Jump Ship to Freedom (3 page)

“Sold? Why, Uncle wouldn't sell you, Dan.” He looked a little uneasy, though, and I could tell he wasn't exactly sure.

“He might,” I said. “That's why we want to buy ourselves out first.”

“Well, it's going to take you a mighty long time to earn a hundred and forty pounds.”

“No, it won't,” I said. “We got my daddy's—” Then I caught myself. “I mean, Mrs. Ivers has got my daddy's soldiers' notes for safekeeping. If the Congress makes good on them, we'll have enough.”

“What's Congress got to do with it? Soldiers' notes are money, ain't they?”

“No, they ain't. They're just a promise of money. The government don't have to pay off on them if they don't choose to.”

“Maybe they won't be worth anything at all, then,” Birdsey said.

“That's the point of it, Birdsey. Right now we could sell the notes for something.”

“Who'd buy them if they ain't going to be worth anything?”

“Oh, people will buy them cheap on the chance that someday the Congress will pay them at full value. Maybe we could get enough for them to buy one of us free.”

Birdsey shook his head. “It don't make much sense to me.”

“Nor me, neither,” I said.

“You ought to ask Uncle about it,” he said.

But I wasn't about to do that. We finished eating, climbed back down into the hold, and got the oxen fed and watered. Then we started loading the deck. You didn't waste space on a ship. We lashed stacks of lumber to the deck, tethered more oxen to the railing, put crates of chickens down in the spaces between everything else.

And we was just about finished, along toward twilight, when suddenly I saw Mrs. Ivers on the dock, talking to the captain. I knew what they were talking about right away. The first thought that crossed my mind was to slip over the side and sneak back to the house. But even while I was thinking about it, I knew there wasn't any hope in it. They'd see me, sure.

So I went on working like nothing was wrong, and in a couple of minutes, sure enough, Captain Ivers hollered out, “Arabus, get down here.”

“Yessir,” I said. I walked to the rail and climbed over pretty slow, not being in any hurry to get down there.

“Quickly,” Mrs. Ivers said.

“Yessum,” I said. I dropped onto the wharf in front of them. I hardly landed before Captain Ivers hit me and knocked me down hard on the boards.

“Get up,” he shouted.

“I ain't done nothing, Captain,” I cried, so's they'd think I didn't know what I was getting hit for.

“Get up.”

“Yessir,” I said. I knelt up and shook my head, like I was sort of groggy. I learned a long time ago that the best thing to do when I got hit was to look as sick and hurt as I could, because nobody likes to bust up a valuable slave.

“Get up.”

I got up on my feet and got ready to tilt my head toward him when he swung, so as to take the fist on the top of my head, which would hurt him near as much as me. But they fooled me, for Mrs. Ivers lammed me from the other side instead. My head wobbled, and I fell down again. This time the deck spun around, and I had to sit quiet until I could get steady enough to stand up again. “I ain't done nothing, Captain,” I cried out.

“Where are those notes?”

“Notes? I don't know nothing about no notes.”

He reached down, grabbed me by the shirt front, and jerked me to my feet. “Don't lie to me boy. You took those notes. Where are they?”

“Honest, I ain't lying. I don't know nothing about them.”

He slapped me hard across the face, but he was holding on to my shirt front, so I couldn't fall down. “Answer.”

“Honest,” I said. “I don't know.” The one thing was to keep on lying. If he knew I'd taken them, he'd lash me for sure. But so long as he couldn't prove it, he couldn't do more than slap me around a little.

He shook me by the shirt front. “Answer,” he said.

“Honest,” I started to blurt out, but he belted me across the face again and cut me off in the middle.

Then they made me strip down right there on deck, where the other men could see me. I was dead ashamed to be seen naked that way, especially with the Iverses looking me over and turning me around like I wasn't nothing but a hog ready for butchering. My face and head hurt bad, too, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. But after a while they realized that I didn't have the notes hidden on me anywhere, and they let me get dressed again.

Then Captain Ivers said, “Go back to the house and get your old clothes. You're sailing with us in the morning.”

I just stared at him. He done just what we wanted. It was a chance for me to take my daddy's soldiers' notes down to Mr. William Samuel Johnson in New York.

