Mae Crawford

Mae Crawford was born in Barbados. She came to Nova Scotia in 1927 at the age of seventeen years to join her parents, Theodore Tull and Elouise Tull, who had come a few years before. She married Norman Arthur Crawford of Sydney who died in 1957.

Of the circumstances that led to her coming to Canada, Mae Crawford had this to say:

              "My father and mother were here in Canada.

               There were three of us in Barbados, two girls 

               and a boy.  My grandmother used to look

               after us.  When my mother got sick here, 

               they sent for us."

Mae Crawford couldn't remember whether her father had come to Canada to work in the steel plant in Cape Breton. She recalled that her father worked at a brick plant for a long time. He was also a carpenter.

Mae Crawford didn't go to school in Nova Scotia. She had to help her mother take care of her younger brother and sisters:

                "There were five of them but I had to 

                 take care of all those five. They were

                 all small."

All her work was confined to the house. She never went out to work. The only occasion to go out was on Sundays to go to church. The church that she knew best of all was the St. Phillips African Orthodox Church to which she belonged. She was able to recall the names of many of the church ministers.

When asked whether she ever longed to go back to Barbados, Mae Crawford replied that she did have moments of longing but that 'after forty years of working with the children, my mother's children, and my own, I had no time to go. I didn't even go after Crawford died.'

She spoke of two musical bands in Cape Breton: the West Indian Band and the UNIA Band. This latter band whose full name was the Universal Negro Improvement Association band got its name after the association founded by Marcus Garvey. Her father played the bass horn in the first band and her husband played the trombone in the second band.

Mae Crawford remembered that these bands had many members, some 15-20 members. There were many black people in Cape Breton when Mae Crawford came for the first time:

         'There were so many people around here. 

          When I first came every corner had a house 

          or store or something.  Lots of them died and

          lots of them are gone away.  I had to stay here. 

          I was in the group that came.  Others were

          born here.  I had no other place to go to. 

          My husband died in 1957.  I couldn't go away. 

          My children were pretty small.'

Mae Crawford was an accomplished singer. Her father was a musician and the man she married was also a musician. She remembered where they first met:

                 "I think we met at a concert at the mission.  

                  There used to be a mission down there. 

                  He was smart and young.  There were other

                  women there, white women who belonged to

                  the United Mission.  We used to go to Sunday

                  school and concerts and I sang in concerts there."

[ Previous story | Next story ]