Frenchie
Frenchie
F renchie was one of those men who might have been locked up by the authorities, only instead of sitting in jail the night before sailing out, he was sharing a meal with Willis and Old Joe in Enid’s kitchen. Enid, Old Joe’s sister, had been freed following the death of her mistress and now lived at the edge of town, preparing food for those who could pay and, sometimes, for those who could not.
As Frenchie told it, he had avoided being hauled away by the inspector on the arrival of his ship, in part owing to his ambiguous, ruddy complexion and, in part, thanks to clever timing. The inspector was still on deck, checking the papers of three of Frenchie’s colored comrades. Frenchie cast his glance forward, then aft, hoisted a small oak barrel onto one shoulder to obscure his face, slipped a coil of rope over the other, and simply walked down a ramp to the dock and into the crowd.
Willis could barely eat his meal for listening to Frenchie’s stories of life on board, for better or worse. The rough seas, the wormy bread, the sickness. The dirty, dangerous work. The satisfaction of a well-coordinated crew. Men of different hues and tongues pooling their efforts, despite the conflicts that could brew on board.
“Not much choice in that,” said Frenchie. “When there’s trouble at sea, there’s no place to go. Either you work together, or you perish together.” Frenchie spoke of sailors like him who’d pushed away from the docks and never returned to land. He told of free black jacks being kidnapped and enslaved and having to escape. If they were lucky. Sometimes, the white Europeans were kidnapped, too, and made to labor. Willis found that hard to believe, but Frenchie insisted.
“There will always be men willing to steal the freedom of others if they think it will bring them an advantage,” Frenchie said.
Willis was fascinated by the idea that a colored man could push away from the docks and leave the port city. That men like Frenchie could cross the oceans to other lands or travel up and down the coast as they did. That even enslaved men could join them as seamen, stewards, or cooks, and spend so many days separated from the people who held them in bondage. If they did not return, they could be hunted and recaptured, or killed. And even if they did return, they might see their wives and children or other kin sold off as retribution. But in the meantime, they were out there, seeing the world, learning things, and carrying the stories of what they’d experienced from one shore to another.
Each story that Frenchie told opened Willis’s eyes to new possibilities. What intrigued Willis the most was the idea of what men like Frenchie could find when they went home. The different cities, the different ways in which men of color might live. The conditions they faced. Sometimes misery, sometimes loneliness. But oftentimes, such men had families waiting for them ashore. Families with land to farm and workshops to operate and children in school. Families that had never been sold out from under them.
Frenchie himself had a wife and children up in a place called Philadelphia. Being Martinique-born, he had language skills that had helped him to cross the oceans and back, though he generally avoided routes that brought him this far south. Not only had officials in the port city taken to confining free sailors and seamen, they’d also issued a ban on those who originated in the French-speaking West Indies. The slave revolt down in Saint-Domingue, long before Willis’s time, still had the local population of slaveholders feeling nervous. Even Willis knew never to call the country by its post-revolution name, Haiti. But the world was full of contradictions, as Frenchie could attest. Frenchie said he’d once worked with white seamen on a ship that was captained by a black man. There had even been a ship with a woman crew member on board, though no one had realized it at first. Excellent mapmaker, she’d proved to be.
“The hardest trip,” Frenchie said, “was my very first. We are going back twenty years, now. I was the cook, and the only colored man on board. There were men who tripped me as I walked by. Men who referred to me in most uncharitable terms. Men who hit me for not delivering the food fast enough. I would prepare the food, with my own two hands, for every man on that rigger, but when the time came to sit down to a meal, I was made to eat on my own.”
Then the vagaries of nature forced a change in their relations. A terrific storm rose up during that voyage. The ship and crew were in danger, and all hands were needed on deck.
“That was when those other lads saw what I was made of,” Frenchie said. “When they needed me to help keep that ship from rolling over and cracking apart.” Frenchie unleashed a low, undulating laugh. “After that, I was hired on as a deckhand. And the year after that, the captain took on a few more fellows like me.”
No matter his provenance, Frenchie said, the seafaring man often was disrespected by others who did not know his work. He was seen as a man apart from others.
“Men without ties to a family or a town. That’s how some people see us,” Frenchie said. “There are people who believe all sailor-town districts are places of ill repute. But sailors come in different shapes and sizes and needs, like anyone else. Over the years, I have come to see that we mariners often band together, across languages and cultures and colors, despite our prejudices, not only to stay alive but also to protect ourselves against the disdain of others.”
Sometimes, Frenchie said, a determined young slave would escape bondage by stowing away on a ship, and they’d all look the other way. If he survived, they’d absorb him into the crew. Make him work for his keep. Willis leaned forward, listening carefully, as the idea of running away by sea began to steer his imagination in a new direction. But Frenchie, who must have recognized in Willis this hopeful kind of agitation, shook his head. It was almost impossible now, with the inspections, Frenchie said.
“Are you never afraid?” Willis asked Frenchie. “You sail on ships similar to the ones that have kidnapped people from far away.” Willis had heard, from the oldest slaves, how men and women, taken forcibly from distant shores, had been bound and stacked like stolen logs.
Frenchie smiled. “How old are you, now?” he asked.
“Fourteen years of age, sir,” said Willis.
“Four-teen,” Frenchie said and gave a hoot. “What you have seen in your short life is only one small part of the truth. Don’t you forget that, young Willis. If you live long enough, you will find that the rest of the truth is out there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the bay. Willis turned his head to look toward the coast.
Frenchie lowered his voice and leaned in toward Willis. “Our ancestors have been going to sea for as long as anyone can remember. It is only natural that some of us return to ride the waves. To listen for the voices of those who went before us. We cannot undo the worst days of our past, but we can always look to better days. A man might have fear, young Willis, but he lives all the same.”
To Willis, it seemed they were still in the midst of their worst days, even though Africans were no longer being brought across the ocean. Even as he moved about the port city with relative ease, Willis saw a market building where a group of men, women, and children were fixed in place by ropes. They were being auctioned off along with cattle and furnishings.
Willis had seen people brought to the backcountry in wagons, chained together or bound with rope. His heart pounded at the thought that he, too, might be stolen away and sold, despite the fact that he was already in bondage. There were slaveholders worse than the Oldhams, Willis knew. All his life, people had told him so.
The next day, Willis watched as the crew on Frenchie’s ship pulled on the clew lines and buntlines from the deck, adjusting the sailcloth. Soon the vessel moved away, buoyed by the incoming tide and towed by longboats. Frenchie and another seaman, still holding fast to the ropes high above the deck, each raised one arm in salute to the people on the docks. Willis waved back and watched as first one, then another sail was raised and the vessel turned fully toward the horizon.