I ran down the wharf and back up the road to the house. Mum was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with a knife. “Mum,” I whispered, even though nobody was around, “I'm going on the brig to New York. Get the notes. I'll take them to Mr. Johnson.”

She looked at my face. “The coward hit you pretty hard.”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “Get the notes, quick.”

But she went on looking at me. “I don't trust him,” she said. “Did he say
why
you was to go on the brig?”

I slowed down and gave that a little thought. “Well, no, he didn't.”

“I don't trust him. He wouldn't never take you before. Now he finds them notes missing and all of a sudden he wants you to go.”

I began to see that she was right. He had some reason for it that he wasn't telling us. “Well, I ain't got any choice about it, Mum. I have to go. So I might just as well take the notes. We have to take a chance on it.”

She thought about it for a minute. “I guess you're right, Daniel. We have to take a chance.” She went out to the cow shed to get the notes. I went down into the cellar to gather together some clothes. They didn't amount to very much—just a couple of raggedy shirts and a pair of trousers. About a minute later Mum came down the cellar stairs, with the soldiers' notes tucked into the top of her dress. She gave them to me. I wrapped them up in the clothes and tied the bundle together with a piece of string. “Be careful, Daniel,” she said. “He'll lash you sure if he catches you with them.”

“I'll be careful. I'll find somewheres to hide them amongst the cargo.”

She nodded. Then she got a kind of faraway look in her eyes. “Dan, I don't want you to take no risks, but if you could get to see Black Sam Fraunces and find out about Willy …” That was her sister, my Aunt Wilhelmina.

“I'll try,” I said.

Then we heard the front door slam. We came up out of the cellar. The Iverses were standing there. Captain Ivers jerked his head at me. “Arabus, go down and sleep on the brig with the men. We sail at the first tide in morning.”

So Mum gave me a big hug, and I hugged her back, and then I said good-bye and left. Saying good-bye to her made me feel kind of peculiar. I was only going for three or four days—a day to sail down and a couple of days to unload and load up again, and a day to sail back. It wasn't a very long time to be away. But I'd never been away from Mum at all, ever, not even for one night. We was very close to each other. My daddy was gone so much at sea or in the army that Mum and me had only each other most of the time. We had to look after each other. We didn't have anybody else. Of course at first, when I was little, Mum was the one who did the looking after. But then when I began to grow some, it came to me that I could look after her, too. Sometimes when Mrs. Ivers put a heavy load of washing on her, and she was likely to go on working into the night, I'd help her so she could finish in time to get her supper. Or if she got sick, I'd get up before dawn and do her hoeing for her, so she could get some rest. And she'd look out for me the same way. She'd save special pieces of meat for me, so I'd grow up big and strong, and she put aside cloth when she could to make me a warm coat for winter. We looked after each other. We had to. We was all we had.

So it made me feel peculiar, knowing that I wasn't going to see her for a while. But on the other side of it, I was pretty excited about getting a chance to learn how to be a sailor, like my daddy was.

When I got back to the brig, the men were lounging around on deck, taking it easy. Birdsey took me down into the crew's quarters and showed me my bunk and a space in the locker for my spare clothes. With Birdsey standing next to me, there wasn't any way I could unwrap the notes from my clothes and hide them, but in a minute he went back up on deck. I looked around. There wasn't too many hiding places in the crew's quarters. It was going to be safer to tuck them down amongst the cargo when I had a chance. I was thinking about this when Big Tom came down the ladder. Standing up, he looked even bigger, and that scar was bright as a flame in his forehead. He stared at me hard for a minute and then he said, “You're Jack Arabus's boy.”

“Yes,” I said.

He went on staring at me. “I hear you're a troublemaker.”

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Never mind where I heard it. I heard it.”

I reckoned it was Captain Ivers who had said that. “Well, it ain't true,” I said.

“What happened to them soldiers' notes?”

Then I knew Captain Ivers had been telling him things. Right away I didn't trust him, black or not. “I don't know nothing about them,” I said.

He laughed. “Maybe you can get the white folks to believe your stories, but don't try them on Big Tom.”

“Honest, I don't know nothing about them.”

