In local bands, he blurted out bebop rhythms pioneered by jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Peter Roderick wanted to write books — big, important works like James Baldwin’s “Nobody Knows My Name.”

Both men, the sons of Cape Verdean immigrants, ended up on Rhode Island’s waterfront, where cargo ships berthed at Providence or Quonset or Portsmouth.

On the docks or in dark holds, they did what longshoremen call “bull” work: They grabbed lumber with metal hooks, loaded pig iron into buckets, heaved bags of cement or tossed boxes of dynamite.

They broke fingers and toes, worked at night under bad lighting, fell through hatches and choked on cement dust.

But theirs was a brotherhood. They made their home first in Fox Point, on Planet, Transit and South Main streets, and then in the local unit of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the first black and predominantly Cape Verdean labor union in New England.

They worked in gangs of 15, 22 or 25 men. On their days off, they prayed at the Fox Point Holy Rosary Church or the Sheldon Street Congregational Church, went to the track, played cards or drank at Mello’s and Neenie Carvalho’s and Bumpa Smith’s Bar.

Soares, a World War II Army bugler, joined the union full time in 1948. Six years later, he became president, a post he held, off and on, for the next 20 years.

During that time, he and others –– including business agent Matthew “Sonny” Bento –– fought for better wages, health benefits and safer working conditions.

“These men made money for the city and the state. They had a global impact,” says Arthur’s daughter, Sylvia Ann Soares, a former actress who now spends her days preserving the history of the men who worked on the waterfront.

So far, she has spent more than 25 hours interviewing longshoremen for “By the Sweat of Our Brow,” an oral history of the group.

On March 28 at 1:30 p.m., she’ll tell their stories at the Museum of Work and Culture in Woonsocket.

Other histories are in the works.

Claire Andrade-Watkins, a filmmaker and director of what she calls the Fox Point Cape Verdean Project, is gathering material for “Working the Boats,” a documentary about the city’s longshoremen. She has spent several years examining private documents and union records.

For more than 30 years — from the 1940s to the early 1970s — the waterfront provided jobs and security for some 250 Cape Verdean union members and their families, she says. “They took the jobs nobody else wanted.”

Now, the original union members are in their 70s, 80s and 90s.

For those who want to record their stories, time is running out.

Cape Verdean life has always been tied to the sea, says Yvonne Smart, education coordinator at the Cape Verdean Museum Exhibit on Waterman Avenue in East Providence.

In the 1700s, Cape Verdean men worked as whalers on American ships.

Two centuries later, in the early 1900s, they left the poor and drought-stricken Cape Verde islands in search of jobs in Providence, New Bedford and Cape Cod.

Some worked in cranberry bogs or factories, or opened stores. But others turned to the docks for jobs. “It was a natural procession to go from seaman to longshoreman,” says Smart.

In Fox Point, they settled along the waterfront in rundown houses and cold-water tenements.

Arthur Soares’ parents, Sebastien Jose Soares and Izora “Izzie” DaGraca, arrived with the first wave of immigrants. Sebastien, a violin maker, opened a barbershop on Wickenden Street; the fair-skinned Izzie got a sales job at an Outlet Company department store.

Their two boys, Eddie and Arthur, swam in the Providence River, joined Boy Scout Troop 40 and later became deacons at the Sheldon Street Church.

Eddie, the oldest, learned to play jazz on his mother’s piano while listening to Fats Waller. Arthur, self taught, improved by listening to other musicians.

Eddie played at the Celebrity Club. Jazz headliners Sarah Vaughan and Pee Wee Russell stopped by his house on John Street.

Before World War II, Arthur played trumpet, sometimes with his brother, in the Jimmy Berry Trio.

Once, he played a gig in Maine, but no one danced. They just stared at the band. They had never seen “colored” people before, says his daughter, Sylvia.

“All your life … you’re feeling like you’re the other,” says Peter Roderick, 70, one of the longshoremen interviewed by Sylvia Soares. “You’re in a totally white environment and you’re always the other.”

Fox Point was different.

Hemmed in by the East Side and the harbor, it was one of a handful of Cape Verdean enclaves in New England in the 1900s, along with New Bedford, Cape Cod and Hartford.

