Freedom

by Catherine Johnson

  “She has found me work with her brothers?” I said, just in case I had got it wrong.

  “If you want it.” Mr Furman nodded. “In the gardens they work at, out of town up in a village called Hackney, in…” He screwed up his face to read the words. “Mr Loddiges Nursery,” he read aloud. “Mr Loddiges has many glasshouses and needs a lad with experience of exotic plants…”

  I smiled so wide, Mr Furman laughed. “Boy, you look like the cat who got the cream never mind the mutton!”

  And that was that. I took my leave of Henry, my first friend.

  “I will learn my letters,” I said. “I will, to write you.”

  “Then I’d better learn mine too!” he said. “We shall make it a race, the first to write buys the other a pork pie and a jug of beer this time next year!”

  We shook hands. And I set off with Mr Furman for my new life. As we walked the road north into the countryside, I thought happily that I was no longer bought or sold or owned by anyone. Soon my labour would bring me money I could call my own. Mamma and Old Thomas would be so proud of me.

  I saw Mary again on the Whitsun holiday when she came out for a picnic with her brothers. It was a glorious day. We set out across the fields together, me, Mary, Joshua, who worked in the glasshouse with me, and Benjamin her older brother, who worked with Mr Loddiges, talking to customers.

  Joshua and I carried the basket between us. Up in the sky, swallows – for I knew what those birds were called now – sliced through the air.

  “Your namesakes, the Barratts, will be back to Jamaica in a fortnight,” she said.

  I protested. “Oh, they are not my namesakes! Not any more. I will not be called by those that owned me!”

  “Too right!” Joshua said, and Mary nodded.

  “I’m Nat Thomas now. That’s my name.”

  We found a patch of meadow and set out our feast. Mary had brought some beer and we had bought a good cheese from a dairy close to the gardens.

  “How’s Mr Bird?” I asked. I hoped perhaps he had flown away too.

  “Oh, he’s just the same, he went for Maggie when she was doing the fire up in the library, she’s lucky to have all her fingers. She forgot herself and ran straight down the proper stairs instead of the servants’ ones, bashed clean into Mistress Barratt, almost knocked her over!”

  We all laughed, and Mary smiled. “How’s work going?” she asked.

  Joshua grinned. “Nat’s teaching me all he knows, about the pineapples…”

  “And Joshua’s teaching me my letters,” I replied.

  Joshua nodded. “Nat’s a fast learner!”

  Mary smiled. “You’ll be writing to Henry before he does I bet!”

  I looked round. I was so lucky. Here we were in a meadow, the sun on our backs, the birds calling in the sky. My new life was still full of hard work, but I liked it. Sometimes, in the very early mornings, I would get up an hour before the others and help the night-soil men. Loddiges’ garden used a lot of night soil to help the plants grow and Mr Colley was one of the men that delivered to us. Most of the other lads hated the job, Joshua specially said the smell made him vomit. I did not mind one bit. Mr Colley always brought news of Mr Furman and every time the cart opened and the dirt fell out on to our manure heap I saw, in my mind’s eye, the Barratts covered in the stuff. I remembered again just how lucky I’d been to get away.

  I raised my mug. “A toast to Mary!” She blushed and threw a handful of grass at me. “Thanks for your excellent help in my escape. And to friends and family far away.”

  I thought of Mamma and all the folk across the ocean, and Henry crossing the North Sea. And I blinked then; it felt as if I had the most enormous stone in my throat. Mary put a hand on mine.

  “You will see your mother again,” she said quietly. I nodded. It would just take time.

  “I’ve got a toast!” Benjamin sat up. “To new friends!”

  I raised my mug again. Mamma would be so pleased to see me here, among real friends. Working hard, free at last.

  “Are you all right?” Mary asked.

  I wiped my face. “It’s only some of that grass you threw at me, got in my eye…”

  Joshua drained his cup. “Enough toasts!” He got up. “Who can climb to the top of that beech tree the fastest?” He ran across the meadow and reached the bottom of the tree before any of us had even had a chance.

