The Woman Who Taught a City How to Play the Piano

Oscar Peterson's name is on the concert halls. Daisy Peterson Sweeney's is on a park, a street, and a mural on a Little Burgundy triplex—modest monuments, maybe, but more than this city gave her for most of her life. That's just how history tends to work: The performer gets the spotlight, and the teacher gets the footnote, but the footnote here, in detail, starts looking like the whole book.

Daisy Peterson Sweeney was born in 1920 in Little Burgundy, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and the second of five children. Her father, Daniel Peterson, had come from Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and found work as a sleeping car porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a respectable trade of that era even if the men who did it were addressed as "George" regardless of their name and treated as interchangeable. Daniel was away a lot, and when he came home, the house snapped to attention.