Murril Baulding / Muriel Baldwin (1895-1921)
Written by Wencke Rudi and Jade Ferguson
The 1911 Canada Census lists Murril Baulding, a 16-year-old “Negro” girl, as being one of thirteen “inmates” at 1 Waterloo Avenue, the Humane and Children’s Aid Society of Guelph children shelter. The Society removed children from—what they considered—“miserable and degraded surroundings, and placed [them] for a time in the Shelter, [under the supervision of Mary Allen] some of them afterwards being provided with foster homes.” Some of the children were in the shelter from cases of neglect and cruelty, others were temporary inmates because of sickness in their homes, and others were “wards” of the Society. Who is “Murril Baulding”? Why is she an “inmate” in the children’s shelter? Where is her family? What led to her placement in the shelter?
After searching through the archives, we believe “Baulding” is a misspelling, and that “Murril Balding” is Muriel Baldwin. Born in 1895, Muriel was the daughter of George Baldwin and Susan (Jackson) Baldwin. In 1891, Susan, George, and their oldest child, Albert, lived in Peel Township, where George worked as a farm labourer. A decade later, the Baldwins had moved to Guelph, where Susan’s mother, Elizabeth, lived with the family and helped care for the four children, included Muriel. George worked as a day labourer. However, by 1911, George had abandoned his wife and children. Susan and her four children lived at 59 Sackville Street, in Guelph’s immigrant and working-class Alice St. neighbourhood. The Baldwins home was close to the Mallott, Palmer, and Goins families. It seems that Susan was the only family member earning money as there is no occupation listed for Susan’s two oldest children, Albert, 24, and Muriel, 15. A single-mother and sole breadwinner, Susan, worked as a laundress.
By May 1911, George had moved to Brantford, Ontario. George began a new life and family with Rosetta. Similarly to Susan, Rosetta worked as a lundress. The Black washerwoman was “all but beast of burden of the aristocratic slaveholder, and in freedom, she continued at this hard labor as a bread winner of the family” (Woodson 269). To “provide for her home,” the “Negro washerwoman” endured the heavy burden as the sole wage earner of the family. As an able-bodied husband or son were “often forced to a life of idleness,” as gainful employment was difficult to find (272). “The working woman was often the central figure of the family,” writes C. G. Woodson, “and the actual representative of the home” (273). In a short period of 1911, the Baldwin children would experience not only their father’s abandonment, but also their mother’s death. After two weeks in the hospital, Susan died from General Tuberculosis on July 30, leaving four children (figuratively) orphaned (her death certificate lists her as “widowed”). How did Muriel navigate these uncharted territory fraught with challenges and stresses, loss and grief?
In our brief attempt to reconstruct “Murril Baulding,” we envision her not as tragic or ruined, but as an ordinary young black woman, whose life has been shaped by absence, loss, and grief. This “minor figure” in the archives had to confront at a young age the challenges of how to thrive on her own. Murril is listed as both an inmate and a resident of the house on Sackville Street in the same census year. We read these inclusions as being suggestive of Murril’s mobility, she went between both residences often. She preferred walking around Guelph’s streets, then staying at home and taking care of her siblings. We imagine that she tired quickly of the demand to care for others: Why should she toil in the kitchen or laundry? Why should she work herself to the bone? This unregulated movement encouraged a belief that something great could happen despite the barriers and obstacles. Her wayward wandering was the way she engaged the world: as she drifted through the streets, she had thousands of ideas about who she might be. She longed for another world: she was hungry for more, for otherwise, for better. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “She was hungry for beauty.” She would not find beauty as an “inmate” in the shelter, but she “made a way out of no way” (Wayward Lives).
The last time we locate Muriel in the archive is 1921. The young Black woman “hungry for beauty” dies a decade after her mother at 24 years old. Her death certificate lists her as “single” and working as a domestic. “Pott’s disease, T.B. of Spine” is noted as the primary cause of death. She suffered from this crippling condition, with its commonly related symptoms of back pain, deformity of the spine, lower limb weakness, and paraplegia, for three years. While her surgery two years prior to her death may have provided some relief the symptoms, her occupation as a domestic with its back-breaking labour must have exacerbated the pain she experienced in her spine. On September 20, 1921, Muriel was returned to her father and buried in Brantford. As we imagine it, “Murril”/Muriel’s story is that of an ordinary young Black woman caught between names, families, and homes. In the afterlife of slavery, the past traumas of colonization and slavery continue to affect and shape the present at the expense of Black future liberation.