Coal Black Heart by John Demont

Author:John Demont [DeMont, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37330-4
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2008-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Naturally, the immigrants stuck together. Distinct neighbourhoods—in some places little more than ghettos—began to emerge, and gave towns their own taste, smell and feel, along with a cosmopolitan sheen that seemed way out of whack with their small size and bottom-rung economic status. The French and Irish flocked to Reserve Mines and New Waterford, named after Waterford, Ireland, from which many of the immigrants hailed. In places like Dominion, Italians played bocce and scopa and sang lugubrious old-country songs. In Glace Bay, the smells of West Indian food wafted out of open windows over the heads of yarmulke-wearing Jews piously making their way down the streets to the island’s oldest synagogue.

The waves of arrivals rubbed up against each other. Black furnacemen recruited from the United States to work in the Sydney steel mills experienced the same sort of racism and inequality they felt in their old country. Italian immigrants were beaten and robbed routinely enough by Sydney toughs that they began to travel in packs for protection. Eventually, they had had enough. One Saturday morning they marched to the front of their church carrying guns, pitchforks and “anything else suitable to serve as a weapon,” Esperanza Maria Razzolini Crook recalled. The priest defused the situation and things got better for a time, but the tensions between nationalities boiled over when Mussolini joined Hitler in the Second World War, making Italy an enemy of Canada. A few Italians from Cape Breton were sent to internment camps. For those allowed to stay, the hassles increased.

The earliest Jewish settlers came after spying advertisements offering free passage—and a chance to escape the European pogroms—in return for labour in a coal mine. Instead, most became peddlers, moving on to open retail businesses in competition with the company stores. David Epstein, whose existence I discovered in an old issue of a local historical newsletter, was one of them. He arrived in 1907, at age sixteen, unable to speak a word of English and without a cent in his pocket. He began to “peddle” for his Uncle Morris, who owned a general store in the Whitney Pier area of Sydney. Epstein’s turf was all of Victoria County. “I had a 75 pound pack on my back and fifty pound pack in front,” he recalled years later. “I walked house to house from [Cape] Smokey to Bay St. Lawrence.” That’s a good half-day drive in 2008; a century earlier, on foot, it must have taken weeks.

Sydney was a particular magnet. That’s why I want to take a minute to consider the three-square-mile, triangle-shaped area around the steel mill known as Whitney (as in Henry Melville) Pier when it was in its prime. Once it was an all but empty expanse of scrub land with a few scattered homes housing folk who lived off the ocean and subsistence farms. With the coming of the steelworks and the coal-shipping piers, the area filled up. What emerged was a community of communities: the Poles and Ukrainians settling in Bryan, Ferris and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.