Let's get to know Sam Slick a lot better

Hopefully, like a horrendous thunder and lightning storm, this unfortunate situation will clear.

The appearance of a particular C.W. Jefferys drawing on this year’s Sam Slick Days booklet cover was a shock to everyone. It was an oversight and we accept that. But it was the ultimate in such mistakes and mishaps.

This sort of situation is every editor, publisher and client’s nightmare. In fact, it’s pretty well a worst-case scenario and we can’t but accept the fact that the Sam Slick Society volunteers and others do feel the worst.

However, no one could be expected to be more upset, insulted and hurt than those of the African Nova Scotian community. It showed insensitivity as well as bad judgment. It also reflected negatively on the general community. We all look worse for it.

That said, it is an opportunity to get a better look at Sam Slick and his creator, Windsor native Thomas Chandler Haliburton. The works reflect, among other things, the early and mid-19th century views then current concerning ethnic and class relationships.

Haliburton was a male of upper middle-class British Loyalist stock. His writings reflected that, often at the expense of other groups: African Nova Scotians, women and others, including New England Planters. His views were not unique; they were the norm, even among the intelligentsia and the powerful.

In fact, Slick himself was an object of class fun. The formally uneducated though keen and observant salesman was a foil for Haliburton’s the Squire and his more refined view of things. Slick was an Archie Bunker type of character and just as Archie’s redneck, narrow, fearful and defensive views, expressed in uneducated and regional dialect, didn’t reflect those of creator Norman Lear, Haliburton’s and Slick’s views did differ.

Well, maybe not quite so differently in the case of Slick and Haliburton, who were perhaps closer than with which many of us are comfortable in 2008. But Haliburton was a product of his times and a reflection of them.

The Clockmaker series is an impressionistic portrait of ethnic relations in the province and relations between Nova Scotia and the outside world, including the republic to the south.

It’s part of us, just as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are part of American literature, with all the warts and carbuncles. So is Sam Slick – and Haliburton – to Canadian letters and it’s more pertinent in Windsor than anywhere else in the country. This is where it all began.

As Windsor native and professor George Elliott Clarke acknowledged in 1996, we can’t burn Haliburton’s works; they are part of our history.

Perhaps next year’s event can include a discussion of Haliburton, his Sam Slick character and their places in our collective history and literature. It’s only right that it does happen, and on an annual basis. These things have to see the light of day and get a good airing.

This is not to cover up, dress up, condone or apologize for Haliburton and his views, but to understand what he was saying and how to use his words to better deal with issues as they were in past and are represented now.

We can’t turn our backs on any of this and we’re sure Haliburton himself would appreciate that no one is infallible.