Kai Thomas’ ‘In The Upper Country’: A tree-planting encounter inspires historical Black fiction

Eye-catching debut fiction, “In the Upper Country” delivers a novel of nestled stories — animal tales, autobiographical snippets, fables, parables, travelogues, slave journal extracts, anecdotal recollections, and journalistic articles. Ottawa-born Kai Thomas has built a cerebral puzzle box of a Gothic-tinged historical novel; it reimagines (and repopulates) rural Victorian Ontario while also meditating on family, community, indigeneity, history and Canada’s roles in the slave trade.

The novel’s origins connect a bygone epoch to the here and now. Thomas concludes “Upper Country” with a curious Author’s Note, an anecdote about himself, police and a First Nations man — all unfolding between university terms when he was tree-planting near a remote B.C. town. Lodged in his memory, the event nourished a growing interest in creative writing. It proves an unexpectedly contemporary inspiration for fiction set well before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Thomas’ eventual goal, he writes, “was to conjure a world that was very close to the ‘real’ world, yet different in some of the ways that fiction allows.” Not recognizably a “real place,” Dunmore, Ontario — a Black enclave and “swamp town full of witches and moonshine” — is the novel’s principal setting. In Dunmore, Jane-of-all-trades Lensinda Martin helps publish the abolitionist “Coloured Canadian” periodical. With her “applewood skin, saucy tongue, and warring glares,” Lensinda is saddled with a reputation as being difficult.

Lensinda begins her tale in 1859, where she’s harried with work tasks. A bundle of impulses and opinions (she’s known as an unchurched “bush-wild thing,” an “upper-country witch,” and one of many local doctors “with a knowledge of potions as well as poisons”), Lensinda can’t crow over widespread popularity. As a protagonist, though, she’s commanding.

In “Upper Country”’s first chapter, neighbours alert Lensinda to news — a “strange tale” that may or may not involve a fatal shooting at a nearby farm outside of Dunmore, which is an Underground Railroad hub where bounty hunters and slaves fleeing the South are common sights. She questions eyewitness farmer Simeon, who answers Lensinda’s bluntness (“What in the hell went on down here?”) with a zigzagging chronicle.

The end of his long, meandering story ends with a fatally wounded bounty hunter and an elderly Black woman, a fugitive. Curious about this stranger (and hotly pursuing an article topic), Lensinda soon visits a jail in nearby Chatham. She tells the cantankerous old woman prisoner, “Folks may want to hear about how an old woman shot a man down in a cornfield.” The woman demands transactions: she will barter facets of her story for stories from Lensinda. Outmanoeuvred, Lensinda agrees. When the “crone” — named Cash, it is later revealed — then tells the fable of the Rabbit and the Fox, Lensinda wonders, “What was the crone playing at?”

Stubborn, the quarrelsome women continue to wrangle.

Enigmatic and elliptical, harrowing and heartbreaking, the story exchanges place readers in Lensinda’s position: what purposes do these stories have? What truths might they communicate?

Gradually, as the tales proliferate and overlap, Thomas identifies connections — a lineage — between Lensinda and Cash. (Though their relationship remains prickly: “What you believe,” the prisoner snaps after Lensinda doubts a tale’s revelations, “is none of my concern. You’re not at Sunday service, girl.”)

Thomas utilizes a theatrical setup — two apparent strangers in a shadowy cell who swap tales as an indirect way of both communicating and understanding one another. Through it he illustrates the women’s growing familiarity and commonality, and their shared heritage too. If the sheer number and kinds of tales occasionally grow unwieldy and eclipse Thomas’ fascinating portrayal of Dunmore and its citizens (including Lensinda, her no-nonsense boss and bartender), there’s undeniable force to the embedded stories and the historical truths they bring to vivid life.

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