Jump Ship to Freedom (16 page)

“And how did you happen to meet Mr. Fatherscreft in the first place, Daniel?” he asked. “According to Captain Ivers, you jumped ship and ran away.”

There wasn't any point in lying about that. “Yes, sir, I ran away. Captain Ivers, he was going to sell me off South.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard him tell Birdsey.”

“Birdsey?”

“He's Captain Ivers's nephew,” I said. “Or he was, sir. He got washed overboard in a storm on the way down.”

“Yes, now I remember him. He was drowned?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You've had a lot of hard luck recently, Daniel,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I guess I have. Nor was that all of it.” I reached into my shirt and took out the oilcloth package. “Captain Ivers is after my daddy's soldiers' notes.”

“I don't understand.”

So I told him all about it: how Mrs. Ivers had taken them from Mum, and how I'd stolen them back, and us planning on asking him to help us sell them so as to get our freedom money. He just sat there and listened and nodded, and asked a question here and there. When I got finished with the whole story, he said, “And you knew that Captain Ivers was in Philadelphia?”

“I reckoned he would be, knowing that me and Mr. Fatherscreft was headed that way,” I said.

“And you came down anyway?”

“Yes, sir. I couldn't go back on a promise to a dying man.”

He thought about it for a minute. Then he said, “You know, Daniel, I'm constantly surprised. It's generally said that Africans don't have a true moral sense, the same as whites do.”

“Sir, I've been looking at the whole thing pretty hard the past little while, and it seems to me that there ain't much difference one way or another. You take my daddy, and Big Tom and Mr. Ivers and Birdsey and me, and take the skin off of us, and it would be pretty hard to tell which was the white ones and which ones wasn't.”

“That's not what most white people believe.”

“It ain't what most black folks believe, either. I didn't believe it myself, back home. But my daddy, he believed it, and I reckon I believe it now, myself.”

He didn't say anything for another minute. Then he said, “Well now, Daniel, you understand that I have to turn you back to Captain Ivers. You're his property, and that's the law in Connecticut.”

“I guess I know that as well as anybody,” I said.

He gave me a sharp look to see if I was being uppity, but I wasn't sorry I'd said it. “I suppose you do,” he said. “But did you know that it's also the law in Pennsylvania? However, I can see to it that he doesn't sell you for a while all right. Your father performed a service for the country, and now you've performed another one at considerable personal sacrifice. It's the least we can do. I'm sure that General Washington will agree with me, and I doubt strongly that Captain Ivers will want to oppose the general's wishes.”

“Sir, I don't want to be uppity, but there's Mum.”

“Oh, your mother, too.” He smiled, then he got serious again. “Daniel, there's a lot of talk in Connecticut about passing a law forbidding the selling of slaves out of the state. I think such a law will pass, and if it does, you and your mother won't have to worry about being sold away.”

“Sir, there's my daddy's soldiers' notes. Do you think they'll ever be worth anything?”

Dr. Johnson thought about that for a minute. “It's hard to predict,” he said. “But I think they will. Now that we've got an agreement on the slavery question, I'm pretty confident we'll get a constitution to form a new nation with. And it's my belief that the new government will pay off the notes.”

I could feel the tears come up behind my eyes, and I blinked to keep from crying. “So Mum and me could buy ourselves free?”

He thought about that some more. “Daniel, I think the smart thing would be for you to give me those notes for safekeeping. If the government votes to pay them off, I'll make an arrangement with Captain Ivers to obtain your freedom and your mother's.”

And that was what happened. Over the next few years, Connecticut passed laws saying we couldn't be sold away from the state. The Constitution was voted on, too, and the thirteen little countries was organized into the United States. And soon the new government decided to pay off the soldiers' notes. Dr. Johnson took our notes to Captain Ivers and made a deal with him, and after that we were free. Oh, I can tell you, the day me and Mum packed our clothes and walked out of Captain Ivers's house was the greatest feeling I ever had. It was like the whole world for years and years had been in clouds, and then the sun came out.

Mum knew where there was a little old lean-to house in Stratford we could borrow. She figured she'd go to work for Dr. Johnson in his house, and I figured I'd go to sea for a while, save up some money, and buy my own fishing boat.

So we walked away, and after a bit we got to the lean-to. There wasn't much to it; just a little shingle place with the roof half fallen in and the chimney needing work. But we could fix all that up. The most important thing was, it was ours. It was the first time in our lives we'd had a place of our own.

We went in and began figuring out what to do to the roof. But even though it was a happy day for us, I could see that Mum was looking a little bit sad. I knew what it was, too: She was thinking about all the ones that wasn't with us on that day. She was thinking about my Aunt Willy, who'd run off to New York, and now we didn't know where she was. She was thinking about Birdsey, who'd got washed overboard and drowned. Most of all she was thinking about my daddy, for if it wasn't for him fighting all those years in the Revolution, we'd never have got free.

But I didn't say anything; and we started in on the roof and after a while I heard Mum singing and I knew she was looking down the road ahead.

It is never easy, even for highly trained and experienced historians, to know exactly what happened in the past. We are always to some extent unsure about what we think we know. One of the things we are not sure about is how people spoke in the eighteenth century. We know how they wrote, of course, because we have many letters and diaries from that time. But we do not know if they talked the way they wrote.

Daniel Arabus almost certainly did not speak the way we have him talking in the book. The style of speech we have picked for him, and various other people, is much too modern for the Revolutionary Era. We have used this style in order to give the flavor of language as it might have been employed by a poor boy—black or white—without much schooling, growing up surrounded by people who did not speak English very well themselves.

