Family Secrets by Catherine Slaney

Author:Catherine Slaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459714786
Publisher: Dundurn

CHAPTER 18

THE SEPARATION BEGINS

When you re black and white, negotiating racial identity is life going through a revolving door.1

In restrospect it seems quite possible that the move to Chicago may simply have facilitated a means of keeping the family together. It was during these years that Wilson Ruffin, the eldest Abbott son, was admitted to Medical School in Illinois and eventually graduated to become a prominent lung specialist. He married three times, always to white women. Gordon, born in 1885, grew up in the Black communities of Dundas, Chicago, Toronto and Buffalo. He later settled down in Toronto and married a white woman and raised a “white” family. Grace married a Black businessman, Frederick Hubbard of the prestigious Hubbard clan, and they also remained in Toronto, but raised a Black family. Both Ida and Helene married Black Americans and remained in the United States, both raising Black families.

Prior to her marriage, Helene spent ten years in St. Louis working as a Kindergarten teacher. Helene’s daughter Eleanore explained, “Well, Mama went to St. Louis because Grandpa Abbott was a School Trustee and he often visited the schools in the cities in the United States. They were familiar with the system and, of course, they knew she would not be able to find the same kind of work in Canada.” Helene was motivated to enter the teaching profession after a friend, Molly Lambert, introduced her to other professional young ladies who were either teachers or secretaries:

She was always ambitious and eventually entered the Kindergarten Program at the University of Toronto. When she graduated she looked around for a job in the United States and she and Grandpa settled on the city of St. Louis. At the time there was a rule that you couldn’t teach if you were married. That was true everywhere even in Toronto. You would have been taking a job from somebody else. Well, she went to St. Louis and she taught there for about ten years before she got married after a very long engagement.2

At that time, although educational opportunities were available in Canada, employment was not. In the article entitled “The Colored Woman of Today,” Fanny Barrier Williams makes a number of interesting observations:

A little over a century ago colored women had no social status and indeed only thirty years ago the term “womanhood” was not large enough in this Christian republic to include any woman of African descent. No one knew her, no one was interested in her. Her birthright was supposed to be all the social evils that had been the dismal heritage of her race for two centuries. This is still the popular verdict to an outstanding degree in all parts of our country. A national habit is not easily cured and the habit of the American people, who indiscriminately place all colored women on the lowest social levels in this country, has tended to obscure from view and popular favor some of the most interesting women in the land.

But in spite of these

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