Harvard University Press/Black Jacks/Joseph Johnson

[Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, by W. Jeffrey Bolster]

JOSEPH JOHNSON

"Creating a black Atlantic seafaring tradition from African maritime practices, New World maritime slavery, and African spiritual associations with water, black sailors fashioned a workplace culture that remained closed to whites in certain ways. The case of Joseph Johnson, a superannuated black merchant sailor in early-nineteenth-century London, is illustrative. Lacking a naval pension, and having no claim to parish relief because of his foreign birth, he had no choice but to entertain for sustenance. A white Londoner suggested that 'novelty...induced Black Joe to build a model of the ship Nelson; to which, when placed on his cap, he can, by a bow of thanks...give the appearance of sea-motion.' The aged Johnson tramped the streets with his unique ship model upon his head, gracefully dancing his way to a beggar's livelihood. But neither novelty nor necessity alone inspired Johnson's elaborate headgear. In a classic case of cultural cross-over, Johnson appropriated a European artifact, one that had become meaningful to him through his own years of sea service, and reinvested it with African meanings to create a characteristically black cultural expression. Most white contemporaries looked at Joe Johnson through the distorted glass of race and saw an old black sailor cleverly manipulating a full-rigged ship on his head. London blacks, on the other hand, saw an aged mummer bobbing through the streets, connecting them with his coded ship to West Indian and Carolinian slaves, and to people on the Gold Coast and the Niger Delta. Forced to represent himself with fawning propriety to white almsgivers, Johnson undoubtedly took psychological refuge in their inability to comprehend him fully, even as he shook his creolized African past in their faces."

(pp. 66-67)