Jim Henson

Jim Henson was an African man who was enslaved in Maryland, U.S. Henson escaped slavery, and made his way to Canada, where his slave narrative, entitled Broken Shackles, was published in 1889. Biography Henson settled in Owen Sound, on Georgian Bay. Henson's maternal grandmother, Chandesia, was the daughter of a chieftain of the Bagirmi people, in what is now Chad, when she was kidnapped. In his review future poet-laureate of Canada George Elliot Clarke cheered the 2002 republication of Henson's memoirs, characterizing it as "one of the humble wellsprings of what we now proudly term African-Canadian literature."