Jump Ship to Freedom (2 page)

There was another reason why I wanted to meet Black Sam Fraunces. That was because my Aunt Wilhelmina, she run off a few years ago. It was Captain Ivers was trying to make her a slave, after she'd been set free by her master. She told us she was going down to New York, and we figured she'd have gone to work for Mr. Fraunces. Maybe he would know where she was, at least.

Anyway, it was because of my daddy fighting in the Revolution that he got his freedom from Captain Ivers. Leastwise, that was supposed to be the idea of it. But when the war was over, Captain Ivers didn't want to give my daddy up. He wanted him to come back and be his slave some more. My daddy wouldn't stand for that. He ran off, but he got caught and put into jail over in New Haven. So he got a lawyer and sued Captain Ivers in court. The judge said that my daddy was right, and Captain Ivers was wrong. If Daddy fought in the War for the country's Independence, he got his own freedom, too.

But he couldn't get Mum and me free. I never did exactly understand why his soldiers' notes wasn't worth anything after him fighting so hard for all those years. Why would Congress do that to all those soldiers—white and black—who'd fought and lots of them got killed and their widows and children needing the money?

Anyway, now Mum and me had the notes. After I stole them back from Mrs. Ivers, Mum hid them down in the cellar under her pallet. When she went out to milk the cow, she wrapped them up in a piece of oilcloth, took them out to the cow shed, and hid them in the hayloft, way deep down in the hay. The Ivers never had nothing to do with the cow, except to drink the milk. Mum and me was the only ones who ever went up into the hayloft. The Iverses wouldn't think of going up there and getting themselves covered with dust and cobwebs.

I went out with her. It was just barely daybreak. We stood in the half-light amongst the tools and dusty barrels, with the cow crunching away on its hay, and talked about it. “The hard thing to know is if we should sell them off now for what we can get for them, or hang on to them in hopes that Congress votes to pay off the whole value of them.”

“When are they likely to vote, Mum?”

“I don't rightly know,” she said. “It ain't just the Congress at New York. There's them other men meeting in Philadelphia. They got to decide something about it first.”

I didn't know much about it, either. They had formed a convention in Philadelphia to fix up the government of the United States, but being as we wasn't but black folks, nobody told us much about it. “We should ask Mr. Johnson,” I said. “He'll know.”

William Samuel Johnson was the most important man in Stratford. He was our delegate to Congress. I'd been in his house lots, because my Aunt Willy worked for him. Her name really was Wilhelmina, and she was Mum's little sister. Mr. Johnson's house was a real fancy place, hip-roofed instead of plain gabled like most of them around Stratford. It had three stories and big dormer windows. When I'd go into the kitchen to see my daddy, I could peek into the dining room. There was such a sparkling glass chandelier hanging over the table as you couldn't believe, and a big cupboard just stuffed with silver dishes and mugs and things.

“Yes,” Mum said. “He'll help us. He was sorry about your daddy being drowned, and he said to ask him if we needed anything. The only thing is, Mr. Johnson's down in New York at the Congress.”

“He comes back sometimes,” I said.

“He might not come back for months,” she said. “It could be too late.”

I knew what she meant by that. There was a lot of talk going around Connecticut about doing away with slavery. A lot of people thought slavery was wrong. Most ordinary white folks didn't own slaves and didn't care one way or another anyway. But the ones that did own slaves, like Captain Ivers, was pretty worried about all that talk. Oh, there wasn't much hope that the legislature would suddenly turn us slaves loose. Slaves was property, and the General Assembly wasn't about to take property away from people—white people, anyway. Slaves was different—they'd already had themselves taken away from themselves. But there was a lot of talk about preventing new slaves from coming into Connecticut, and not letting old ones be sold off South to work in the sugar-cane fields. And any babies that come along now was to be free when they grew up—anyway, that was the law in Connecticut. And naturally that started the white folks who had slaves to thinking that maybe they'd better sell us off while they still had the chance. Mum and me, we knew we was likely to be sold off South. Mum always keeps an ear open to the Iverses, and she'd heard them talking about it.

