York librarian discusses research on James and Mary Mink
On Thursday Feb. 18, 2016, Heritage Hall celebrated Black History Month by hosting a talk delivered by Guylaine Pétrin. Pétrin spoke about the myth and source story of Mary and James Mink.
Heritage Hall is formerly the Guelph British Methodist Episcopal church. The venue has been owned by the Guelph Black Heritage Society since 2011 and was built by former fugitive slaves who arrived in Guelph via the underground railroad.
Pétrin is a librarian at Glendon College at York University, but is also a genealogist and a historical researcher specializing in Upper Canada. Her work specifically focuses on black communities in old Toronto and the surrounding area.
The talk itself focused on a local Ontario folktale. The story has repeatedly been portrayed in various forms of media since the 1860s, including movies, novels, news stories, and history books.
According to the folktale, James Mink was a black millionaire in Toronto who owned livery stables. He offered his daughter, Mary, to the best white suitor he could find. The original story lists that man as James Andrews. Andrews eventually takes Mary to Chicago where he sells her into slavery. However, Mary escapes and ends up living on her own in Chicago until she dies. Most recently, the folktale was adapted into the 1996 film Captive Hearts: The James Mink Story, which draws its source material from a pivotal book in black Canadian history, The Freedom Seekers.
As Pétrin identified in her talk, the core issue with the story is that it is a folk legend. The story isn’t real—almost none of the story is true.
Pétrin has been researching the Mink family since 2013, scanning through old news stories, searching for birth records, baptism records, marriage records, and anything else that might afford researchers insight into the members of the Mink family.
Pétrin’s research—and her conclusions—will be published in the spring issue of Ontario History. The important details of her research, however, were discussed in her Feb. 18 talk at Heritage Hall.
According to Pétrin, James Mink was a real person. His father came to Canada via New York in the late 1700s. Although he was wealthy—Mink owned farmland just off of Danforth, as well as a stagecoach line, and a modest house at the top of Toronto Street—he was not a millionaire. Mink also never raffled off his daughter. Mary Mink actually married an employee of her father’s—a black man named William Johnston. William and Mary moved to Milwaukee, not Chicago, and Mary died of natural causes. Most importantly, Mary Mink was never enslaved.
The core question that Pétrin sought to answer pertained to how this story about a progressive, well-off, black Toronto family could become so convoluted in its telling that it became a veritable myth.
Pétrin explained that she believes that the story began with an interview conducted between James Mink and the New York Times, in 1868. Petrin called the story “a puff piece,” but it was the first time that James Mink’s story had been recorded in a paper outside of Toronto.
The loss of veracity arrived when the story travelled across the Atlantic Ocean. Taking inspiration from the New York Times article, an editor for an English magazine called Blackwoods wrote a story about a rich black man in Toronto who owned a stagecoach line, and who ended up selling his daughter to a white man.
Pétrin described Blackwoods as a magazine that was a “right-wing rag … against Catholic emancipation, against women, and against anti-slavery, and during the civil war were strong supporters of the south.”
Blackwoods was published by Edinburgh University, and, throughout its almost 200-year lifespan, the magazine featured many influential writers. The magazine eventually crossed the Atlantic to the large Canadian city of Toronto.
In 1880, several years after Mink’s death in 1868, the Chicago Tribune published the story as fact. The story was featured in publications across North America, eventually finding column inches in the Toronto Telegraph.
The Toronto Telegraph was the predecessor to the Toronto Sun. In 1894, then editor-in-chief, John Ross Robinson, set out to compile stories that were pivotal to the history of Toronto. Robinson’s selections filled six volumes of stories, and his collectin contained the falsified story of James Mink. From Robinson’s collection, the story ended up in The Freedom Seekers. The rest, as is said, is history.
During a question-and-answer session, The Ontarion posed the question: “How much harm do you think the fake story caused?”
Pétrin responded by saying: “False stories… cause harm especially by perpetuating the idea of women as objects to be bought and sold.”
Pétrin added that, in stories where the token woman is used as an object “she becomes a MacGuffin.” Pétrin said that stories like that of James and Mary Mink skew attitudes about women—especially black women—by transforming their characters into objects. However, Pétrin added that such portrayals were rare in Canada during the period that the Minks’ story took place; Canada abolished slavery in 1834.
“We like to think that Canadians are better than Americans … we say ‘we had the underground railroad: They had slavery, but it ignores the fact that there was a Canadian story too … False stories tend to replace the real stories,” concluded Pétrin.