“Riz Flowers” (1937), a play by Vida Mann

Just over a year ago, Kimberly (Mann) Duarte contacted me about her great-aunt, Vida Mann Keyworth. She was looking for information about Vida’s brother, Earl, who had moved out to BC in the mid-twentieth century. Vida and her husband Dennis had moved out here in about 1975 to look after Earl, who was ill. We know a little more biography, but not much, nor was I able to find any publications other than the one we had listed when Kimberly found us: the short play “Riz Flowers,” published in the Acadia Anthenæum in 1937, the year Vida graduated from Acadia University with her BA. Anton Wagner, in The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Plays in English 1766-1978 (Toronto: Playwrights, 1980), notes that the play is “a dialect comedy about life on a black homestead in the Gaspé and Sarah’s efforts to win first prize for her hooked rugs at a local fair” (218). It is certainly an almost-nostalgic representation of the home of Vida’s youth. (A small point of interest: the play includes, among other peripheral characters, an “Elizabeth Hottot.” We can see on Ancestry.ca that Hottot was a not-uncommon name on the Gaspé where Vida Mann grew up; in fact, her brother Ernest Calvin Mann married Annabel Hottot in 1940.)

Here’s what we know about Vida’s life:

Very little is known about Vida Mann Keyworth. A descendant of United Empire Loyalists, Vida was born in Campbellton, NB, in 1905 to William Peter Mann (1862-1955) and Edith Chatterton (b. 1873), and was raised primarily in or near her father’s hometown of Port Daniel, QC. She appears to have graduated with a BA from Acadia University in 1937, and by 1949 was teaching in Montreal. Sometime before 1960, Vida married Dennis Richard Keyworth, who had one daughter, Florence, by a previous marriage. Vida and Dennis had a son, James, but little is known about him.

In 1937, the same year she earned her BA, Vida published a play, “Riz Flowers,” in the Acadia Athenaeum, but it is not certain what else she wrote. Her interest in literature, however, did not wane with her marriage. In 1960, at the age of 55, Vida earned her MA in English literature from the Université de Montréal with the thesis “The Regional Novels and Travel Books of Will R. Bird.”

In 1963, Vida and Dennis (who is registered as a “foreman” in 1963 and elsewhere as a “machinist”) were living in Longueuil, QC, just outside of Montreal. By 1972, the couple had settled in Bonaventure, Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC, near her childhood home of Port Daniel. Dennis retired between 1972 and 1974, and died in Matsqui, BC, in 1978. According to family records, after Dennis’s retirement Vida and Dennis had moved to British Columbia to care for Vida’s brother Earl, who died in Victoria, BC, in 1982. Vida died in 2000; the couple are buried together in Hopetown, QC.

When even her relatives haven’t been able to find more, I am fairly sure that the general public won’t have much to contribute, but if any of you do see the name Vida Mann Keyworth in your travels through Canadian literature, please do let us know. Meanwhile, here is the script of “Riz Flowers.”

 

“On the Death of Judge Brew,” by Rebecca Gibbs

There is a complete biography of Judge Chartres Brew in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, but we of course are far more interested in the biography of the poet, Rebecca Gibbs, who was one of the first Black Canadian poets. We would be very grateful for additional information on her or any other Black early Canadian authors.

Here’s what we know about Rebecca Gibbs, much of it from the work of Crawford Kilian, who has done extensive research on the history of British Columbia, and has discovered a bit more about Rebecca Gibbs than any other of the sources I have found. A number of sources suggest that she was the sister-in-law of Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915). In 1866, Mifflin Gibbs was elected to the Victoria City Council, making him as the first Black person to hold an elected position in British Columbia, the second in Canada, and the third in North America. His younger brother, Isaac P. Gibbs was apparently in Barkerville during the autumn of 1868, as Crawford Kilian notes that he was “one of the blacks who suffered losses in the 1868 Barkerville fire.” “Mrs. R. Gibbs,” we are told, “saved her things, but lost her house.”

Rebecca Gibb’s grave marker in Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, BC, reads:

Here Lies Rebecca Gibbs
Born in Philadelphia, USA
About 1808
Many years resident of Barkerville
Died in Victoria B.C.
14 November 1873
Laundress, Poet, Nurse
One of many black people who came to Canada to escape discrimination before the US Civil War.
Erected by the Victoria Black People’s Society & the Old Cemeteries Society

In Pioneers: Blogging the Black Pioneers of British Columbia, Crawford Kilian posits that, given that Isaac would have been about 20 years younger than Rebecca, it is unlikely that they were in fact husband and wife. I have to agree, especially when other Ancestry.ca family trees list this Rebecca Gibbs’s husband as a Richard Gibbs. I have found no proof for that association at all, but neither do I have any evidence of a marriage to Isaac Gibbs.

In the sparse copies of the Cariboo Sentinel held in the University of British Columbia Archives, I  found only two references to Rebecca Gibbs (and none to Isaac): on 29 September 1868, Rebecca Gibbs is one of the people commended for quickly rebuilding their establishments, “Phoenix like,” from the ashes of the fire that destroyed the town; and on 11 June 1870, Rebecca Gibbs published a poem in commemoration of Judge Chartres Brew, who died on 31 May 1870.