“Come on, Arabus, I know you got them, and you know I know. Where'd you hide them?”

I shook my head. “I never touched them. Probably Mrs. Ivers just plain lost them. They wasn't hers anyway.”

He stared at me. “Are you saying that Mrs. Ivers stole them notes?”

I sort of blushed. “They ain't hers. They belonged to my daddy.”

He stared at me some more. “Now looky here, Arabus,” he said in a quiet voice, just in case anyone was listening. “I been shipping out of Stratford for seven, eight years now. I've got me a little money saved, and soon's I get a little more, I'm going to buy me a fishing dory and some nets and set up in business for myself. The one thing I don't want is an uppity nigger causing trouble with the white folks. Things is nice and peaceful between white and black around here right now, and that's the way I want them to stay. If you start a ruckus you ain't going to have trouble just with the Captain, you're going to have trouble with me, too. Understand?”

I looked at him and then I looked down at the floor. But I kept quiet, and in a minute he climbed up the ladder onto the deck, and by and by I went up, too. I reckoned I was lucky that he'd come out that way about the notes, because otherwise I might have trusted him and let something slip.

We sailed the next morning just before dawn when the tide was up, and I began to learn what it was like to be a sailor. It turned out not to be so much fun as I thought it'd be. The idea I had was that you stood around on deck singing work songs, like the ones my daddy used to sing at home, and every once in a while you'd climb up one of the masts to spy out the land or see if there was any whales in the way.

It wasn't like that at all. I tell you, for plain hard work it beat anything I'd ever done. Compared to being a sailor, cutting kindling in the dead of winter when your fingers was like to freeze to the hatchet was a piece of cake. Leastwise, splitting kindling, when you got enough for a few days, you could stop. On a ship, nothing ever stopped.

The main idea of it was to keep the sails trimmed just right so as to take the best advantage of the wind. If there was only a little breeze, you had to keep angling them this way and that to catch the wind the best way. And if you had a good strong wind, you had to take in some sail, which was called furling them, so the ship wouldn't blow over too far and capsize.

Trimming the sails wasn't so bad. There was three big square sails hanging from yards on the mainmast. Lines ran down from the ends of the yards to places where they could be tied at the railings. To trim the sails all you had to do was ease off on the lines on one side and tighten up the ones on the other.

Furling was the worst job. You had to go right up to the top to do it. They always sent the smallest men up first, because they could slip through the rigging the quickest. Naturally that meant me and Birdsey was always on the jump. The mate would give a shout, and up we'd go, scrambling through the rigging until we got right up to the top.

There wasn't any ladder to stand on up there, nor even a spar—just a big loop of rope that ran along under each sail. So we'd stand on that, me and Birdsey, one of us on each side of the mast, with that line under our feet rocking back and forth, and clinging on for dear life. Only we couldn't cling on with both hands, because we was supposed to be furling the sail, not just enjoying the view. “One hand for yourself, and one for the ship,” was the rule, but let me tell you, a lot of times we needed both hands to get that sail furled proper, so we'd cling on with our elbows or legs or whatever part of our bodies we could get ahold of something with, and pray that the ship wouldn't take it in mind to give a sudden lurch.

You didn't want to look down, either. Looking straight out over the sea wasn't so bad. But if you looked down through that mess of rigging, sails, and spars, it seemed like the deck was half a mile away and the men working down there nothing but tiny dolls. I learned quick enough just to race up there, get the job done, and race down again. I mean race, too: If Captain Ivers or the mate didn't think you was moving quick enough, why, they'd blister your skin with their tongues. I never heard such cursing before; it stung like bees.

The other thing was that we didn't wear gloves when we was handling those lines. Gloves was too awkward for tying knots. You just had to let your hands toughen up. Some of those old sailors had calluses thick as boot soles, and about as hard, too. So I let my hands blister up; and then the blisters broke until there wasn't nothing to my palms but raw skin. Oh my, how that stung when I grabbed on to a rope. But there wasn't nothing to do but let it sting and go on with the work. We didn't wear shoes much, either. It was a lot safer walking around on those lines barefooted, so you could get a feel of your footing. And of course my feet began to blister up, too.