Postcard images of Nova Scotia accent either the granite slag-heap coastline of Peggy’s Cove or Cape Breton’s cliff-hugging Cabot Trail. But when I was a “coloured” kid growing up in Halifax’s rough-and-tumble North End (all pavement and smashed glass and malice-eyed cops and pink-faced drunks), I felt immeasurably blessed. I knew that, 40 minutes away by car, bus or train, there was a grassy apple-blossomed paradise, the “Gateway to the Annapolis Valley,” the town of Windsor. Just southeast of it was Three Mile Plains, a black Eden where my mother’s parents lived. 

Three Mile Plains is also — ecumenically — “Five Mile Plains” and “Windsor Plains.” Not flat, it’s several loping kilometres of rolling slope upon which folks farm, raise cows and horses and allow hay to explode skyward. 

My mother’s people — the American slaves liberated by the British during the War of 1812 — arrived in coastal Nova Scotia in 1813. A generation later, they moved inland, perhaps to join a larger black community, to Three Mile Plains. There, blacks were granted too little land — deliberately — to become farmers. So they toiled in gypsum quarries and in white people’s homes to eke out livings. Some of them, including my maternal relatives, intermarried with the Mi’kmaq. They also erected a church, Windsor Plains (African) United Baptist, and attended the segregated (until 1956) one-room Three Mile Plains School. 

Acadia University reported in 1965 that most Three Mile Plains adults had only an elementary-school education. However, my mother, Geraldine Elizabeth Johnson, graduated from teachers’ college and my father, Bill Clarke, is a self-taught polymath, so when I was born in 1960 (my mother matching my initials to her own), they ensured that I received the best public education available. 

My formal schooling was gilded by visits to unpaved Green Street, which bisects Three Mile Plains, and my grandparents’ two-storey, white wooden house — with ocean-sounding conch shell doorstops and a veranda — and what seemed an expansive, dandelioned and willow-treed sloping front lawn. I loved their antique wood stove and the smells of burning wood crackling in the blue dawns and the Sunday supper riches from their garden: carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, potatoes. They even had a pear tree and a crabapple tree. The cheek-by-jowl woods, approached via tall fields of hay, sprouted trickily thorny blackberry and raspberry bushes along their fringe and brandished hazelnut bushes among pine, birch, spruce, alder and maple trees. A footpath plunged and twisted through the woods down to the iron tracks that bore freight and passengers through the valley, the train horns blaring whoo, whoo as they trundled past us, leaving a fragrant — to a child — whiff of diesel fuel in the air.