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FOR ANNA MINERVA HENDERSON (1887-1987)1
A native of Saint John, New Brunswick, Anna Minerva Henderson worked in Ottawa for many years as a civil servant, but took time to publish her poetry in Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1937 and 1939 as well as in an anthology, Harvesting: Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918-1938 (1938), edited by Ethel Hume Bennett. At age 80, in celebration, perhaps, of the Canadian Centennial year as well as of her own fine age, she published her chapbook, Citadel (1967),2 which thus became the first collection of poems by an African-Canadian woman. Even so, in her poetry, Henderson strikes a "raceless"-almost bloodless-stance, addressing her auditors as just another British-descended, Anglophile, Loyalist New Brunswicker; that is to say, she writes like an assimilada. Henderson's poetry avoids, save for two surreptitious moments, any statement of racial surveillance, and her verse is centred on the presumably white Anglo "Home" of New Brunswick and her fidelity to the white-run British Empire and its "daughter," the equally Caucasian-dominated Dominion of Canada. However, identity is always complicatedly complex: Henderson may participate, at a remove, in the often "colourless" African-American women's writing of the Harlem Renaissance, not to mention the race-evasive poetry of English Canadian verse. Nevertheless, read closely, Henderson may be "blacker" than she first appears.
Is She or Isn't She?
Born in 1887, Anna Minerva Henderson, a literate black woman in Saint John, New Brunswick, lived in a milieu where ideas from the trans-Atlantic African Diaspora washed ashore, delivered by itinerant preachers and politicized sailors. Perhaps, then, she perused copies of the once-Saint John-based, African-Canadian lawyer Abraham Beverley Walker's eleven-month-lived, five-issue journal, Neith, or a copy of his 1890 speech, The Negro Problem; or, the Philosophy of Race Development from a Canadian Viewpoint. In this address, Walker (1851-1909) urged all Negroes to make "periodical visits to Great Britain and Ireland," the centres of civilization, where there was no racial prejudice, and he felt that all should emulate the virtues of English gentlemen, who are "a chosen people who cling to [God's] right hand" (Winks 398). But if Henderson did read Walker, it was not for his PanAfricanism, but for his Anglo-Saxonism.
One can only guess about Henderson's familiarity with African-American women poets like Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-84)...