A young black man and a white commercial boat owner made a deal to go fishin’ for tuition. It shouldn’t have worked.
First day of a new job rarely is easy. First day of a job on a commercial fishing boat in southwest Alaska is soul-scorching. “I can handle cleaning,” Jawanza Brown said. “I can handle heavy lifting. I can handle the hard work, you constantly get slapped in the face by a fish because it’s still alive and wants to swim away. But in the nitty gritty, I don’t know what it is, when I have to bleed a fish and put it (in the refrigerated saltwater hold) 2,000 times day, then the slime builds up and eventually, you slip, and you’re on your knees. Every June, the young Black man leaves his Flint MI., home to keep his bargain with an old white boat captain from Bellingham: Six weeks of what Brown calls “pretty crude work” in exchange for the income to pay for four years of college and a chance to have a piece of the world. photos, >click to read< , From June 5, 2017, From Flint to Alaska, Fishing for Hope – >click here< 15:08
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