African Nova Scotians: 20th Century Canadian Legacies

Certainly, here is the transcript without the times and numbers:

“I am remarried. I had four boys and this is my girl, Sarah. So Sarah starts school. I say: ‘This is great. Here I am in my fifties, two small children and they’re going to school. I’ll have time to myself.’

So Sarah comes home from school one day, during her first year at school. Sarah says: ‘Mommy, I want to be a brownie.’ In her first afternoon at brownies… I took her to brownies and left her there and I felt: ‘This is great!’ But I had an hour and a half… all to myself! Oh, I was ecstatic! You think I’m a little crazy, but you know, I was in my fifties and started children all over again. I said: ‘I’m going to the library.’ For the first week, I dropped Sarah off, went to the library, got a card, got my books, I said hi, got to know everybody. I said: ‘See you next week’ to the librarians. They said: ‘OK.’

Next week didn’t come. You want to know what happened? You’ve got to guess what happened. I took Sarah to her brownie meeting. I got to the door with Sarah, and the leader, the Brownie leader came to me. ‘Oh’, she said: ‘Mrs. Robson, Mrs. Robson, I wonder if you could help us today.’ I said: ‘But I don’t know anything about… I know a little bit about Scouts, my boys were Scouts, but I’ve never been to the Brownies.’ She said: ‘Oh no, there’s nothing, you don’t need to do anything, just be here, I’ll tell you what to do.’ That was it.

What is it… 25 years later, I’m still with the Guides, because I got there and I loved every minute of Guiding: the people, the young people, the leaders, the program itself. My daughter, it helped her too, to become who she is.

I saw one incident. One of the questions, one of the crafts we had to do was to make a kite. Now I thought it would be great. And they taught that and they had sessions of that at the Bell Museum, in Baddeck. We couldn’t afford to send fifteen or twenty girls on a bus, so I said: ‘I’ll go up and bring the information back to the girls.’ So, I got on the bus, and they gave me the materials to start this kite.

When we were finished our kites, we were supposed to go out on a little trip, on a bridge, and try the kites out. So I get out there and the boy beside me, our kites got entangled. So the leader, she brought them in and explained about untangling. And the boy’s mother was standing behind him. I heard her say to the leader: ‘What’s she doing here?’ and instead of saying she… I wasn’t deaf then, I’m getting deaf now. I heard her say the N-word. ‘What is that N-word, what is that n****r doing here?’

I said: ‘I don’t need this.’ And the leader, the woman that was there at the museum, stepped right beside her. Didn’t say a word. So when we brought in our kites, the little boy was going with his mother, he turned around and he quickly ran over to me and he said to me: ‘Miss, she didn’t mean to be mean to you.’ And then his mother called him and he ran back. I thought, I wondered, you know: He knew more than his mother. He was polite and she was rude. She was racist and he was being raised in this home. I wonder what kind of young man he made. But who knows?”