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Sally Gunning uses extensive research to bring issues from the past back to life. |
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Gunning brings history to life with ‘Bound’
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Brewster author Sally Gunning is like a dog with a bone, and lately she’s been chewing on the subject of young people sold into indentured servitude during the early years of our nation. The resulting novel, “Bound,” will be released by HarperCollins on April 1.
When Gunning finds a fascinating story idea, she grabs hold and won’t let go until she’s spun it into a compelling yarn filled with drama, passion and always a heaping helping of history. Her stories are so memorable that if she had been your history teacher, you would have made an A.
Both “Bound” and her previous novel, “The Widow’s War,” are set in Satucket, a geographical area that roughly coincides with modern-day Brewster. Even that has a back story.
“In 1694, incorporation papers for the area known as the Satucket Lands became Harwich,” she says. “In 1803, Brewster split off from Harwich.”
It’s hard to call the novel’s setting Brewster since Brewster didn’t exist in 1756, she says. And it’s not Harwich, though technically it was at that time. So, she settled on Satucket.
Her first novel takes on the plight of Lyddie, a woman who becomes widowed when her husband, a ship’s captain, drowns within sight of shore while trying to land a whale that’s wandered into the shallow waters. The laws of those days say that the husband’s property goes to the nearest male relative, in that case Lyddie’s daughter’s husband. He has to feed and shelter her but has little other obligation. How she combats that and manages to gain some measure of independence is the story of the first book.
This second book takes up a different subject, binding over children for servitude — boys until they were 21, girls until 18. And, unlike slaves that were owned outright for life, the owners had little incentive to treat them well especially as they neared the end of their “contracts.”
Fictional Alice Cole was one such girl. Her mother and brother died during the family’s passage to America from London, and her father, not knowing what else to do, bound her over as a house servant at age 7. Her life was not so horrible. The family had a daughter, Nabby, who became her friend, and the father in the household was decent to her. All that changed when Alice was 15. Nabby married and Alice was given to her as a gift, meaning she was actually given to Nabby’s husband.
Soon she was frightened, hurt and fearing for her life. She ran away, and for one who is indentured there are serious consequences to such action. She snuck aboard a ship in Boston Harbor that landed her in Satucket.
From there she re-invents herself as a young free woman looking for work. She changes her name and begins to create a small life for herself but cannot escape her past. Like rising water after a flood it threatens to wash away the small but almost happy situation she has created and, ultimately, threatens her very life.
“I was researching “Widow’s War” and came across the Bangs Diary,” Gunning says. “In there was a passage about going to visit a former bound servant who was in jail. The girl in that story became Alice Cole.”
That was the germ of “Bound.” Gunning was later able to get the court documents for the real case. In those days jails had dirt floors and no facilities and poor people charged with serious offenses often languished for months waiting for the circuit court to come around. They were not even allowed to testify on their own behalf.
Gunning says she had thought her second book would be about slavery but then she found out about the large numbers of bound children.
“No one in New England wants to admit we were in the slavery deal like the southern states, but we were,” she says. “I was going to blow it out of the stratosphere (with her book). Then my brother reminded me that not all slaves were black. Some were white and indentured.”
When she started to look into it, she found a lot of abuse.
“They were treated worse than chattel slaves,” she says. “There was no investment for the future to take care of.”
Often, she says, children were taken from homes and put in service by town selectmen. It only took a vote of two and those children’s lives were on hold until they were grown. There was little education and no freedom to speak of.
Considering Alice’s situation, it’s no mystery why Nabby didn’t protect her former childhood friend.
“A wife then couldn’t just walk out the door,” Gunning says. “There was not a clear option. To get a divorce she would have to go to the legislature. By law she’s her husband’s property too, and that puts her in a very uneven position.”
After a while Gunning says she became depressed writing about Alice but says she had to recall that even though her life was very hard, Alice always had hope that somehow she would get through.
Unfortunately, this is not some old, long-gone custom to be considered from the comfort of distance.
Gunning received a letter from an Argentinian woman who said the same laws had been in place there not so long ago and that she knew a personal story very much like “The Widow’s War.” And then there is the Loomba Foundation, a modern-day entity fighting for widows’ rights in Southeast Asia where they are considered to have none.
She found that stories from the 1700s are still going on in other lands.
And, close to home, she says, there is Emancipation Imports in Dennis, a business that sells items made by women rescued from sexual slavery.
“They are trying to cut the chains for these women,” she says.
The stories are still devastating, with 12-year-old daughters still being sold and women fighting for independence around the world.
“There are 27 million people living in slavery today,” she says. “And here I thought I was writing about days gone by.”
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Southern comfort during WW II
Galleries, galleries, galleries
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Mar 27th, 2008