underground railroad - 2009 - A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

Kathleen Bradford

Scholastic Canada

2009

224 pages

A Desperate Road to Freedom is a work of fiction written in the style of a young girl's personal journal as she tells the story of her escape, with her family, from a slave farm in Virginia to a homestead in Ontario. Julia May Jackson, with her parents and siblings, flee slavery through the underground railroad to settle into the Owen Sound region. The book is a part of an interesting series, titled 'Dear Canada', put out by Scholastic Canada, of fictional journals written by girls who lived through times of historical trauma in the Canadian and (sometimes) American contexts. Other books in the series are written from the perspective of girls who lived through the internment of Japanese Canadian’s for example, or through the War of 1812. I intend to read the books on the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and the Red River Metis rebellion too.

I don’t know about other books in the series but what I admire about this particular entry is that it does not idealize Canadian society or sanitize it of its own racism. The history of slavery and the underground railroad in North America provides an opportunity for Canadians to compare our history with that of the (still) deeply racist US, with the potential for us to view ourselves historically as a nation as having more enlightened attitudes towards race. The diary of Julia May Jackson tells the story of racist brutality and murder in the US, but also of racial prejudice experienced after her family’s escape, in Ontario, where even the friendly folks of the area express their prejudices in subtle but no less upsetting terms.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, bandidos mc - book - 2009 - The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club
Alex Caine
Vintage
2009
222 pages

This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs.  Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.  

The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members.  Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs.

Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred.  According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution.  That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.

There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty.  

All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker.  Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood.

Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.  

vagabondia, toronto tent city - book - 2004 - Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown

Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shantytown
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
Random House
2004
475 pages

Hiya!  My copy of Down to This was acquired at the U of T Victoria College book sale held every fall.

From some indeterminate moment of genesis in the late 1990s, until September 2002, a homeless community thrived on the south-east corner of Toronto’s downtown.  At the mouth of the Don river there’s a post-industrial wasteland that joins the waterfront with the decaying portlands that a group of self-reliant vagabonds built shelters on.  These grounds were apparently contaminated with beryllium and other toxins, and many of the people who lived there were struggling with mental health, substance abuse issues, and other personal issues.  Still, they built a community that, to some extent, worked.  The people who lived at this site were evicted in fall 2002, and now, almost a full 10 years later, the site remains a fenced off waste.

 

Tent City Toronto: 2001

 

2005 view of Tent City grounds, taken from Citynoise.org

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a writer who, in the spirit of gonzo journalism, lived at Toronto’s tent city from November 2001 until the date of eviction.  Bishop-Stall, however, went beyond any of Hunter S. Thompson’s endeavors, by becoming fully integrated into the community.  He drank with the Tent City dwellers, occasionally smoked crack with them, fought with them, and talked and joked with them over that ten month period.  When Bishop-Stall was beaten up by some of the rougher inhabitants of the place, he didn’t pack up and leave immediately, in fact he stayed for many more months.  Down to This is a day-to-day account of Bishop-Stall’s experiences as a part of this community, with text under date headings to show the movement through time.  The precession of events at Tent City during this period went from a cold winter of communal bonding, to a hot summer of crack that brought the city to an end.

Bishop-Stall’s work is not just an account of life in the temporary makeshift village, it’s also a story of his own problems, as he weaves in memories and accounts of dreams of a failed relationship into his on-going narrative.  Furthermore, the activity of writing, of protecting his notes, and the signing of his publishing deal for Down to This are all incorporated into his story of living at the Tent City.  After the author secured publication for this book he began interviewing many of his neighbors about their lives, what brought them to this point, what kept then on the street, etc.  Bishop-Stall appeared to become good friends with many of the tent city inhabitants, and he manages to humanize them in his writing without idealizing them or treating them as either charity cases or lost causes (even if they did have long-term issues with addiction, committing crimes, mental health, etc).  

The most interesting aspect of Down to This are the detailed descriptions of the lifestyles of tent city’s inhabitants.  The dwellings made from plywood and found (or often donated) materials, the often unseemly methods of bringing in an income (Bishop-Stall hustles pool at a dive bar and he discusses one scenario where he sees an acquaintance crash his bike into cars and then demand money from the drivers), the constant drinking (tall cans of Crest Strong) and shouting and screaming and fighting.  One persistent feature of life in tent city was illness, the author was perpetually suffering from a variety of ailments throughout the book, recalling similar accounts of rough living as told by authors such as Ted Conover in his personal hobo adventure tale Rolling Nowhere, and others who have thrown themselves into this kind of lifestyle for the sake of writing.  

Tent City was a major embarrassment to the Toronto municipal government, and garnered international media attention for a brief period of time in the early 2000s.  The city had to shut it down to hide its shame... not only that but during the city’s final summer crack dealers were setting up shop, and the tent city was becoming an example of a Sadistic counterpart to Hakim Bey’s concept of the ecstatic and carnivalesque temporary autonomous zone.  It was not only residents of tent city who were consuming the crack, but Bishop-Stall described scenes of middle-class teenagers coming down to buy the stuff.  At that point tent city was becoming a high-profile law-free zone open-air drug market that no government could knowingly tolerate.  For Bishop-Stall, the eviction of the tent city population was bitter sweet, as the community was broken up but everyone was given housing.  

A filmmaker named Eric Weissman made a documentary film about the tent city and its inhabitants, and followed the lives of some of them well after the date of eviction. Weissman's film appears on youtube in segments, here's part 2 (for some reason blogspot's internal youtube video search couldn't locate part 1: