Fab 5 Freddy Shares His Top Five Recent Obsessions

Even with all the films made about pirates, you would never know that a lot of pirates during the time of Pirates of the Caribbean [the 18th century] were of African descent, particularly when the big moneymakers were the slave trade and sugar. It’s like with Westerns: Watching them, you would never know that Black folks played significant roles in the West. There were a lot of Black pirates; a good book about them is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss. It stars the father of Alexandre Dumas, who wrote The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846). One purpose of his own books was to keep the legacy of his father—Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a great general during the time of Napoleon—alive. Every boy grows up wanting to grab a couple broomsticks and do the sword-fighting thing. As a young African American, I would have been excited to know that one of the best who ever did it happened to be a Black guy.

The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici, by Catherine Fletcher, tells another story that has been swept under the rug: One of the Medicis during the time of the Renaissance happened to be of African descent. Alessandro was a Medici who ruled Florence [in the 1530s], making him, next to Barack Obama, a Black man who ruled a Great Western Power. His dad was a Medici and, because of his bloodline, when his father passed, he became the ruler of Florence. He was a contemporary of Machiavelli. The Black Prince is an academic read, but it really gets in and breaks down all the nuances of his life.

Another book I’ve been rereading is The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, byC.L.R. James, one of the definitive stories about the Haitian Revolution and its leader. It was perhaps Napoleon’s greatest defeat, and it was the only successful slave uprising in the history of this hemisphere. It created so much fear that the revolution was going to spread. Toussaint demonstrated a real kind of leadership and savvy. He didn’t try to kill the French plantation owners but worked out a way that they could function on a more equitable basis. It’s remarkable what he put into place, after the barbarism of slavery at that point. It’s fascinating, once again, to think of him and the type of leadership he created. 

The Lost Pirate Kingdom is a documentary series on Netflix that’s another pirates-in-the-Caribbean story. It’s pretty well done, and there are some good historical nuggets. The way it was shot has been giving me direction for a body of visual work I’ve been developing about Black pirates. I scratched the surface a couple years ago with a series of paintings I made with some digital assistance. You can see some, from my series “Black Pirates, Return,” on my website, fab5freddy.com. I’ve been doing more research and am looking to expand on those. I’m developing a narrative as well.

My favorite podcast of late has been The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway. He’s a really smart guy, and listening to him has become a way to get an update and an assessment of all the madness that we’re living through right now. He breaks things down. Unlike more and more mainstream journalists who have become afraid to express how they really see things, he has very smart takes on politics that he puts together in succinct, clear ways.He has greateconomic assessments of what we’re dealing with and how our world is severely altering. And he’s not afraid to push back on certain things and expose the kind of bullshit that is so glaring.