Tag: Black history

SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Porter (Feb. 21, 9 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)

Marsha Greene, one of the co-creators of “The Porter,” says the historical drama is about aspiration and ambition. She was talking about the dreams of its characters when she told me that in an interview, but she could as well have been describing the people who made this show happen.

“The Porter” is indeed aspirational and ambitious and, more importantly, has seen those ambitions realized, based on the two episodes I’ve watched and rewatched. It’s something of a unicorn in homegrown television, a series that tells a Black Canadian story with a majority Black cast and creative team.

This is a richly drawn portrait of not only a time and place in Canadian history, but a substantial world whose Black characters live nuanced, complicated lives. We see not only the trains where the porters attend obsequiously to the white passengers — “the most invisible (men) on the Earth,” Junior (Aml Ameen) calls them — but the Black community of St. Antoine, Montreal (also known as Little Burgundy), where the porters are respected and admired.

You can tell that every detail of the series has been thoughtfully conceived and honed, from the writing and performances, directing and cinematography, to the set, costume design and soundtrack. It all comes together in an absorbing story rooted in the 1920s but relatable to the here and now.

Ameen, a British actor, and Ronnie Rowe Jr., a Toronto actor most recently seen on the bridge of “Star Trek: Discovery,” are porters Junior Massey and Zeke Garrett, friends and World War I veterans. A tragedy involving a fellow porter sets them on opposing paths: Zeke to try to win improvements in working conditions through unionization; Junior to try to improve his financial condition by smuggling whisky to Prohibition-era Chicago, where their train makes regular runs.

Their stories intersect those of the other lead characters: Marlene (Mouna Traore), Junior’s wife and a Black Cross nurse; Miss Queenie (Olunike Adeliyi), a Chicago gangster of whom Junior runs afoul; and Lucy (Loren Lott), a performer and bartender at the Stardust nightclub who aspires to fame in New York City.

Arnold Pinnock and Bruce Ramsay, who originated “The Porter,” also play parts as porter Glenford and conductor Dinger, while celebrated American actor Alfre Woodard portrays brothel owner Fay.

Those brief character sketches barely scratch the surface of everything that happens in Season 1. While I’ve only seen two episodes, I’ve read ahead about the other six and it’s clear there’s much more story to come should “The Porter”be granted subsequent seasons.

Canada doesn’t mine its history — let alone its Black history — for TV drama the way some other countries do. The last Canadian historical drama I recall that told a specifically Black story was the miniseries “The Book of Negroes” (2015), which is set in America and Africa as much as Canada.

By breathing vibrant life into an overlooked portion of the country’s past, “The Porter” has set a standard that hopefully other Canadian creators will emulate.

BLK: An Origin Story (Feb. 26, 9 p.m., History and StackTV)

Chances are you’ve heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when over two days a white mob burned down the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and killed as many as 300 people. Ever heard of the Shelburne Race Riot in Nova Scotia?

No lives were lost, but the white rabble there inflicted 10 days of terror, beating Black people and destroying their homes. Why? Because a Black preacher named David George baptized a white woman. And the intent in Shelburne was the same as that in Tulsa: to put Black people in their place.

This is one of the bits of history — Canadian history, not just Black history — elucidated in “BLK: An Origin Story,” a four-part docuseries that traces the presence of Black people in this country as far back as the 1700s.

The first episode, the one I watched, covers the migration of three groups of Black settlers to Nova Scotia beginning in 1783; the second, Black and Indigenous War of 1812 vet John “Daddy” Hall of Owen Sound; the third, the Hogan’s Alley community that began in Vancouver in the 1850s; the fourth, Little Burgundy, the Montreal neighbourhood that is the setting of “The Porter.”

Listen, we all know that history documentaries sometimes seem like things we should watch rather than things we want to watch, but my attention didn’t flag once while I watched this one. Not only is the subject matter interesting, it’s delivered by a lively assortment of mainly Black Canadian experts, not just academics but poets like George Elliot Clarke and El Jones, and authors like Lawrence Hill.

There’s so much I didn’t know: that besides being populated by Black Loyalists escaping the American Revolution (the people whose names were entered in “The Book of Negroes,” source of the CBC miniseries mentioned above and the Hill novel it was based on), Nova Scotia also became home to “maroons,” self-liberated Jamaicans who were forcibly deported after they battled the British colonizers there, as well as Black veterans who supported the British in the War of 1812. Or that the maroons helped build or rebuild some key edifices in Halifax, including Citadel Hill and Government House. Or that Nova Scotia schools weren’t officially desegregated until the 1950s although the last Blacks-only school didn’t close until 1983.

It’s all covered in more detail than I can do justice to in this post.

What wasn’t in the least surprising was the discrimination so-called “free” Blacks faced when they arrived, often denied the land they had been promised for their service to the British, left at the mercy of white settlers to earn livings and feed their families, to the point that many of the Black settlers fled Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone.

