M A C V A Y S I A

Black Gaels? Well, there are many references to ‘black’ people in Gaelic lore, but they almost always refer to someone with black hair, not black skin. One of my great-grandmothers, for example (my mother’s mother’s mother) was a MacDougall, a name that means ’son of the black stranger’ (dubh = black, gall = stranger). ‘Black’ also usually meant simply ‘dark’.

However…

The Wikipedia entry on Canadian Gaelic, which I check on frequently and have edited a bit, now has a very interesting bit of information about Gaelic-speaking Cape Bretoners of African descent:

Eòin and Seòras Mac Shuail, believed to be the world’s only black goidelophones (a person whose mother-tongue is Gaelic), were born in Cape Breton and in adulthood became friends with Rudyard Kipling. In 1896 the author wrote Captains Courageous, which featured an isolated Gaelic-speaking African-Canadian cook originally from Cape Breton.

A footnote at the end of that paragraph leads to a page called Nova Scotia Quotes, which contains the following information (attributed to a Pat MacAdam, originally printed in the Ottawa Sun on Oct. 29, 2006):

John and George Maxwell were identical twins. The only language they spoke and understood was “the Gaidhlig” – Scots’ Gaelic. The Maxwells were black. They may have been the only black Gaelic-speaking “Highlanders” in the world. For sure, there were no other Gaelic-speaking blacks in Nova Scotia. The Maxwell twins were born June 18, 1864, on Cameron Island in Bras d’Or Lake in the West Bay-Marble Mountain area of Cape Breton Island. Their father was the son of a West Indies slave who emigrated to Halifax from the United States after the American War of Independence. George met Rudyard Kipling in the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Kipling had many fixed addresses. He was born in India but lived in England, Burma, South Africa, Canada and the United States… His wife was from Gloucester and he was living there when he met George… Kipling was quite fascinated by George Maxwell and they spent several evenings together. At the time, Kipling was researching and writing Captains Courageous, a novel about Gloucester fishermen on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks. He decided to add a black character. So, George Maxwell became the cook on the fishing schooner..

There’s also an excerpt from Kipling’s Captains Courageous (published in 1896):

The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes Harvey had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and dumb-show invitations to eat more.

“See, Harvey,” said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, “it’s jest as I said. The young an’ handsome men – like me an’ Pennsy an’ you an’ Manuel – we’re second ha’af, an’ we eats when the first ha’af are through. They’re the old fish; and they’re mean an’ humpy, an’ their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don’t deserve. Ain’t that so, doctor?” The cook nodded.

“Can’t he talk?” said Harvey, in a whisper.

” ‘Nough to git along. Not much o’ anything we know. His natural tongue’s kinder curious. Comes from the in’ards of Cape Breton, he does, where the farmers speak home-made Scotch… “That is not Scotch,” said “Pennsylvania.” “That is Gaelic. So I read in a book.”

This is fascinating to me for several reasons. It’s fascinating to me as a Cape Bretoner, as someone whose family tree is full of Gaels, as someone who’s interested in history, and as someone who has had the good fortune to be close to Cape Breton’s small but vibrant black community.

Another reason it’s fascinating to me is that my grandfather, Duncan MacLeod, told me a story about one of the Maxwells, obviously a descendant of the brothers who inspired Kipling’s tale. This particular Maxwell was one of Papa’s colleagues at the steel plant. I called Papa to ask him about it several weeks back and he gave me a lot more details, but now I can’t quite recall everything (if only I had his sharp memory!). But I do remember this:

One night, when Maxwell (his name was either John or George, like his ancestors, but I can’t remember which) was a young man, he and another man stopped in at a rural Cape Breton house which was the home of a Gaelic-speaking family. The men were on a hunting trip and needed a place to stay, either that or they were just on their way somewhere and the weather turned ugly; whichever it was, it was quite common in those days for people in rural Cape Breton to give anyone who showed up a home-cooked meal and a bed to sleep on, whether they knew the visitors or not. These particular homeowners took the young men in, but the lady of the house said in Gaelic to the white half of the pair, ‘If you think I’m feeding that black thing there, you’re crazy.’

Well, things got smoothed over and the two men enjoyed a hearty meal and a good night’s sleep. The next morning, as he was heading out the door, young Maxwell turned to the old couple and said, in perfectly fluent Gaelic, ‘Thank you very much for the food and the bed. I really appreciate it.’ Something like that, but I’m sure you get the picture. I imagine the next thing heard after he said it was the sound of an old lady falling onto a wooden floor, unless her husband caught her. Priceless.

The idea of black people speaking Gaelic is, in a way, no more interesting than the idea of immigrants to western countries (immigrants from an amazing variety of linguistic backgrounds) speaking English. That is, most people could easily learn any language (yes, I’m generalising), under certain circumstances conducive to a language really taking root. But in a way it IS really interesting, simply because there aren’t a lot of black people who speak Gaelic, and even if there are—or at least were—most people don’t know about them. It’s fascinating because—for whatever reason—there is something incongruent about it. I almost always get surprised reactions when I speak Malay, not because westerners can’t learn Malay but rather because they usually don’t.

There’s more on black Gaels here, including a snippet from a text that was presented at a conference centred on Highland settlers:

Highlanders in the American South seldom overcame the practices and values of slave-holding society, however. Their slaves, being members of a Highland community, also spoke Gaelic. Lady Liston, wife of the British minister in Washington, wrote in the late eighteenth century, “The Gallic language is still prevalent amongst them, their Negroes speak it, and they have a clergyman who preaches in it.” John Sinclair wrote in 1872, “I have met with a number of coloured people who speak the Gaelic as well as if they had been raised in any of the Hebrides.” Sinclair himself was minister to the freed slaves of Harnett County, and some black churches continued to use Gaelic in religious services well after the abolition of slavery. Some African musicians were acknowledged masters of Highland music, such as fiddler John “Jack” McGeachy who lived in Robeson County, North Carolina from 1769 to 1869.

And then there’s this,
which, like the quotes above, might call into question the Maxwells’ status as the world’s only black goidelophones (not that it takes away from my interest in them):

Moreover, with a little more digging I found that on file in the North Carolina Historical Archives is a newspaper from the mid 1700s with an advertisement offering a reward for the capture and return of a runaway African slave. “He will be easy to identify” the advertisement claimed, “for he speaks only Gaelic.”

Another reason all of this is fascinating to me is that for about a decade now I’ve had a novel swirling around in my head, a novel in which a Gaelic-speaking black man is one of the central characters. The novel was a way for me to bring together various circles I found myself venturing into (in this case my Gaelic heritage and my five-year relationship with a black girl), circles which, at the time, I believed did not overlap (not to the extent I envisioned for my novel, anyway). Now I find out my premise isn’t so novel after all.

But it’s a pleasant discovery nonetheless. And it really doesn’t ruin my novel, which is about an old man whose dying wish is to be taken from his nursing home somewhere in the USA to the place of his birth, Cape Breton. His grandson is going to take him there, despite his contempt for the old man, who he thinks is partly responsible for his father’s poor upbringing and current status as a lifer in an American prison. The problem is that the old man, seemingly suffering from some form of dementia, now speaks nothing but Gaelic. So when a computer repairman from Cape Breton just happens to visit the nursing home and finds himself reluctantly acting as interpreter (he would like to forget about his Gaelic-speaking family and his troubled past), the grandson invites him on a road trip which will force the three of them to confront their respective demons.

Yeah, that’s my novel. Not sure if I’ll ever write it, but we’ll see.