Black Then

A sixteen-year-old slave boy who finds freedom in a most unusual way, a teenage prostitute who does not, a business manager of the 1790s, a fugitive Kentucky slave who makes a name for himself as a jockey and horse trainer - these are some of the people we meet in these thirty stories about black life in and around Montreal between the last days of slavery and the early years of Confederation. The black experience in Montreal during these eighty-odd years, a time in which the city grew into the metropolis of a new country, has remained largely unknown. These stories begin to fill that gap.