Ode to Francisca | Francisca has been preserved

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Sometimes you stumble upon a name, a person you don't know, yet it feels like there is a spiritual intimacy. Someone who touches you, someone you wish you had met. Perhaps because that person is similar to you, or precisely because they are very different. Someone who fought the battle you are facing now, or who lived in a time you would have liked to have found yourself in. Someone who breathes the same air, who knows the ground where you once made your home, who shares your stories. That was the feeling I got when I came across the name Francisca.

A free woman in 17th century Amsterdam. A woman of color. A black woman. That addition completes her story, because to really understand her place and time, you need to know. In the early 1930s, a small black community emerged in Amsterdam. The men in that community often worked as sailors for the WIC and VOC. However, the background of the women often remains unclear, as if they stood in the shadows of history. Sometimes we know no more than their marriage or the birth of their children, and of many even that has not been preserved. But some names and stories have endured the centuries, like Francisca's.

Francisca's story has been preserved, even if it is fragmentary and sometimes distorted by time. We must always look critically at sources from that time, especially since they were written down in a world of colonial rule and slavery. But what we do know is that Francisca was probably employed by a man named Luis Gomes in Hamburg, and by 1632, along with other black Amsterdam residents, she was living as a free woman in a basement apartment on Breestraat.
 

Francisca played an important role in the formation of the black community in Amsterdam. Although sources sometimes tried to portray her and her community negatively, they also paint the picture of a woman who actively helped others. She welcomed black newcomers into her home, gave them shelter and helped them find their place in the city. One testimony even states that she “took in all blacks coming here to her home, and paired them with black women.” She was a sleeping woman, a connecting force in the community. The names of black Amsterdammers came up again and again in notarized deeds, in marriages, in the baptism of children. They knew and supported each other.
 

It fascinated me, the idea of a black community in the Amsterdam of that time, but even more so the idea of a woman like Francisca. The history we are taught in school often revolves around men - and especially white men. But here was Francisca, a black woman, visible and powerful in a city that did not accept her as a matter of course, but where she found her place.
 

As I write these words, I feel the lines of time that connect us. I am part of a long chain of black Amsterdammers. From Francisca to now, we are all writing a line in a poem that is still in the making. A poem about identity, about finding a home in a city that is both familiar and alienating. A poem that grows with each new voice, with each experience, with each struggle.
 

A poem as an ode to this city, as an ode to the woman who brought her strength and warmth. An ode to Francisca.
 

Gershwin Bonevacia