The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children by Wanda Taylor

Author:Wanda Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2015-12-14T14:52:30+00:00

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Ironically, the most devastating event of Starann’s life at the Home happened while she was away from it.

“I had been begging to go visit with my relatives in Ontario for a long time,” Starann explains, “but the answer from staff was always no. I was so desperate to go.” When she was about thirteen, four years after first arriving, the Home began making arrangements to place Starann’s siblings in a foster home. She had no idea. None of the staff informed the overprotective older sister that she was about to be separated from from her brother and sister, the two youngest. Instead, the staff agreed to let her go to Toronto to visit family. Starann was overjoyed. She was told it would be her reward for passing grade seven. While she was away, her younger brother and sister were shipped off to a foster home.

The foster parent, Jane Earle, would later tell me that she and her husband, Gordon, understood the children were not to be separated and were willing to take them all, but it was the Home that made the decision to allow only the younger ones to go. The two older sisters, Starann and Deanna, were left at the Home. Jane expected that once the younger ones got settled, the other two would be allowed to come.

When Starann returned to find two of her siblings gone, she was devastated. She had been promised she would not be separated from them. With no real explanation from the Home, the resulting trauma caused Starann to hate and resent the foster parents, believing they purposely separated her from her younger brother and sister. With no counselling or support from the Home or the child welfare agency who placed her there, Starann’s feelings about this traumatic separation festered for years. She wouldn’t learn the truth until adulthood.

As she got older and bolder, Starann made many attempts to run away from the Home. She would make her way back to Truro to her father, which was almost an hour away by car. Each time, she recalls, he had to make the heart-wrenching decision to send his daughter back.

I was taking off and running away almost every week. But because I was a ward of the Province, my father would explain that I couldn’t stay and he would take me back to the Home. Eventually, that male staff [member] who was molesting me started coming to look for me. Every time he found me and brought me back, he would beat me up for running away. He never left a mark on my face, but my body was always full of bruises and possibly broken bones. I never got to see a doctor. And every time I would run away and he would find me, he would beat me up worse than the time before.

The same staff member has been named in numerous affidavits of former Home residents, including that of Harriet Johnson, alleging rape and sexual abuse.

When Starann returned to the Home,

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