‘‘Well, I know it might be too late,” I said, “but there ain't much we can do about it.”

She sighed. “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“How soon do you reckon it'll be before Mrs. Ivers finds them notes is missing?”

Mum shook her head. “Tonight, most likely, when she says her prayers.”

“Do you figure they'll know it was us who took them?”

“Oh, they'll think so.”

“What'll happen?”

She shook her head again. “I just don't know.”

Then Mrs. Ivers hollered out that I was to go down to the brig and help with the loading. The part of Stratford I lived in was called Newfield. It was just a few houses, two wharves, and Captain Ivers's warehouse, an old wooden building about thirty feet long, with hardly any windows. The main part of Stratford was bigger—lots of houses, and the church where we went on Sundays.

I walked in the dawn down to the landing. The sky in the east was coming up yellow. I liked being in the harbor. I liked the smells of it—the smell of tar and paint and saltwater and fish all mixed together. As I came along, I heard the water lapping quiet against the piles of the wharf where the brig was tied up, its masts as tall as trees and still in the calm water.

I stood there for a minute, looking at it all.

Pretty soon I'd have to go aboard, and after that I'd work steady, most likely down in the hold stowing things, where it would be hot as a skillet by eight o'clock in the morning, and half the time you couldn't stand up straight but would have to work bent over or down on your knees, with the boards cutting into your skin.

What I wanted to see was the sun come up out of the sea over across Stratford Point. I always liked that. Standing up there on land, it seemed like when the sun first started to rise up out of the water, you were higher than it. I mean most of the time you think of the sun as being high in the sky, but when you see it rise up or go down in the sea, it seems like it's below you. It gave me a funny feeling, to be higher than the sun.

So I waited, and watched, and in a minute the rim of the sun edged up into sight. Slowly it rose, and gulls wheeled up into the light, shining red and gold, and I stood there in the smell of the tar and paint and saltwater, thinking about nothing but just catching the feeling of it all, and then suddenly I realized that it was plain daylight and I'd better get on board before Captain Ivers came on deck and saw me.

Captain Ivers's brig was called the
Junius Brutus.
It was maybe seventy-five feet long and pretty broad, about twenty or twenty-five feet across. For cargo you want a broad ship with plenty of room below decks. It was a pretty sight, painted black with a gold band around it. It had two masts, with horizontal yards for the square sails and gaffs and booms for the fore and aft sails. And there were lines going every which way, like a great nest of cobwebs.

Much as I hated Captain Ivers, I sure wanted to sail on the
Junius Brutus
sometime. I wanted to go to sea like my daddy did, and do brave things in storms and such. I used to ask Captain Ivers if I could go as the boy, which was the lowest job, sometime; but he always said no, and I quit asking. If I ever got my freedom, that's what I was going to be—a sailor like my daddy. But there wasn't no use in asking Captain Ivers anymore, so I walked down the wharf and climbed over the rail onto the ship.

The first person I met was Birdsey Brooks, who was Captain Ivers's nephew. He was my age, and we'd gone to school together, except him being white, they figured he was smarter than I was and stayed in school after I stopped so's he could study mathematics and learn navigation. Of course they wouldn't have let no darky study navigation anyway. Still, it made me sort of sore to think that one day Birdsey would be master of a ship, and I would never be no more than a deckhand, even if I was free. My daddy worked on Captain Ivers's ships for years before the war, and he never got to be nothing at all, even though he knew everything about those brigs and could handle one himself in any kind of weather. I knew that, because some of the sailors told me so.

Birdsey was leaning on the rail, eating a chunk of corn bread with molasses on it. “Uncle's been wondering where you was,” he said.

“Don't give me none of that, Birdsey,” I said. “The sun just come up.”

“Well, he's been over at the warehouse cursing you out for near half an hour.”

“He'd have cursed me out if I'd got here an hour ago,” I said. “Where'd you get the corn bread?”

“Down below. The crew is eating. I come up here to see the sun rise.”

I thought of telling Birdsey about the feeling I got when the sun was just coming out of the sea and I was higher than it, but I decided not to. I was afraid that if I said it out plain, it would sound real stupid.

