“Porter Talk”: Podcasting and the Power of Oral History

Stacey Zembrzycki

In 1986 and 1987, Stanley G. Grizzle began to cold call old friends, asking them if they would be willing to share their memories of portering during the first half of the twentieth century. This famed Toronto-based labour activist, war veteran, civil servant and citizenship judge, who was also a porter for twenty years, was in the midst of writing a memoir. Beyond his own story, Grizzle sought to fill in gaps in his knowledge about the history of unionization and, in particular, the development of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. This was the first organized union for Black Canadian men who worked as porters for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Some were unabashed in their refusal, making it quite clear that they did not want to revisit the past. Dredging up the details was too complicated, and they had closed the book on that chapter of their lives.^[i] Most, however, said yes immediately, inviting Grizzle into their homes across the country, where they proceeded to banter about life on the rails while hammering out the finer details of the larger processes through which they had lived.

Grizzle donated forty-three of these informal conversations, along with his extensive collection of textual holdings, to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in 2007. Recently, with help from the LAC Foundation, the recordings were digitized and made available to the public; those interested can now listen to the interviews through the Collection Searchtool on LAC’s website. Detailed summaries, which point researchers to the different sound files that make for a complete conversation, are contained in the record details for each interview in the collection. There is no order to the tapes Grizzle donated; he seems to have recorded his conversations on whichever ones had space available! The interviews tell us not just about what life on the rails was like for Black porters, but how close relationships forged on the job bound the men together for life, ultimately shaping the intimate conversations Grizzle had with each of them.

These interviews and others are at the heart of a new Discover Library and Archives Canada podcast series. In particular, Voices Revealed showcases LAC’s vast but little-known oral history collections, making space for those from a variety of marginalized and underrepresented communities from across the country to tell their own stories in their own voices. Narratives of injustice, conflict, resilience and resolution enable us to understand how the past powerfully defines our present, while also providing the insights we need to imagine new directions for our collective future. Everyone has a story to tell, and it is our hope that this podcast series will provide an accessible means through which a variety of narratives can be contextualized and shared.

The first season, “Porter Talk,” which is rooted in Grizzle’s interview collection, introduces listeners to the Black men who rarely had a name, let alone a voice, while they were employed in the extractive and highly exploitative job of portering. Their stories, along with those shared by their wives and children, speak truth to power, emphasizing the anti-Black racism these folks endured both on and off the rails and the strategies they employed to move forward and build community. This season begins by introducing listeners to Grizzle himself, reconstructing his life story and the ways that activism shaped his worldview. This episode provides the essential information needed to wade into his interview collection and the particular clips that are integrated into successive episodes. “Porter Talk” also focuses on who the men were, where they came from, what their working conditions were like, how unionization developed and the various ways that communities, and women in particular, created the necessary foundations on which change could occur. Episodes are contextualized by leading Black scholars, Canadian historians and community storytellers and knowledge keepers, helping listeners make sense of the larger narrative that shaped the kinds of stories porters could tell. It is our intention to launch a new episode every six weeks. Those interested are encouraged to subscribe on their favourite podcast platform to listen to episodes as they are released!

Pedagogy has been central to the design of this series. Encouraging listeners to ponder who created the interviews and the conditions under which these exchanges took place serves as our starting point. Each episode also includes a timestamped and searchable transcript that directs listeners back to the original collection material. Our hope is that teachers and students in particular will engage with the primary sources themselves, listening to the interviews, making their own connections to these men and finding their own unique meanings in the words that are shared. Additionally, we have provided a list of resources for each episode, drawing attention to major works in this field, as well as biographies for each interviewer, interviewee, scholar and community member included in the episode. There are many ways to gain access to this important collection!

Oral histories, once recorded, are rarely listened to again. They tend to gather dust on closet shelves, remain packed away beneath mattresses or simply take up space on our computers and external hard drives. Publicly available interviews are often edited into short clips and presented on engaging websites. Mostly though, whenever possible, the vast majority of us choose to read transcripts rather than take the time to listen. Limited time, resources, and searchability often make this choice for us. Very few of us can commit to listening to a complete interview, let alone an entire collection. “Porter Talk,” and subsequent seasons of Voices Revealed, provides an alternative, albeit long-form, way to engage with the stories that shape who we are as Canadians. The humanity inherent in these narratives allows us to build connections with the past, which rarely looks that much different from the present. This is the power of oral history, however we choose to access it.

Stacey Zembrzycki is an award-winning oral and public historian who serves as a Podcast Development Specialist in the Outreach and Engagement Branch at Library and Archives Canada.

The second episode in the Porter Talk series launches today.

Notes

^[i] Towards the end of his life, Grizzle recorded nearly every telephone message and conversation he had on cassette tapes, in addition to the interviews he conducted. Some of these conversations are available here.

Suggested Readings

Melinda Chateauvert. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

Cecil Foster, “They call me George”: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada(Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019).

Stanley G. Grizzle with John Cooper, My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. Personal Reminiscences of Stanley G. Grizzle (Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1998).

Steven High, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Saje Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Dorothy W. Williams, Blacks in Montreal, 1628-1986, An Urban Demography (Montréal: Les Éditions Yvon Blais Inc, 1989).

Dorothy W. Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1997).