Bound
Sally Gunning
Reviewed by Jo Manning
“The first ‘slaves’ brought to America were in fact white indentured servants; when chattel slaves from Africa arrived, they worked side by side … in similar working conditions. The first indentured servants arrived in Massachusetts in 1620 aboard the Mayflower…”
[From Sally Gunning’s Historical Note to BOUND]
In early colonial America, it was estimated that 75% of the labor force was indentured white folk. The poor saw it as an opportunity to start over in the New World and many came voluntarily, their labor brokered by an agent or a ship’s captain. Others making up the indenture pool were debtors, criminals, and orphans who’d not necessarily volunteered to make the harsh ocean voyage and were often sold into indenture (also known as debt bondage) against their will. Passage to America was not free; someone had to pay, and the payment exacted could be steep.
The potential for abuse in this system — beatings, rapes, being put to extremely hard and long hours of labor, extension of length of service on the most arbitrary grounds — was enormous. Very young children could spend their whole childhood in such bondage. Worse, the BIBLE (see Deuteronomy 12 in the Old Testament), as interpreted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s hellfire-and-damnation preachers, condoned slavery, giving those who enslaved their fellow man the scriptural justification for doing so.
Such is the setting for the tale of Alice Cole, who as a 7-year-old sailed from London one fine day with her parents and two brothers, hoping to start a new and better life in Philadelphia. Alas, her brothers and mother die of a fever midway in their journey, putting her father in debt to the ship’s surgeon. Cost of on-board commodities was horribly inflated and there was no appeal for release from the incurred debt, it had to be repaid; and so the little girl’s bound over to a Mr. Morton in indentured servitude. Worse, her father deserts her, leaving her in Boston, where the ship’s landed (having been blown off its intended course), while he heads off to Philadelphia. She’s all alone.
Alice is a household servant at the Mortons and shares a room with the African cook, the chattel slave Jerubah, and is a companion to Nabby, Morton’s daughter. When Nabby marries a man of comfortable means but dubious character named Emery Verley, Alice accompanies the couple to Medfield, where she’ll complete the last three years of her indenture and then be released from the contract. Perhaps she’ll try to find her father, from whom she’s heard nothing in eight years. She’s now fifteen, but slight, and looks younger.
Verley’s the villain of the piece, a brute, a despicable drunk and fornicator who beats and rapes the hapless Alice repeatedly. Badly injured by his assaults, unable to get Nabby’s help (Nabby beats her as well!), Alice decides to run away. Morton’s no help, so she makes her way to Boston. At the harbor she meets the two people who will have the greatest impact on her life up to then, the independent and wise Widow Lydia Berry and Ebenezer Freeman, a brilliant lawyer and budding revolutionary who boards with her. [Lydia Berry’s story is told in Gunning’s previous novel, THE WIDOW'S WAR.]
Widow Berry takes in the young girl, who’s valuable as a wool spinner, while not entirely believing the story she tells that she’s free. Berry treats her fairly, and, slowly, Alice’s confidence begins to be rebuilt, though she will not share her history with anyone. She learns that the independent widow is shunned by some in the town — she doesn’t go to church — and that one of the reasons may be her suspected relationship with Freeman, a widower. The house is a lively one where men meet to express their opinions about the worsening situation in the colony. The lawyer takes an interest in the girl and, finding she can read and write, supplies her with books. Alice also meets the widow’s step-grandson, Nate Clarke, and learns of the estrangement between the Widow Berry and her surly son-in-law. Meanwhile, shy Nate, about to leave for Cambridge to begin studies at Harvard, falls into puppy love with Alice, while Alice mistakes Freeman’s interest in her for something else.
What happens next is a stunning education in the rights of runaway indentured servants and what happens when wrathful masters catch up with them. Adolescent Alice — her hormones confusing her as much as any contemporary teenager’s — goes through a difficult year that will test her soul and lead her to discover what freedom really means and how it’s not that easy to understand, much less accept. Bondage, in a way, is far easier to comprehend.
Sally Gunning’s depiction of pre-revolutionary New England is richly evocative and she easily brings this historical period to life. The background to Alice’s story is set against the burgeoning unrest over colonial taxation that will climax with the Boston Tea Party and other events that will lead to the American Revolution. These historic events are well integrated into Alice Cole’s story and Gunning never allows the historic detail to overwhelm the story, which is quite a feat.
BOUND is a page-turner that will especially please readers of good historical fiction. As for me, I learned a lot more about indentured servitude than I did when I started, and it was not that unknown a concept, as I’d devoted some mention to a well-known case of forced indenture, that of James Annesley*, in my non-fiction book, MY LADY SCANDALOUS. The Annesley case served as inspiration for at least three 19th century novels: Tobias Smollett’s PEREGRINE PICKLE; Charles Reade’s THE WANDERING HEIR; and Sir Walter Scott’s GUY MANNERING. The 1944 Newbery Award-winning children’s story JOHNNY TREMAIN is another story of indenture set in the same historical milieu as BOUND; the protagonist, indentured to a silversmith, comes of age during those turbulent pre-Revolutionary times. Young Johnny might well have bumped into the comely Alice Cole running away from her indenture nightmare through the Boston docks just as he sped to one of the many anti-taxation demonstrations organized by the firebrand Sam Adams. It was a small New World, after all.
* James Annesley was kidnapped in Ireland circa 1737 by men acting for his uncle, who coveted the boy’s inheritance (and title) for his own son, Arthur. James was sold into indenture in the West Indies (though another version of the story had him sold to cotton planters in America’s deep South, from whence he fled to the Caribbean). In 1740, after surviving thirteen years of indentured slavery, he talked his way onto a ship bound for England and pursued the Annesley inheritance, albeit unsuccessfully. The years of hard labor in an unforgiving climate had taken a major toll on his constitution; he died before he could prove his claim.
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Jo Manning was a children’s librarian before she went back to graduate school and trained to become a research/reference librarian in academia (Washington State University, U. of Miami, others) and the corporate world (Reader’s Digest, ABC News, Citibank). She's always regarded children’s literature as the purest form of fiction. "These are often very moral books," she says, "and the lessons in them, as well as the characters, stick with you all of your life. (Think LITTLE WOMEN, PETER PAN, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, et al.)"
Jo has been writing fiction for publication since the 1990s. Starting with short stories (about a dozen were published in magazines and anthologies); going on to romance fiction (three novels - THE RELUCTANT GUARDIAN, SEDUCING MR. HEYWOOD, THE SICILIAN AMULET - two of them historical fiction); and her last book, MY LADY SCANDALOUS, a biography of the 18th century royal courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott. Her newest work-in-process, YOU CAN BE HAPPY WITHOUT A MAN, is a Young Adult novel set in Victorian England about a young girl’s attempts to find a husband for her mother.
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