Samuel R. Delany, the award-winning author of many science fiction books, and who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, had this to say to T: The New York Times Style Magazine in its Culture issue (April 24, 2022) about sources for his fiction:
"When I'm writing, I think about the paper in front of me and the story I'm trying to tell. I'm very much aware that almost any idea can be sourced from somewhere, and they're as liable to be from other books as they are from things in life."
Malcolm X once said that anything below the Canadian border was the South, referring to the existence of white racism throughout the United States. That led other blacks to label the so-called "liberal" North as "Up South."
The "Up South" label could just as easily apply to Canada, a destination many fugitive slaves headed for to gain freedom.
In Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells (Sutherland House Books, 2021), I learned that the Canadian-born film director (born in 1926),whose many films include In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, and The Hurricane, grew up in a Toronto neighborhood that was a five-minute walk from a Lake Ontario beach. At the beach, there was a sign Jewison would see that said, "NO JEWS, N******[NIGGERS], OR DOGS." The sign, writes Wells, a Canadian academic and journalist, was there to ensure that "the sight of a Black person or Jew" would not hinder the enjoyment of the beach by families seeking relief on a hot summer day.
So despite being seen as a refuge for runaway slaves and a land that promotes racial tolerance and multiculturalism, Canada had its own struggles with racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.
Note: Despite his surname, Norman Jewison is not Jewish. He is a white Protestant of British ancestry.
Nancy Milford (1938-2022), the biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's widow and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, was quoted in a Washington Post obituary (April 1, 2022) as telling the Chicago Tribune in 2001 that being "a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse."