“We were like a whole village of Cape Verdean mothers and fathers who weren’t only raising their child, but … everybody else’s child,” says 77-year-old Harold Fontes, interviewed for “By the Sweat of Our Brow.”

The longshoremen’s union had its start in Detroit in 1892 when delegates from 11 ports adopted bylaws and the name National Longshoremen’s Association of The United States. A few years later they changed the name to International Longshoremen’s Association to reflect the growing numbers of Canadian members. By 1905, the union boasted 100,000 members.

Manuel Q. Ledo, a Cape Verdean community leader, started the Rhode Island chapter in 1933 to improve working conditions locally.

Although there were some non-Cape Verdeans — Irish, Italian and African-American workers among them — Local 1329 mirrored a Cape Verdean family, says Andrade-Watkins. Sons learned the trade through their fathers, uncles, cousins or neighbors. The men adopted a hiring system based on seniority. Older union members, carrying “A” cards, got the first jobs. Those with B, C, D, E and F cards followed.

The work was hard and dangerous. Falling loads killed some. Others, after years of breathing in cement dust, died of lung cancer.

Marshall Bento Jr., 65, remembers cranes dumping scrap metal onto the ship decks. Toxic plumes would billow up — dust from ground up cars. A lot of guys who didn’t wear masks ended up with breathing problems, he says.

Marcelino Medina, 72, remembers loading boxes of Navy dynamite as a teenager. The work occurred offshore in case the ship “blew up.”

The union gave Providence’s longshoremen an independence and power “that most workers of color would not experience until several decades later,” says Brown University student Olivia Ildefonso, the author of an unpublished thesis on Local 1329, part of the Fox Point Cape Verdean Project.

A one-time gang boss and hatch foreman, Soares was the first black man and union official to become president of the Narragansett Bay chapter of the Propeller Club of the United States, a group dedicated to improving the maritime community worldwide. In 1987, the club named him Maritime Man of the Year.

“That became my avocation,” he told an interviewer in 1987, “to improve the conditions of the longshoremen and also make a dollar myself.”

Sylvia Soares grew up in Fox Point, but her relationship with her strict father was a rocky one. Sylvia rebelled and dreamed of living far from her Fox Point neighborhood.

After Hope High School, she spent two years at Lincoln University in Missouri. Back in Providence, she joined the fledgling Trinity Repertory Theater. But for many years she lived in California, Connecticut and New York, where she roomed with actress Susan Sarandon, appeared on the New York stage and won guest roles on TV shows such as “Baretta” and “Kojak.”

Then the work dried up, and in 1981, she returned to Providence.

“I didn’t know what my mission in life was,” says Sylvia, who spent time working as a live-in nurse’s aide.

Her father died in 1988, when she was 47. Her mother, Dorothy, died four years later.

Back in Providence, she earned a bachelor’s degree in theater at Brown University, but “I was drained and ambivalent about my future,” she says.

At some point, she saw a documentary by Andrade-Watkins, a family friend. Called “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican,” it mentioned the longshoremen’s union but not her father. She had been thinking about the lives of her extended family. The documentary made her think she could do something similar.

With a $2,000 grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Sylvia Soares began to interview the men who had worked on the waterfront decades ago. Some had worked with her father.

“I was moved by these men and their stories,” she says.

One of them, Peter Roderick, had abandoned a first novel after his wife died and his job left him with little time to write.

But after a heart attack, he wrote another book, “Araujo’s Stone,” published by TurnKey Press. In it, the main character leaves Fogo, a Cape Verde island, for the Providence waterfront, “with just the clothes on his back, one change of underwear, two five dollar bills,” a stone and the address of a cousin in New Bedford.

Sylvia hopes to turn her waterfront stories into a booklet, a traveling school exhibit — maybe even a one-woman play.

The 68-year-old actress works out of her parents’ last home on Cypress Street in Mount Hope, where her father and mother died.

The old Cape Verdean neighborhood at Fox Point — shattered by urban renewal, gentrification and the growth of Brown University — is gone.

But on Cypress Street, Sylvia Soares keeps shrines in two rooms. They include photos of her mother and statues of Buddha and Quant Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion. Her father’s old lumber hook hangs nearby.