Adding to the pages of Yarmouth's history

By Michael Gorman

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

Sharon Robart-Johnson never intended to write a book.

It was a curiosity about the names in local cemeteries that first led Robart-Johnson to begin digging through historical archives. But as she started digging and as she started to collect “boxes” of information, she started to get the sense that she might have something more on her hands. “I just wanted to identify people in the cemeteries in Greenville,” she says. “From there I decided, why don’t (I) just research some of the history. It just kept going on and on and on.”

Robart-Johnson says it wasn’t until she finished collecting information that she realized just how much there is. After all, as she rightly points out, the information has never really been collected and written down.

At her sister’s prompting, Robart-Johnson decided that maybe she could be the one to tell the story and set out to do just that.

The result is Africa’s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. The book chronicles black history in the area from its earliest dates and struggles to more recent successes. The book will be formally launched Wednesday evening at the Yarmouth County Museum.

It was a four-year process to put the book together. And as Robart-Johnson says, there was a lot of material to cover in writing the book, as evidenced by the size of her first draft. “My first rough draft was 840-plus pages,” she says with a laugh.

A rewriting process eventually got her down to around the 300-page mark. The challenge, says Robart-Johnson, was determining how to get the information she wanted in the book while also trying to keep the story moving and not overwhelm the reader.

Ultimately what she decided to do was tell the story in a chronological order and pick certain events representative of an era or situation to tell the story. Cutting wasn’t an easy process. As most writers know, it’s easy to become attached to material and not so easy to let it go. “It is hard to cut it down, but in the early days — back in the 1800s — most of it was bad. So you’re not going to put all that in. I just chose the one (story from that era),” she says, referring to the story of a girl named Jude who died from her beatings. “That to me was the worst . . . that could have been done and I just went on.”

While the book is a historical document, it isn’t written like a textbook. Robart-Johnson says it was important to her that the book be written in a way that would make people enjoy sitting down to read it. “I wrote the way I like to read,” she says. “I like to read something that has a story to it, which is what this does. It’s written like a story with accurate historical facts and references to those documents.”

Naturally, Robart-Johnson learned a lot about the area’s history during her research and the writing process. One of the things that stands out most to her was learning that there were slaves in Yarmouth. “That was an eye-opener for me, a really big eye opener.”

That so few people know about this aspect of the area’s history stands out to Robart-Johnson as a reason for why it should be documented. Only once people know about the history can they work towards shaping a better future, she says. “I’m hoping it will teach people that this is not acceptable,” she says. “What went on years ago — and in some cases is still going on today — is just not acceptable. We’re all human beings, regardless of the colour of our skin or our ethnicity.”

With this in mind, Robart-Johnson says she believes the book has a place in the school system for older students. It’s important, she says, that people have a complete picture of their history and where they come from. She notes that most of the black history taught in schools today is American black history. “It is ours indirectly because they did come from there,” she says. “But it’s still their history, it’s not ours. Our history was shaped once they landed on our shores . . . I’m hoping the older people will read it and learn a history they didn’t know. “But I’m (also) hoping the younger people, kids in the schools who are old enough to understand what it’s about, will read it and learn and understand that the type of things that went on in the past can’t go on in the future.”