninety-eight. According to the funeral ledger entry, Ruth Hannah was the daughter of George Crawford and Elizabeth Brown. She was born in Greenville, as was her father. Because of her advanced age when she passed away, it is assumed that she had been a midwife in the community of Greenville well into the 1870s and later. Those who remember her say that she was a robust woman and an extremely hard worker.
Deborah Ann (Herbert) Wesley, born on July 10, 1869, was the daughter of Harriet Jane (Herbert) Jones and Winston Tobin. She married Frederick Henry Wesley on June 20, 1894, in Greenville. Like those women who came before her and those who came after, Deborah Ann Wesley performed a much-needed service in her community. How many babies may not have survived without her caring presence? Deborah Ann passed away on May 5, 1938, at the age of sixty-nine.
Mary Agnes (Jones) Johnson was born April 15, 1908. The daughter of James Jones and Agnes Hubbard, she was baptised at St. Ambrose Catholic Parish on April 19, 1908. She married Clarence “Bampy” Johnson, a resident of Greenville, and in the 1950s was baptized into the Greenville United Baptist Church. Mary was a midwife for more than fifty years and brought many of today’s residents of Greenville into the world. She loved what she did and would help anyone who came knocking on her door, no matter the hour. On February 10, 1995, “Nanny” was honoured by the Black Cultural Society for Nova Scotia and was inducted into the cultural centre’s Wall of Honour. She died on September 2, 2001, at ninety-three years of age.
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