Race and magic in the New World

American origin novels tend to be about tough pioneers who brave nature as they head out west, or cowboys who roam the prairies with massive herds of cattle, or stern lawmen who bring order to the wild frontier. All of whom, in the novels, are usually white, with perhaps a scattering of lowlevel Mexicans among the cowboys.

But there was racial diversity in America from the very first non-native settler days. African-Americans lived and worked in the US as free men before slavery was established. Mexicans were landowners in much of the southwest. And there were Indians too, as Brinda Charry has described in her two novels of historical fiction. Her first, The East Indian, traces the life of a man who might be the first South Asian American, all the way back in the 1600s.

Charry has followed that up with Hocus Pocus, this one set in the 1800s, examining the life of a magician from Madras. This is fiction, to be sure, but is based on two Indian magicians, Ramo Samee and Kumar Sama who performed in England and the United States in the early nineteenth century.

As with her first book, Hocus Pocus is extensively researched and detailed. Here too, Charry writes in the language of the 1800s without going overboard with old-timey phrases.

“Do not tempt me, dear captain, pray do not,” pleads Walter languidly between sips of madeira. “I cannot acquire a thing at the moment, not a thing. I am quite tragically short of funds, as Ezra reminds me every day.”

The language becomes more vivid when India is described.

where English vessels drop anchor at the port of Madras, India, where the waters come alive with lean catamarans carrying acrobats, astrologers, barbers, beggars, peddlers, porters, pimps, laundrymen, masseurs, dancing girls, snake charmers and other sundry sorts […] Inevitably among these numbers are the magicians of the city, humble and obscure practitioners of their art, yet among the most skilled in the world.

Among these magicians is Samuel, of unknown ethnic origin. He is very fair-skinned, and could be

the abandoned child of some slatternly girl recently arrived from England who had taken up with one of her countrymen [..or..] the offspring of a Tamil woman and a wastrel English soldier.

Called Kumar Samee by his adoptive Tamil parents, he is a misfit, teased and resented by his Tamil playmates for his fair skin. His adoptive family was of the ‘magician caste’, though, and by the age of ten he has enough talent that he performs for the English. Who are

appalled to see one who looked like one of their own dressed in native garb

and promptly put him into an English orphanage, where he is renamed Samuel Thomas. Eventually sent to England to perform, he joins up with another magician for a double act. Hints are dropped of a grim event in England before Samuel migrates to America, where a museum owner decides to exoticize him.

His skin is [now] a rich brown, the color of mahogany, of good coffee taken with a very small dash of milk. His eyes are lined with blacking, his lips are stained red. Perched on his head is a turban of finely spun green silk, atop which sits a large peacock’s feather. Upon his ears, hoops of bronze. He is clad in a long, spangled robe that appears to be wrought of liquid gold and crimson and in flowing trousers of magenta silk.

This hodgepodge appearance, and the fact that he appears to not know English during his performances, serves Samuel well, professionally, for a while. Offstage, he wanders the streets of cold rainy Boston, meeting a variety of people who are drawn with Charry’s well-researched pen. There is Liberty Washington, a free black man from Maryland with vitiligo (a skin disease that fascinates many ethnologists of the time, as the man appeared neither white nor black). Jason Williams, a former seafarer who is covered with tattoos, and constantly adding more. Mr Malcolm, an elderly black man whose owners were reluctant to free him until he grew old, when they became all too eager to let him free. Each character is interesting in themself, and adds to the rich tapestry of the book.

Non-conventional sexuality is a steady theme in this book. In the foreground is Walter Mepham, the owner of the museum who hires Samuel and grows increasingly attracted to him. Mepham is married, childless, and has had affairs with young men in the past. Samuel too has a longlost love, although it is ambiguously told in flashbacks, and it is always unclear if it was reciprocated or consummated. Other young men, selling their bodies, or exuding a beauty that attracts Walter or Samuel, also drift through these pages. But homosexuality is banned and shunned in both England and America, and the gay men live in the shadows, always in fear of being found out.

[..] arrested, mocked and pilloried as men of their kind stand in danger of being [..]

The book slumps in the middle section, when nothing much seems to happen except more of the same. Samuel has competition. Walter’s debts increase. Samuel and Walter are threatened. Minor characters appear and die without making much impact.

Several threads go nowhere. Walter buys a tiger cub, who is apparently content to live in what must be a small cage until he escapes. A tiger in 1815 Boston! A reader might expect this to be, somehow, a plot point, but the tiger appears and disappears as background. A boy vanishes, and his mother keeps asking Samuel to magically find him, every 50 pages or so. An aged Paul Revere is seen on the street. There are a LOT of dream sequences and visions and ephemeral thoughts:

He is visited by the memory of the sound of applauding hands; of whispers in the dark; of a shared stage ablaze with light; of a twilight that was only his and Kabir’s; of a desire that did not know how to name itself, that wants sometimes to be left alone to be what it is, that yearns sometimes to be acknowledged byt he world; of a voice calling from yesterday and his own raised in reply.

Beautiful, but perhaps too many of such passages for a prosaic reader like me. Still, even when I felt let down by the stasis or skipping over some of the dream sequences, Charry’s precise, careful, rich prose kept me reading on.

This is a book to be read for its atmosphere and its exploration of identity and race in early America.

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