In the Upper Country


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 viking
 an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
 Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
 Published in Viking hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2023
 Simultaneously published in the United States by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 Copyright © 2023 by Kai Thomas
 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
 Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
 Title: In the Upper Country : a novel / Kai Thomas.
 Names: Thomas, Kai, author.
 Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210395087 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210395095 | ISBN 9780735243460 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735243477 (EPUB)
 Subjects: LCSH: Ontario, Southwestern—Race relations—History—19th century—Fiction. | LCSH: Ontario, Southwestern—History—19th century—Fiction. | LCSH: Slavery—Southern States—History—19th century—Fiction. | LCSH: Southern States—Race relations—History—19th century—Fiction. | LCSH: Southern States—History—19th century—Fiction.
 Classification: LCC PS8639.H576 I52 2023 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
 Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward
 Book design by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke
 Cover design by David Litman
 Cover images: (silhouettes), (woman’s face) PeopleImages / Getty Images; (woman) Magdalena Russocka / Trevillion Images; (grass plants) George Peters / Getty Images 
 
 
 
 pid_prh_6.0_142226813_c0_r0
 
 
 
 For Lyris.
 
 
 
 
 I got to be quite hardy–quite used to water and bushwhacking; so that by the time I got to Canada, I could handle an axe, or hoe, or anything.
 mrs. john little
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Prologue
 
 
 
 A pirate on the inland sea took me south.
 “It’s a thing to behold,” he told me. “In truth I hadn’t seen free country till I saw that. You been to coloured church before, yes, but has your grain known a Negro gristmill? No. Not unless you been there. The ironmasters, the schoolteachers, even the dogs; all coloured. And the runaways flood in like spring and summer rains. Hobbling, mind you; running, holding their wounds, blood in their eyes. There in New Canaan or Dunmore, Buxton or up in the Queen’s Bush. There to rest their cracked feet. Heal unseamed wounds. They have time there, at long last; doctoring sometimes, but mostly just time, and bush-wild medicine from a hand like yours. And once healed, I tell you, in those towns they have a grace in the way they walk…like they know for certain that they reached where they meant to reach.
 “If I would be an honest man,” the pirate said to me, “I’d make my life in such country. Glory and the promised land, no?”
 I’m sure I scoffed. Even then, I had seen enough to know that behind every glorious thing is a whole mess of trouble.
 
 
 Chapter I
 
 
 
 Dunmore, July 1859
 It was dusk, and I muttered curses to myself as I made my way down the muddy green lane. Just minutes earlier, it seemed, I’d been tired and keen to finish my day with some stew and warm bread; some idle chitchat in the rocking chair, perhaps. Yet instead there I was, trodding like a fool through the mire and the quickening dark.
 Mine was an unusual profession for a young woman. In Spancel Narrows, where I was born, there was a kind old bachelor named Samuel Frost, who loved hosting his coloured neighbours; many a night we brought our suppers down to his estate, dined at his great table, and then sat at the hearth listening to the old-timers. And for years, three mornings every week, my mother would hurry me along through the woods, and I would join Frost in his study while she cooked and cleaned. There, I left behind the paltry education of the crowded schoolhouse, and under his careful tutelage I learned properly to read, write, and tally accounts. I didn’t realize until many years later—until I got to Dunmore, in fact—what a gift he and my mother had given me.
 His teaching gave me sovereignty in my work. My employer, Arabella, would be off for days to her meetings and speaking engagements with the True Bands and the congregations as far off as Toronto; as far off as New York even. After a while it was decided I would stay at the house. There were five others there when Arabella was gone. Her brother worked days in the swamp, and he had three young children to whom he had the will, if not the time, to attend. The children’s mother had not survived their escape. Their grandmother Velora used to look after the young ones, but she had begun to lose her hold on memory. She took to hiding food in corners and under loose floorboards, and dinner wouldn’t be made when the brother came home from the swamp and the children from school. They would smell the food days later when it began to rot, and the children would hold their noses at one another and titter about “Granny’s stinkers.” Arabella would quell any such teasing if she heard it. She understood that Velora’s forgotten caches were the resurfacing of an old practice: as a young slave woman she’d made a habit of secreting away meat and provisions for her family in the field.
 As Arabella will often remind me, she considered me sent from above—even though my arrival in Dunmore was thought to be strange