This month, a historic house on Rudlin Street will be commemorated with a plaque in honour of B.C.’s Black History Month. The house was built in 1862 and its original owners, John Dandridge and his wife Charlotte, were part of a wave of African-American immigration from California to Victoria in the 1850s and 1860s. Charlotte Dandridge is buried in Pioneer Square, only a few blocks from where I live.
Putting up the plaque is an act of commemoration. It’s a way of declaring that this house, these people and the circumstances that brought them to this city are worthy of remembrance.
Poised as we are on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, our collective memory will be focusing overwhelmingly on military history for the next little while. The Conservative government is planning to commemorate these anniversaries as great moments in Canadian national history.
It’s the proper time now, then, to pause and think about who memorializes our history, and how we publicly remember it.
The plaque on Rudlin Street is a small thing, but I like small reminders of our history. I like brass name-and-date signs and unimposing but informative plaques on the sides of buildings, and the little tags on street signs that designate areas as “historical.”
Of course, all parts of our city are historical, insofar as most of the locations and streets and landscapes are the same as they were a century ago, but it’s one thing to be in a place that has history and another thing to acknowledge that history. The past is a place that always is and always will be inaccessible, but physical reminders of the past are woven throughout our city.
In the streets of Berlin, you’ll find plaques on the street in front of some of the houses. The plaques detail how on such-and-such a night, so many Jewish people were removed from their homes. What these two examples have in common — the plaques in Berlin and the plaque on Rudlin Street — is how the act of remembrance is made physical. Putting plaques in plain sight incorporates the past into the present in a way that’s part of daily life. It’s almost mundane, which, of course, is part of the point.
It’s different from what we usually think of as public remembrance. Memorials, for example, are places that exist in the public space but are removed from our daily lives in some way. I’m thinking of large public spaces with things like statues or obelisks — objects on sites where we gather and engage in public ceremonies of memory.
In Pioneer Square, for example, there’s a small memorial in the centre of the park. A pathway leads to the dais, but it’s surrounded on all sides by a fence. There are currently wreaths resting on the shallow steps. You wouldn’t sit on those steps to relax — there are benches by the graves for that purpose. The memorial is simultaneously accessible (the path has been newly paved) and sacred (the fence requests that we pause and take stock of why we want to enter that space). Physically, you can enter, but cultural expectations suggest that you might want to keep your distance.
Do we find our history in that distance, in that understanding that here is something to be respected by a physical remove? Or do we find our history in the words stamped down on brass, on the streets and houses that we can move through? Do we find our history temporally, by dedicating time to the investigation of history that has been obscured and unwritten, as Black History Month attempts to do?
Putting plaques on the house of a black pioneer might be tokenism, but it’s also a way of reworking, even if in a small way, the still-dominant discourse of Canadian history as a story about White Men Doing Things. And that’s always a good thing, because yes, white men did things, but other people did things too and we don’t talk about those people and those things nearly enough.
(As an avid consumer of trashy historical fiction, I’m continually appalled by the authors who view history as white, with people of colour largely — and comfortably — absent.)
The state puts its stamp of approval on certain forms of remembrance and upon certain histories. But what falls through the cracks? What’s important to us?