The popular narrative of Canada as it relates to its Black population tends to be fixated on the Underground Railroad: Canada as a shining beacon to those escaping enslavement in the southern U.S. But as art historian and researcher Charmaine Nelson says, “We’ve enshrined in our curriculum a 31-year history when we were abolitionists, and obliterated, ignored and erased our two-century history of slaving.”

Sure, that’s an indictment of our smug sense of superiority to our American neighbours — already shot to hell by the convoy protests in Ottawa — but it’s also an opportunity for honest reflection.

Personally, I’m all for Canadians learning more about the history of this country and not just the parts that play into our overblown reputation for being nice.

History also has the three-part miniseries “Abraham Lincoln” starting Feb. 21 at 9 p.m., an examination of the life of the U.S. president as well as his attitudes toward slavery. It’s part documentary and part dramatization, with Graham Sibley playing Lincoln.

Short Takes

Vikings: Valhalla (Feb. 25, Netflix)

If the end of the TV series “Vikings” in 2020 left you hankering for heroic quests, Norse accents and people dressed in leather and furs, this show inspired by Michael Hirst’s original should scratch that itch. Hirst is an executive producer on this one, created by movie writer Jeb Stuart (“Die Hard,” “The Fugitive”). It shifts the action 100 years past the previous series and focuses on relative youngsters Leif Eriksson (Sam Corlett), son of Erik the Red; his sister Freydis (Frida Gustavsson) and Prince Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter). “Valhalla” returns to Kattegat, now ruled by Jarl Haakon (Caroline Henderson), and to Uppsala, where Haakon sends Freydis on a pilgrimage. Leif and Harald, meanwhile, head to England to avenge the St. Brice’s Day Massacre, which in the show — if not in actual history — is the destruction of all Viking settlements in England by King Aethelred II. But the campaign is complicated by tension between Vikings like Leif who believe in the old gods and those who have converted to Christianity, including Harald’s half-brother Olaf (Johannes Haukur Johannesson).

Netflix also has “RACE: Bubba Wallace” (Feb. 22), a docuseries about the only full-time Black NASCAR driver.

Why We Dance (Feb. 25, 9 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)

For a few glorious months in Grade 4 (or was it 5?), I was an aspiring ballet dancer, complete with my first pair of toe shoes. And then the free lessons at school ended and the toe shoes got put away in a chest, but that enduring love of dance is why I give things like this documentary a second look. As part of “The Nature of Things,” filmmaker Nathalie Bibeau (“The Walrus and the Whistleblower”) examines the human impulse to dance, what purposes it serves and which other species can move to a beat, which might ring a bell if you’ve watched videos of Snowball the cockatoo. Human dancers strut their stuff here too, including members of Toronto Indigenous troupe Red Sky Performance.

Odds and Ends

Disney’s big debut this week is the revival of its early aughts animated series “The Proud Family.” “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” (Feb. 23, Disney Plus) focuses on an older version of Penny Proud (Kyla Pratt), as well as her friends and family, while expanding to include LGBTQ characters. The movie thriller “No Exit” also premieres under the Disney Plus Star banner, on Feb. 25.

HBO and Crave have the documentary “Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches” (Feb. 23, 9 p.m.), in which five of the anti-slavery activist’s speeches are highlighted by five Black actors: Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Jonathan Majors, Denzel Whitaker and Jeffrey Wright. Also premiering on Crave are “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber” (Feb. 27, 10 p.m.), the first instalment of a Showtime anthology series starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Uma Thurman and Kyle Chandler; and the Clint Eastwood film “Cry Macho” (Feb. 26, 9 p.m.).

Lifetime has the docuseries “Janet Jackson” (Feb. 26, 8 p.m.), which claims to be an unfiltered look at her “untold story.”

Prime Video, meanwhile, has another music documentary with “Charli XCX: Alone Together” (Feb. 24), showing the pop star making an album with the help of fans while quarantined at home during the pandemic.

PBS’s “Nova” is highlighting people with disabilities with “Augmented” (Feb. 23, 9 p.m.), about biophysicist Hugh Herr, who lost his legs in an accident at 17 and became an inventor of better prosthetic limbs; and “Predicting My MS” (Feb. 23, 10 p.m.), which follows filmmaker Jason DaSilva and how he handles his diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis.

Finally, BritBox has a second season of the Scottish crime drama “Traces” (Feb. 22), which stars Molly Windsor as a forensic lab assistant hoping to solve her mother’s long-ago murder, and co-stars Laura Fraser (“The Loch,” “Breaking Bad”) as her boss; Martin Compston (“Line of Duty”) as her boyfriend and Canadian Jennifer Spence as a prickly professor of forensic anthropology.