New miniseries The Porter highlights the importance of showcasing Black Canadian history

Junior Massey is smoking nervously in a downtown Chicago back alley, leaning against a truck containing about 50 bottles of whisky. It's 1921 — early days of Prohibition — and Massey has used his job as a railway porter to smuggle those bottles down from Montreal.

Junior, a Black man, is there to offload that liquor to a white gangster, who quickly tries to lowball him — offering him 50 per cent less than what they had previously agreed to. Both know that if he's forced to keep the bottles, he'll either have to smuggle them back into Canada, or be arrested. 

Junior (played by I May Destroy You and Sense8's Aml Ameen) smiles. He picks up a bottle, and smashes it to the ground. Then another. And another. Junior continues to destroy his own product, until the other man backs down and agrees to pay full price for what's left. 

"You're a real cocky coon aren't you?" he asks, counting out the bills. "I hope it was worth it."

"It was worth every penny," Junior responds, before defiantly adding: "Crackerjack."

In many ways, that interaction does more to explain the new CBC and BET show The Porter (premiering Feb. 21) than nearly any synopsis could — but it did not come from the writer's room. Instead, it sprung from Ameen's head in the moment — an improvised rejoinder based out of his character's refusal to be disrespected in a society that refuses to respect him. 

"That's something I just said, because that's something I just felt," Ameen explained in an interview with CBC News.

"I felt that Junior wouldn't allow somebody to get away with something like that."

In focusing those experiences, those little large moments drawn from the real lives of Black Canadians, The Porter's cast is hoping to undo a problem at the core of Canadian culture. Though Black Canadians helped shape this country, their history and place in it is rarely shown. That's contributed to a blind spot around much of Black Canadian history, and a general invisibility of Black Canadians as a unique cultural group in the first place.

At its core, the series follows the history of sleeping car porters. They were a largely Black working force who tended to railway passengers' luggage, as well as generally attending to those — largely white — passengers' needs. 

Unveiling that history is what inspired director and star Arnold Pinnock to craft the story in the first place. 

"Once someone bought a ticket, it was almost like, 'OK, I get to be on these palaces on wheels and I get to have my own slave,' Pinnock said.

"And to showcase it from the porter's perspective, you know, from their viewpoint, I couldn't be any more prouder."

As the show details, those porters went on to create North America's first Black labour union, helping to both kick off the civil rights movement and create a Black middle class.