In the early 1600s, America was vast and Europeans had a tenuous foothold in Jamestown, Virginia. To encourage immigration, every Englishman who brought a servant or bonded labourer to America was ‘given’ 50 acres of land. One of the Englishmen who took advantage of this policy was George Menefie, who brought 23 servant workers from England, among them ‘Tony, an East Indian’.
Brinda Charry’s novel starts from this snippet of information, and goes on to explore the life in America of what might be the first South Asian American. There is no additional historical information about this Tony, so the novel is fiction, but based on extensive documented historical information about the period.
In Charry’s telling, Tony was born in
Armagon, in East India [to] a Tamil woman who had migrated from further south and who was reputed among the townspeople for her beauty.
He did not know his father, who could have been ‘anyone at all’, since his mother made a living as a prostitute. Another Tamil man who had travelled abroad dubbed the young boy ‘Tony’, a name A boy who carries the ‘spiced Indian air’ to 1600s Virginiamore pronounceable across the world, and the reader never learns his original name. After his mother’s death, Francis Day encourages Tony to travel to England as the servant of another Englishman, and thus does the boy leave his homeland.
Armagon is a place visited in a dream, one remembered in fragments: the scented jasmine clambering up the walls of our small house; the salt beds glimmering in the light of the moon; the surf rolling onto the sandy shores; the weeds that grew around the walls of the East India Company factory bursting into bloom after the rains […]
By the time Tony landed in London after a long sea journey, his protector had died at sea, and he was essentially a waif. Options were few: apprenticeships required payment and there was much unemployment. Tony became a dockworker, but found an identity.
People regarded me the same as Peter — East Indians both — although he had his own creed, tongue, king and homeland, which were quite different from mine. [..] It was something to do with the color of our skin, a similarity of complexion that put us in the same grouping. [..] It was in London that I became an East Indian, and I was to stay one for the rest of my life.
London is also where Tony met
other dark-complexioned people. In the lane behind ours resided three African men […] And one morning I saw a stocky, brown-skinned, black-haired man fishing in the Thames […] — an Indian of the New World.
A mere 8 months in London, and Tony is kidnapped onto a ship bound for Virginia. Each such ship voyage is fraught, and fewer arrive on the far shore, but Tony survives to arrive with two other boys ‘between ten and fifteen’: Dick Hughes, the oldest, and Sammy the frailest and youngest, both Caucasian.
I felt the land’s essential alien nature loom out of the silent forest and descend over me like a shadow, and I was afeared of it. [..] The English boys were unsettled by the terrain too [..] — such trees, bigger than English oaks; such quantities of land, unbounded by hedgerow or enclosure.
As you see, Charry has chosen to write the novel in language, tone and phrasing of the period, which seems appropriate, but is also smoothly readable for a modern reader. She avoids the excessively unfamiliar words like caitiff or crotchets, and characters don’t say ‘Zounds!’, and this is all to the good.
Where are you from? Such a loaded question for immigrants, and so for Tony too. In London his landlady assumes him to be ‘Mahometan’. He is called ‘the moorish apprentice’, ‘blackamoor’. He converted to Christianity at one point, (although in his heart he worships the gods of his homeland) but is still called ‘devil worshipper’.
There is endless confusion and ignorance about his origins. At various times, he is also called ‘oriental’, ‘Powhatan’, ‘gypsy’, ‘Saracen’, ‘Turk’, and all of these names are said with a sneering dislike. As always, there is suspicion of the ‘other’.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon and Titania quarrel over ‘an Indian boy’, and this piece of the 17th-century Shakespeare play appears periodically in the novel. Tony sees the play in London, is captivated by this slight representation of his origins, and remembers it through his life. And yet, he is despondently aware that the ‘Indian boy’ in the play has barely any role.
It is a brutal life, which is not sanitized or glossed over in this novel. The work is hard and relentless, the hope of escape or freedom is thinner each year, and there is both physical and sexual abuse of the young boys. These are difficult sections to read, but likely quite realistic. Tony aims to become a doctor, or at least an assistant, and this allows Charry to explore the endless superstitions about health: the woman who was hung for being a witch because another woman developed sores, the practice of purging and bloodletting, the demand for love potions, the placebo effect caused by Tony’s ‘unicorn horn powder’.
The Indians of America feature briefly, but this feels like a little of an afterthought, as they have no marked personality or characteristics, and fade out of the picture after one episode.
In Virginia, Tony lives and works alongside Africans, but this is an uneasy relationship: the Africans are older and more sophisticated, and Tony is
torn between envy at their sophistication and relaxed air, and scorn because such black skin signaled the lowest of castes back in my land.
White, black, brown — all the servants and bonded labourers are destined to work some years before attaining freedom. Yet, from the beginning they are treated differently. The black and brown boys are whipped more severely for infractions. If they run away, the black men get lifetime indenture while the white runaways get a year or two added to their sentence. And by the end of the book:
[black] men who came in as indentured servants suddenly found themselves slaves. […] the color of the skin always mattered. The [white servants] had been brought here and were treated like dogs, but they were still white men, and that, quite simply, made all the difference.
Definitely worth reading, both for its historical value and for Charry’s excellent writing.
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