You may have heard that one of Toronto’s early Black settlers was likely the city’s first cabbie. Or that Blacks in the 1950s flocked to the railroad as porters — not because they loved train travel but because that’s where Black workers didn’t face a shut door. Or that thousands of Black women started arriving here in the late 1950s — because that’s who the government let in as immigrants.But a Black funeral director?Correction. Make that, Black owner of a funeral home — because that’s what I discovered during Black history month. In Toronto, 2018.She’s barely 5-foot-2, elegant in her navy blue and white uniform topped with silver gray and blue striped necktie, hair tightly braided, not a strand out of place, resting on top of an exquisitely disarming half smile as she welcomes the reporter into Covenant Funeral Homes, at the corner of Eglinton Ave. E. and Midland Ave.Luann Jones is used to double takes from prospective clients she is about to engage face-to-face at a pre-funeral arrangement.On the phone she’s undertaker nondescript — professional and proper, disclosing just so much without disguising anything, a hint of British lilt to leave one wondering.Then they come in to make arrangements to bury a loved one and, ah, she is, oh, yes, Black.“I researched it and there’s never been a Black funeral home in our country, in history,” Jones says. “So, I’m like the Harriet Tubman of funeral services. Others will come after me but that history can’t be changed. I’m the first.”It’s not a boast; it’s delivered in mortician monotone, yet with a twinkle. Twenty-two years in the industry and Jones is nowhere near a dead end. Rather, she aims to expand Covenant into a series of funeral homes across the GTA.Who’s to tell Jones she can’t. That’s what she heard and disregarded from those in the know in the industry.“You ...
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