James Stout

In 1757, he gets a job as a clerk in the ordinance office, which so far as I can tell is like a mid-level bureaucratic position.

This leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order to argue with his friends.

Wow.

One of his older brothers is a doctor who – and you get the feeling this is like a family of good people because his older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of his house for the poor of London, right?

Damn, yeah.

And Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out with him and his patients and like talk.

There's not TV at the time.

What else are you going to do, right?

No podcast.

No podcast, right.

So Granville shows up one day in 1765, the year before Equiano buys his freedom, and he happens to meet a black enslaved person named Jonathan Strong.

Strong had been taken from Barbados to London by his owner, slave trader David Lyle.

He was 15 or 16 when Lyle has him baptized.

Now –

Religion is confusing at the best of times, and Strong, like many enslaved people, misunderstood the purpose of baptism and was under the impression that now that this was done, he was a free person.

Because he had been baptized, right?

You can't hold a Christian as a slave, right?

That'd be fucked up.

Pretty weird.

Pretty weird.