We walked forward to the crew's foc's'l hatchway. The crew's quarters were at the forward end of the ship. At the other end, the stern, the deck was raised up about four feet, and underneath was the captain's quarters, where Captain Ivers and the first mate lived. In between was the big storage hold.

We climbed the ladder down to the crew's quarters. There were double bunks along the wall, some cupboards for stowing gear, and two great anchor chains going straight up from the floor and through the deck above. The men were sitting at a board table eating corn bread and drinking mugs of beer. I was surprised to notice that one of them was Big Tom, a black man who usually sailed out of Stratford. I'd never seen him around Newfield Harbor before. He had muscles in his arms like straps of leather. He'd got a scar running right across his forehead just over his eyebrows, like somebody had tried to slice the top of his head off, and a lot of his teeth was missing. I wondered if he'd been in the Revolution like my daddy, or just got into a lot of fights.

“This here is Uncle's nigger,” Birdsey said, pointing to me. “He ain't had any breakfast.”

They gave me some of the corn bread and molasses and I went over to a corner and stood there eating it. I knew better than to sit down with the men, even if there was a black man there. Then after a bit the mate hollered down that time was awasting, and we set to work loading the brig.

The way Captain Ivers did business was, he'd buy stuff from farmers in the countryside around and store it in his warehouse until he had a good shipload to trade somewheres—New York or Philadelphia or even the West Indies. Most of the time it was New York. He knew lots of people there he could trade with. He'd trade in anything—peas, corn, apples, cider. A big part of his business was in livestock, like oxen, horses, cows, hogs, and such. He kept them in pens at the side of his warehouse.

Loading them on the
Junius Brutus
was the worst job of all. There was a big boom which was attached to one of the masts. It had a canvas-and-rope sling at one end and a heavy weight at the other. The idea was to strap a horse or an ox or something into the sling, and heave down on the weight at the other end. The ox would rise right off the ground, kicking and bellowing. Then by swinging the boom around you'd get the ox over the aft hatchway and you could lower it down into the hold. Oh my, the oxen didn't like it at all. They'd thrash around so it was worth your life to get them unstrapped from the sling and hitched to the rings along the side of the storage hold.

Captain Ivers made me and Birdsey work in the hold. We stayed down there all morning, ducking and dodging around those oxen and getting hot and sweaty and stuck up with the hay we were feeding the oxen. By noontime we were pretty tired. We ate our bread and cheese and apples up on the deck in the shade of the quarterdeck over the captain's quarters, feeling the June breeze and watching the sunshine dance on the slow waves coming in across Long Island Sound.

Being with Birdsey made the work go easier. He was a pretty good friend to me, at least as much as a white man can be a friend to a black man. We'd gone to school together and worked a lot together, and climbed the Iverses' apple trees and played hoops and marbles together, only of course I didn't have marbles of my own, they was all Birdsey's, and if I won any I'd have to give them all back at the end. But I didn't mind; he was my friend and it wasn't his fault I didn't have marbles. Working with him made it seem more like I wasn't a slave. Of course Birdsey was going on the ship. He'd already gone on two trips. He was learning to be a sailor.

“I wished I was going with you, Birdsey,” I said.

“I wished you was, too,” he said. “If you wasn't a slave, you could.”

“I'm not always going to be a slave. I'm going to buy me and Mum free.”

“Oh come on, Dan,” Birdsey said. “That'd cost near a hundred pounds.”

“More than that, Birdsey.”

“More than that?” he said. “How much do you figure you're worth?”

“Well, my daddy reckoned I'd cost somethin' like eighty pounds to buy.”

“Eighty pounds? You're worth eighty pounds?”

“Sure I am,” I said. “And Mum probably sixty, because a woman ain't worth as much as a man.” That was one thing about being black: I was worth something in pounds and shillings. Most white people, near as I could figure out, wasn't worth much of anything at all. I mean you take a free white man, he was worth maybe twenty shillings a month in wages, and here I was worth about eighty times that just sitting there. “That's why we're worried about getting sold.”