It was fabulous to find the poem, but what I really want is a definitive answer to the question: was Rebecca Gibbs related in any way to Mifflin Gibbs, who holds such a significant place in the history of our province?

“Sauble Sunset,” by Elizabeth Holmes

Going through Dorothy Vick’s From Quill to Ballpoint, 1591-1988 (a bio-bibliography of authors from Owen Sound, Ontario), I have come across Elizabeth Holmes, Mrs. H.G. Greenhalf, who Vick calls “a mother of an early Owen Sound family.”  As Owen Sound was incorporated in 1857, that suggests that she should fit within the parameters of our project. Vick also tell us that “her nature poems often appears in several garden publications,” but sadly does not list them. Here is the poem Vick includes in the entry, sadly, again, with no indication of where it was first published. It really isn’t that good a poem, but I include it here as a foundation for my request for any information about the author that is out there. I’m fairly sure that some errors have been introduced in the reproduction of the poem, actually…

Sauble Sunset

The setting sun at close of day
Rose tints the stormy clouds of gray,
In rippled beauty softly be
Inverted drifts across the sky.
Caught in the sunset’s rosy light
Deep blue breakers all fulled with white
Racing on their ribboned bands
Leave rose pink pools upon the sands.

Vick, Dorothy. From Quill to Ballpoint, 1591-1988 [sic:1978?] (Owen Sound, ON: RBW Graphics, 1979). 

(And can someone explain to me, perhaps, how the bio-bibliographer has produced a title claiming to include authors up to 1988 when the copyright date is 1979? Another typo, and it should be 1591-1978? But 1988 appears in 2 places on the title page, bibliographical details notwithstanding).

A Book of Verses (1925), by Gertrude MacGregor Moffat

Moffat, Gertrude MacGregor. A Book of Verses, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Book Society, 1950).

Gertrude MacGregor Moffat (1884-1923)

The wife and daughter of educators, Gertrude Clementine MacGregor was born in 1884 in Stratford, ON, to Reverend Daniel Arthur McGregor (1847-1890) and Augusta Jane Hull (1857-1892). On account of their parents’ early deaths, Gertrude and her two sisters were raised in nearby townships by an aunt and later by her maternal grandparents. Although her father’s family spelled their name “McGregor,” Gertrude used the spelling “MacGregor.”
Gertrude matriculated from Moulton College in Toronto at the age of sixteen and attended McMaster University for a year. Ill health forced her to abandon her university career, although she continued to study independently at home, in the hope of returning to campus. In 1909, she married Thomas Edward Moffat (1884-1954), a teacher who became principal of a high school in Princeton, ON, and later in Tweed, ON. They lived in a series of Ontario towns (Sarnia, Madoc, Campbellford, Tweed), and had seven children before Gertrude’s untimely death in 1923 at the age of thirty-nine. She had suffered a ruptured intestinal ulcer, and died in Ottawa General Hospital. She was buried at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.
Although Gertrude began to write while young, her only volume, A Book of Verses (1924), was published posthumously by Macmillan of Toronto, with an introduction by B.K. Sandwell.

(From the entry that will be posted on the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory website [Edit: now linked above]).

Here are the page images of her volume and, as usual, a searchable pdf.

“To-Day,” by Mabel Hord

Hord, Mabel. “To-Day.” Creative Young Canada: Collection of Verse, Drawings and Musical Compositions by Young Canadians from Seven to Twenty Years of Age. Ed. Aletta E. Marty. Foreward “Agnes Delamoure” (Nancy Durham). Toronto: Dent, 1928. 106.

Altar Flowers (1936), by S. Berthe Husband

Husband, S. Berthe. Altar Flowers (London, ON: Author, 1936).

Here’s another old photocopy I found in our paper files. I have posted the page images and a searchable pdf. The copy quality leaves something to be desired on two of the pages, but hopefully that won’t be too much of an issue. The text on page five is sufficiently legible. Here is as much of the blurred text on page nineteen as far as I can decipher. Anyone with better eyes: please add your interpretations in the comments!

They are so sure, so certain of the Spring,
They do not fear this bleak October day.
But shower down on Autumn-laden wing
With twist and turn as tho’ great moths at play.

Could I but sleep beneath those gay-hued leaves
Heaped high above, as I securely lie
?-? sleeping, with no heart that grieves.
I ?  would surely be as glad to die.

[Whole line?]
[Again, whole line? “Winter’s” in there…]
But gaily shed their lives, so surely knowing
That Spring will come again—there is no death!

All we know about S. Berthe Husband is that she lived in London, Ontario, and self-published this slim volume of poetry in 1936. She also contributed poetry to the Crucible and Canadian Bookman magazines, and appears to have been born in 1891. It is possible that she is the Susan Bertha Husband who is buried in the Parklawn Cemetery in Waterloo, Ontario, but with no birth or death date associated with that record, it is really hard to say.

Does anyone out there know anything more about this poet?