Sergetalks Blog ~ The Official Blog of Serge LeClerc

That evening, when I was by myself eating supper, I thought about what we were going to do and I knew I didn’t want to do it. I knew if we were caught, it would hurt my mother terribly. I decided I would tell the boy the next day that I would not go.

At noon on Friday, the boy said, “We’re going. Are you coming?” I said, “Yes.” In making that choice, I launched myself on a destructive path
that would result in years of untold pain and damage to myself and thousands of others.

We jumped on the streetcar and rode Uptown for some shoplifting. I was the lookout. The next thing I knew, the police were there and everybody was running. Being the youngest, with the shortest legs, I got caught. Everyone else got away.

I was arrested for truancy and taken to 311 Jarvis Street, the secure custody unit of the Juvenile Detention Centre. (more…)

The years we spent in Cabbagetown were amongst the happiest of my life. We were all equal in Cabbagetown because all of us battled the common enemy of poverty. It didn’t matter what color you were, what culture you belonged to, or where you came from. Shared poverty has that calming and leveling effect. It drew us all together.

Cabbagetown was not a dangerous place—if you were a resident, but it was a rough neighborhood with cobblestone streets and tough Irish beat cops who knew everybody by name.

The row houses we lived in were interconnected by dirt tunnels that we kids dug through the adjoining basements. Using the tunnels, a person could go from one end of the street to the other without detection. The parents didn’t stop us from digging these tunnels, because if the police came to the door with an arrest warrant for the man of the house, it was very convenient for him to slip into the tunnels and disappear.

Outsiders were not appreciated in Cabbagetown. We didn’t steal from anyone else in The Projects, nor did we let anyone come in and steal from us. The police had learned from hard experience never to park on the street; they knew full well the Cabbagetown kids would be on the rooftops dropping stones and bricks on their patrol car. (more…)

I was the product of rape.

Solely by my mother’s account, she was Cree and Micmac on her mother’s side and German and French on her father’s.
Her immediate family lived around coastal New Brunswick, but the larger family stretches out from the Micmac reserves on the east coast of New Brunswick all the way to the Crees in Northern Quebec.

My mother was born into a family with a lot of alcohol abuse. Because she was the only girl in a family of alcohol abusers and residential school survivors, for her own safety, her maternal grandmother took her away from her parental home and brought her up in the traditional Cree way.

I once saw a picture of this woman, my great-grandmother. She was probably in her nineties, raw-boned and leathery, a small little gal and as Indian as she could be, sitting in a rowboat smoking a corn cob pipe.

When my mother was thirteen, her grandmother died and she was forced to return to her parents’ home. Shortly afterward, she ran away. Being young and Aboriginal, she was sadly vulnerable to all sorts of difficulty and danger. She was raped and became pregnant with me.
It is interesting that my mother decided against going back to her family home to have her baby. Despite her tender age, she knew intuitively that if she went back home, the likelihood was strong her child would become enslaved in the lifestyle of alcoholism and abuse that prevailed there. So she stayed on her own as a runaway. (more…)

It was a summer evening in 1985. I was a convict at St. Vincent de Paul, a super maximum security penitentiary in Quebec, Canada.

The cells were securely locked for the night. The guards had completed their hourly check to make sure each prisoner was present and accounted for. As convicts like to say, “They treat you like swine and count you like pearls.”

St. Vincent de Paul was Canada’s second oldest penitentiary. It housed 1248 convicts.

The penitentiary’s original design involved six ranges that radiated like wheel spokes from a central dome. The ranges were four stories high, and on each level there was a double row of back-to-back cells, twenty-six to a side, with a narrow three-foot corridor between the rows. Only the guards used this corridor, and it could only be accessed through an internal doorway from the central dome.

Each cell had a peephole window in the back wall, and every hour on the hour a guard would walk down the narrow corridor, slide back the peephole door, and check to make sure each prisoner was in his place. (more…)