  “Not fair!” Benjamin called.

  I sped up and jumped for the low branch, but Benjamin still beat me to the top. I pulled myself up and sat down beside him, panting. I looked out across the city of London to the south. And I felt at home.

  HISTORICAL NOTE :

  THE SLAVE TRADE

  Many countries and societies in history enslaved others in the past: the Romans, the Vikings, the Ottomans, the Chinese and the Incan empires to name a few. But until the British began enslaving African people in the seventeenth century, slaves were usually people captured in battle or conquest.

  African enslavement was different. It was we British who modernised and industrialised the buying and selling of people to work in the hot climates of our new colonies in the Caribbean and North America. It meant that huge fortunes were made by a few individual plantation owners, as workers did not have to be paid; slave owners could work men, women and children to death and just import new ones when they were needed. Enslaved people worked growing sugar cane, tobacco and, in North America, cotton. Walking round the streets of any big town in Britain today you can see the profits that came from the enslavement of millions of people over two hundred years. Art galleries – the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London for example – and many fine country houses across the country were built using money that came from slave labour.

  The slave system was made out to be a good thing to the ordinary British people. After all, argued the slave owners and traders, black Africans were not as intelligent, were not even as human, as white Europeans. This was, of course, all lies. But it kept the trade going and the money rolling in. It wasn’t just the slave owners who profited, many industries flourished through the free labour including shipbuilding and gun manufacturing.

  The public mood began to change after a series of important trials brought the treatment of slaves to the world’s attention. One of these trials was that of the Zong – one of the most important turning points in the battle to end slavery. It meant that conditions on slave ships were printed in newspapers, talked about in churches and chapels, in coffee houses and pubs all across the country. Artists painted pictures about it, books and articles were written about it. Ordinary people began to see slavery for the inhumane trade it was. Some of the arguments and discussions in this story are based on real quotes from the Zong trial, and some have been simplified or imagined.

  Eventually the actions of organizations like the Sons of Africa, and white abolitionists like Granville Sharp, John Clarkson, and later William Wilberforce, meant the government had to act.

  The British trade in slaves was abolished in 1807, but the slaves in the colonies, like Jamaica, were not freed until 1833. There was a massive outcry among the slave owners. Not just plantation owners, but many middle-class Britons who invested in enslaved people as absentee owners: they used their money to invest in and buy enslaved people that they never saw or met, but whose labour directly profited them.

  There was a massive backlash. No one wanted to lose money, so the British Government paid out compensation. The more slaves you owned the more money you received. The son of our former prime minister David Cameron’s great-great uncle received what would amount to £3 million in today’s money, for the two hundred and two slaves he owned.

  The enslaved people received nothing. Not one penny. But at least they were free.

  Slavery was not abolished in America until 1865, and not until 1888 in Brazil. During the three hundred years of the international slave trade, so many enslaved people were thrown overboard, dead and alive on what was called the Middle Passage that to this da
y, sharks follow the route of those ships, looking for more people to eat.

  THE PEOPLE

  NATHANIEL BARRATT and his owners are not real, but their stories are inspired by real historical events. Like Nathaniel, many enslaved people did believe that slavery didn’t exist in Britain. They were sadly wrong – the notices advertising slaves for sale that Mary reads out in the story are based on real adverts.

  OLAUDAH EQUIANO was a real person and had an incredible life. He was captured and enslaved, then went on to buy his own freedom. He did write a book, and it was published as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It became a best-seller and he continued, alongside the Sons of Africa, to fight for the abolition of slavery.

  GRANVILLE SHARP was one of the first white English men who campaigned to end the slave trade. His writings were vital in changing people’s minds, and he worked tirelessly to change the law. He died in 1813, after the British trade in enslaved people had been abolished, but not before Great Britain ended slavery in our colonies.

  SHADRACK FURMAN was a real man too, although the one in this story is really based on two men smooshed together. Shadrack Furman was one of the first black pensioners, which meant he was paid a pension for his service in the British army. He was an enslaved American who joined the British Army during the American War of Independence. The British promised freedom to every slave who fought for them, But when the British lost the war the ex-slave soldiers were shipped to Canada or Britain. There were so many black soldiers in London at the end of the eighteenth century that they were known as the St Giles’ Blackbirds.

