At the tender age of seventeen, Serafim left his family home in Kairi on a ship bound for Liverpool, England.
It’s not clear why Serafim decided to leave his home, but there were rumours that he had a quarrel with his family. Maybe in the heat of the moment, Serafim defiantly decided to leave and prove to his family that he could make it on his own, as any teenager might do. Or like I did at age fifteen, when I snuck out of my bedroom window in the dead of night, furious at my mother for not letting me go see my favourite punk bands three and a half hours south of amiskwaciy (Edmonton), so I boarded a Greyhound bus and did it anyway. Or perhaps, as one of the first in his father’s family line to be born free, Serafim wanted to experience freedom on open waters, to explore life beyond the island that half of his bloodline was enslaved to.
If indeed this was true, Serafim wouldn’t have been the first to dream of life beyond the confines of a plantation. It is estimated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one in five out of all sailors on American ships were Black men from either the United States or the Caribbean. Some worked enslaved, and others free. As historian Neil Kennedy describes, seafaring for Black men was “very often a route to freedom, a route to opportunity, a route to masculine expressions of self-worth and roots to communication in the Black Atlantic that were extremely important as well.” It is not difficult to imagine that many Black men sought more to life than toiling under the hot, beating sun, carrying out intense physical labour and enduring verbal assaults from plantation owners and human traffickers, day after day. While most white cisgender men across Turtle Island in the mid-nineteenth century also worked physically demanding jobs as farmers, loggers, labourers, and mariners, they enjoyed the freedoms that cisgender Black men didn’t—they were able to purchase land almost anywhere they wanted, to purchase homes in any neighbourhood they desired, to vote, to run for government positions, to marry whomever they wanted (so long as it was a heterosexual relationship) without consequence, and, most importantly, to have physical safety.
Although the enslavement of Africans was no longer practised in “British territories” by the time Serafim was a teen, its vestiges still lingered around the world under a different name: capitalism.
Faced with the choice of leading a life bound to a sugarcane or cacao plantation, where he would work endlessly just to fill his hungry belly, or making just enough to survive a voyage in the belly of a ship, traversing the waters into the unknown, Serafim chose the unknown.
Parting at such a young age from the only place he’d ever known was a massive decision and one that required courage and determination. He worked as a cook and deckhand on board, scraping off barnacles, loading cargo, and keeping the ship clean. Within a matter of weeks, Serafim was an entire universe away, making his own way in Liverpool. But his travels didn’t end there. He would cross the Atlantic several times on cargo ships, tracing the South American continent and docking in Brasil, Argentina, and back again to Europe. But no matter how hard he worked or how much experience he gained, Serafim’s position was never higher than cook or deckhand. As historian Jeff Bolster notes, it was rare for a Black man in the nineteenth century to rise to an officer’s berth. Even on international waters with no land in sight, white supremacy reigned.
Finally, after taking in the beauty of the South American coast one more time, Serafim crossed the Atlantic Ocean yet again and decided to settle in Liverpool, England. Liverpool, once known for being a quaint trading town, exploded in size in the early 1800s due to the natural resources stolen abroad by the British Crown. “This massive growth and prosperity was, in the main, paid for by the infamous triangular trade of sugar, tobacco and slaves between the West Indies, Africa and the Americas. Being strategically placed to exploit such transatlantic trade, Liverpool soon became the fastest growing city in the world.”
But even in Liverpool, a world away from plantations of sugar cane and coffee trees, Serafim was not fully free. Occupations in England were still limited for Black men, despite the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. He earned a living shining shoes, working as a cook, and taking on odd jobs. Somewhere along the way between Kairi and Liverpool, Serafim took to the water, but this time for his own pleasure—to swim. Oh, to feel his body weightless amid the crushing weight of white supremacy! To leave land and all of its colonial structures behind, diving into the unknown and re-emerging above the current, his lungs affirming his desire to live! Oh, to part water with his own two hands, just like he learned in his Bible book that Moses once did! Maybe between the sweet waters of the River Mersey and his mortal body, Serafim found freedom.
His life-affirming ritual turned many heads, as Europeans were only just beginning to visit rivers and oceans for recreation, and only a handful of individuals had the ability to swim at this time. Sporting competitions between Black people and white people were seen as taboo or were completely outlawed in the United States and much of the Western world, where segregation was used to maintain power over Black communities—especially in the world of sport, where a Black individual could potentially assert their physical superiority over whites, thus threatening the perceived power of white supremacy in society. Despite this, Serafim began competing in local races with young white men from Liverpool, most notably crossing the River Mersey in the dead of night in record time. Although his athletic ability was notable at the time, what was remarkable was his competing against white men.
Unbeknownst to him, his skill was a gift that would set him apart years later, on the other side of the world, and for decades to come, until his last breath.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes by Ruby Smith Díaz (Arsenal Pulp Press, January 2025).
