Jump Ship to Freedom

by James Lincoln Collier

  ‘‘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.”

  “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.

  3

  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 Wi
lhelmina.

  “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.”