  JOSEPH JOHNSON was the man who danced with a ship on his hat. He lived in London at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. He had a large model ship on his head and made his living dancing on the streets. A character based on him featured recently in a historical drama – only in the background though.

  FRANCES SANCHO was real too. Her mother and father ran a grocer’s shop in Mayfair. Her father, Ignatius, had been enslaved, worked in London and ran away. One of his owners left him money in their Will and he used it to buy his freedom. As a property owner he was entitled to vote in British elections, and in 1774 became the first black Briton to vote. He had six children, and the eldest was Frances.

  THE MAROONS were people who escaped enslavement in Jamaica and set up villages and towns high up in the mountains. The hills were so high and the trees so dense that the British couldn’t find them. There were several wars when the British tried to round up and capture the Maroons, but they never succeeded. One of their leaders was a famous woman fighter called Nanny. Today the only remaining Maroon settlements in Jamaica are semi-independent. The descendants of the original Maroons speak a dialect that originates from the west coast of Africa, in what today is Ghana.

  MR LODDIGES was a famous gardener who had one of the biggest collections of exotic plants in Britain. Before Kew Gardens built their huge glasshouses, his were the largest in the whole world. In Hackney nowadays there is no trace of his gardens, but he has a road and a massive estate of flats named after him.

  TIMELINE

  1562John Hawkins is the first Englishman to voyage to Africa to participate in the transatlantic slave trade. He sells a total of 1,200 people to the Spanish in exchange for sugar, pearls and ginger.

  1728The first Maroon War in Jamaica. Groups of enslaved Africans rebel and defeat British forces in the fight for their freedom.

  1760A slave called Tacky leads a protest against the treatment of slaves on sugar plantations. Hundreds of slaves attack the plantations setting crops and sugar alight. In the end, Tacky is captured and killed.

  1781132 enslaved Africans are thrown overboard from the slave ship, Zong.

  1783The slave owners of the Zong attempt to claim money from their insurers, but the case is taken to trial and they lose.

  1787Ottobah Cuguano writes and publishes, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species”. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave trade is founded.

  1789The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano is published.

  1790Parliament rejects William Wilberforce’s first abolition bill.

  1795The Second Maroon War in Jamaica.

  1807Parliament passes the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. People could no longer capture, buy or sell slaves. But slavery itself is still legal.

  1833Parliament passes the Slavery Abolition Act. This act gives all slaves in the Caribbean their freedom, but some other British territories have to wait longer. Ex-slaves in the Caribbean are forced to work for former masters for a low wage for a period of time, therefore slavery is not fully abolished in practice until 1838.

  GLOSSARY

  ABOLITIONIST A person in favour of formally putting an end to a practice or system

  BROCADE A rich fabric woven with a raised pattern, typically with gold or silver thread

  JUNKANOO A street parade with music, dance and costumes celebrated in many towns across Jamaica and the Bahamas

  NABOB A wealthy person

  ON THE LAM Someone who is on the run

  PICKNEY A baby or child

  PLANTATION A large farm on which crops such as coffee, sugar and tobacco are grown.

  SEDAN CHAIR A portable covered chair, usually carried by two men. Chairs were a popular mode of transport in the eighteenth century, as they could travel down lanes too narrow for carriages.

  THE MIDDLE PASSAGE The journey where Africans, packed onto ships, were transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies. The voyage took between three to four months and the enslaved people lay chained in rows on the floor of the hold or on shelves that ran around the inside of the ships’ hulls.

  VERANDA A large open porch around the front and sides of a house

  While this book is based on real characters and actual historical events, some situations and people are fictional, created by the author.

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  First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2018

  This electronic edition published 2018

  Text © Catherine Johnson, 2018

  Cover artwork © Two Dots

  eISBN 9781407193090

  The right of Catherine Johnson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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