Kai Thomas's novel In the Upper Country is a fresh take on Black Canadian history & the Underground Railroad
The Ontario author's debut novel won the $60K Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction prize in 2023
Kai Thomas's debut novel, In the Upper Country, is a fictional portrayal of mid-19th century southern Ontario through the eyes of a young Black journalist.
When a woman escaping the U.S. through the Underground Railroad kills a slave hunter, Lensinda is enlisted to interview her from jail. Instead of providing her testimony, the old woman proposes an exchange: a story for a story. The deal seems mundane enough, except their back-and-forth soon reveals an extraordinary range of stories, secrets and untold histories, including those of Black refugee communities and Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes.
Thomas is a writer, carpenter and land steward. Born and raised in Ottawa, he is of Black and mixed heritage descended from Trinidad and the British Isles. CBC Books named Thomas a Black writer to watch in 2023.
In the Upper Country was a finalist for the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award and was awarded the prestigious $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust in 2023 by Margaret Atwood herself at a gala event in Toronto. The prize recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.
The Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize jury praised Thomas for his "exceptional debut" which "deftly and compassionately braids deeply engrossing stories within stories that explore a little-known aspect of Canadian history."
In 2023, Thomas spoke to The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about writing In the Upper Country.
The book is set in the mid-19th century in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada. What is the legacy of this region?
This region is really interesting, especially in the period that the novel is set in. Between 1850 and emancipation in the U.S., in 1863, there was a massive influx of Black folks fleeing enslavement in the American South. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the U.S. in 1850, which meant that folks fleeing enslavement could no longer find relative safety, even in the northern states where slavery had been abolished for quite some time because it was a law that deputized regular people to catch and return them to bondage.
The thing that I love about fiction is you get to not only try and model what you find in the history books, but you get to read between those lines.- Kai Thomas
I thought it was this interesting period in history. We as Canadians have this association with the Underground Railroad and we know that Canada was the promised land for many of these people fleeing enslavement. During that time, a number of communities, in particular in Southern Ontario, emerged.
Perhaps we don't know as much as we think about what life was like in these communities. Why, for example, many of them did not survive the test of time. What was a social life? What were the struggles of people in these places as they navigated their newfound freedom? That's what I was interested in getting into.
The book revolves around two women whose fates are intertwined. Can you tell us about these two women and how they meet?
The protagonist is a young woman named Lensinda, who finds herself in Dunmore working for a Black journalist and activist. Lensinda is literate and works as a scribe and then eventually as a journalist.
The novel opens as another character has been imprisoned for shooting and killing a slave hunter. This kind of premise came out of the research I was doing. There were instances of slave and bounty hunters coming north of the border to try and capture people, kidnap them and take them to be enslaved.
Lensinda sits down in the jail with this person who happens to be a very old woman and they have a series of conversations. Lensinda initially wants it to be simple, cut and dry. Let me interview you; let me take your story. But the old woman has different designs for her and instead challenges her to engage in an exchange of stories. That exchange forms the core narrative structure of the book.
What did your research tell you about what Lensinda's life might have been like at that time as a young, Black journalist?
Her character, as well as a couple of others, were modeled off of a few different real-life people. One of whom, Mary Ann Shadd, was involved in starting the first Black newspaper of the region.
The thing that I love about fiction is you get to not only try and model what you find in the history books, but you get to read between those lines.
I did a lot of reading and tried to identify the areas that weren't going to be found in those sources. For example, what does dialogue look like between somebody like Mary Ann Shadd and her contemporaries? What did gossip look like in these communities? These are things that aren't necessarily going to show up in historical records. That's the fun.
Speaking of fiction, obviously there have been works before about a slave narrative and the Underground Railroad. How did you want to approach this story and what did you want to bring to the table when writing historical fiction within that era?
The centrality of the Black characters' relationships to Indigenous characters is a historical relationship that I personally hadn't seen depicted almost at all in fiction and I was finding ample evidence of it in the history books.
I tried to represent these characters who are marginalized or oppressed as powerful agents of their own experience.- Kai Thomas
In my lived experience, I have ample evidence of Black and Indigenous people connecting and having relationships and political alliances. It was important to bring that historical relationship into the novel in meaningful ways.
I tried to represent these characters who are marginalized or oppressed as powerful agents of their own experience and who are capable of all of the things that the humans inflicting violence on other people are.
I found it tricky to do because oppression and the types of struggles and challenges that a Black person in mid-19th century North America faced make it tricky to really hone in on these scenes of power in ways that are not romanticized or unrealistic.
That was just a good challenge for myself to dig into the research and say, "Okay, where am I seeing instances of Black and Indigenous people taking power in very meaningful ways?" Let me represent what that could have looked like on the page.
Kai Thomas's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
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