In particular, we had to consider very carefully our use of the word
nigger.
This term is offensive to modern readers, and we certainly do not intend to be insulting. But it was commonly used in America right into the twentieth century, and it would have been a distortion of history to avoid its use entirely. In addition to historical accuracy, it was important to use the word to show how Daniel learned self-respect and developed self-confidence. You might also note which of the characters in the book used the term and which did not. Such use can tell you something about the social attitudes of the speakers.

Our story of what came to be known as the Constitutional Convention is taken from letters and diaries of the day. So are the details of American life, the villages, towns, and countryside as we have presented them. Daniel Arabus and his story, however, is fiction. A message of the kind he carried down to Philadelphia was in indeed brought by somebody in order to bring about the compromise over slavery between those who favored it and those who opposed it. But we are not absolutely sure who carried the message or exactly what it said.

Peter Fatherscreft is also a fictional character. However, there were several people like him who were at the same time members of Congress and also of the Constitutional Convention and went back and forth between Philadelphia and New York. Philadelphia had a large population of Quakers who were leaders in the antislavery movement. Pennsylvania even today is known as the Quaker State. The little black girl whom Daniel called Nosy is also fictional, and so are such minor characters as the Trenton tavern keeper and Big Tom.

Captain Ivers is based on a real Captain Ivers who lived in Stratford, Connecticut, and sailed from the harbor there. We know very little about him, though, and most of the details of his life and character as they appear here are invented. However, we do know one thing about him: he owned a slave name Jack Arabus and sent him to serve in his place in the Revolution. Indeed, the whole story of Jack Arabus's service in the army for six or seven years, his return and Ivers's attempt to reenslave him, his jailing and his suit at law in New Haven, is entirely true and historically accurate as we have it here. The sketchy details we have are found in the official Connecticut law reports. The story of his friendship with Washington is borrowed from the life of another black Connecticut soldier named Samuel Bush. We do not know how or when Jack Arabus died, or whether he had a wife or children. That part is made up.

William Samuel Johnson, of course, is real. His son's house, in which Dr. Johnson lived in his old age and died, still stands in Stratford, and you can visit it there. Dr. Johnson was a member of both the Congress in New York and the convention in Philadelphia at the same time. Later he was one of Connecticut's first senators under the new constitution. The little harbor of Newfield is now Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city. The Iverses' house we portray in this story still exists, preserved and moved to the grounds of the Bridgeport Museum of Art, Science and Industry. It was the house of Ivers's stepson, John Brooks, and you can visit it and walk around in it. The storm at sea is taken from Captain John Brooks's own journal of one of his voyages on the
Junius Brutus.
John Brooks and three of his sailors were actually washed off the deck, and Brooks and one sailor really were washed back on. You can read about it in his own handwriting in the journal preserved at the museum.

The
Junius Brutus
was a real brig, of which the real John Brooks was captain. The ship we describe here is taken partly from Brooks's journal and partly from a real brig, the
Beaver II,
a floating museum in Boston that is a replica of the famous “Tea Party” ship. You can visit it and climb all over it as we did.

Black Sam Fraunces is also a historical character. Fraunces' Tavern still exists in New York City, in Lower Manhattan. There is a restaurant there, and there is also a museum where you can see artifacts of Revolutionary times. The present building sits on the original foundation, but the tavern burned down completely twice in the nineteenth century. The current building was designed to be typical of the large inns of the eighteenth century, but we cannot be sure that the original tavern looked exactly as the present one does.

Sam Fraunces is quite an interesting character. He came from the West Indies in the 1750s and supplied food to the army during the Revolution, at which time he established a friendship with George Washington. Earlier he had purchased the tavern, which became one of the best-known inns in the United States. George Washington bade farewell to his officers at the end of the Revolution there. When Washington became our first president under the new Constitution, he asked Fraunces to serve as steward in his household. Actually, at the time of our story Fraunces had sold the tavern and was managing a farm in New Jersey, but he continued to have business interests in both Philadelphia and New York and visited the tavern quite frequently. Whether he knew Jack Arabus or not, we do not know; but the case of
Arabus
v.
Ivers
was well known among black Americans, and it is probable that he would have heard of it, at least.

Curiously, we are not sure whether Fraunces was in fact black. Trying to find out with certainty was one of the most interesting and intriguing research problems we encountered in writing this book. He was called Black Sam, and he did come from the West Indies, where there was a very large black population. Most modern writers have assumed that he was a black man—including several historians of colonial New York. However, the first United States census, which was taken in 1790, lists him as a “white male.” It is our guess that he was of mixed blood. Perhaps he was part French, because his name was spelled Frances before he changed it—probably to conform to the way it was pronounced. Or maybe he was simply a dark-skinned white man.

Historians disagree about the major compromises of the Constitutional Convention. For years most historians believed that the disagreement most difficult to resolve was that of whether to give the most populous states more representatives and votes than the least populous states. That problem was solved by the Connecticut Compromise, which gives each state two senators no matter what its population is, but gives each state members of the House of Representatives proportionate to their population. During the past generation, however, through new research and study, many historians have come to see the slavery question as most important. Some say that the people of the United States missed their best opportunity to abolish slavery in 1787. Others say that was impossible given the conditions and attitudes of the time. In any event, we do know that the compromise described in our story did come about, and probably as a result of messages between the convention and Congress. Of course, we also know that slaves became more numerous and slave conditions became worse after the new government came into being. Finally, seventy-eight years after the days of our story, slavery was abolished as a result of a terrible Civil War.

This book, then, is a mixture of fact and fiction. We have tried, however, to capture a feeling of what it was like to live at the time this nation was being put together by the Founding Fathers.