Bound
by Sally Gunning
List Price: $24.95
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780061240256
Publisher: William Morrow
I came to writing at a young age, driven to it in desperation one rainy day when I ran out of books; my main influences at the time being Dr. Seuss and parents who heartily subscribing to the puritan work ethic, my first effort was a poem about making my bed. I continued to tinker with poems and snippets through Winnie-the-Pooh and my brother's Hardy Boys books, but when I hit Salinger's Catcher in the Rye I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to try to write a book. It turned out to be later - after going to college and working as a chambermaid, a stewardess on a cruise ship, a tour guide in a Revolutionary War museum, and staff of one in an old-fashioned country doctor's office.
But one day that doctor decided to do a novel thing - he decided to take a day off and he liked it so much he decided to do it once a week. That extra day off turned into my writing day -- I sealed myself in the dining room with my typewriter; I told friends and family not to call; I didn't shop, clean, do laundry mow the lawn, or go to the beach. Another kind of writer might have entered that room immediately aspiring to the heights of one her writing idols -- Harper Lee or Jane Austen in my case -- but Lee and Austen had already taught me my first important lesson: I didn't yet know how to write. So I walked into that room thinking Hardy Boys instead. I thought of that first book as an exercise in novel-writing, a way to teach myself about plot, pace, and structure --- in other words, as an exercise in learning how to tell a story. It never occurred to me that very first book would actually sell, or that it would result in a series of contracts that kept me writing mystery novels for the next ten years of my life. But ten years later I found myself asking, wasn't there another kind of story I needed to tell?
I'm often asked where the switch from mystery to historical fiction came from; although there's the usual long answer to the question, the short answer is that it came out of the ground. My husband Tom and I live in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, a place my ancestors had discovered for us about three hundred years before we rode into town. Every day we walk over ancient Indian paths and colonial roads past houses that were built when my ancestors first arrived; we can look out our window at an ocean that cost more than one ancestor his life; we've lived through storms that have left us without heat, light, water, and gasoline for as long as five days, plunging us, however briefly, into the kind of life those ancestors lived.
Living so physically and psychically close to the past inevitably led me to want to know more about it; I began to read every book on Cape Cod history I could find, and bit by bit the Cape's past began to make its way into my novels. That was a start, but it wasn't enough; from own family's history I knew there were stories out there that hadn't yet surfaced. I began to dig out old wills, deeds, diaries, town records, business accounts. I found that the same mix of large-hearted, small-minded, lustful, self-righteous humanity filled the past as filled the present, and when I found Lyddie Berry I knew I'd found the story I needed to tell. The Widow's War was that story. And out of an eighteenth century diary I discovered while writing The Widow's War I found Alice Cole, the indentured servant whose story gave birth to my next novel, Bound. I have no doubt that my next story is back there somewhere in the past, waiting for its chance to connect with the present.
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Historical Note
The first “slaves” brought to America were in fact white indentured servants; as the first chattel slaves from Africa arrived, they worked side by side with white indentured servants in similar working conditions. Indentured servants arrived in Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower in 1620; soon afterward Massachusetts legalized chattel slavery, the first colony to do so, and the word “servant” was frequently used to describe both chattel slave and indentured servant, but the distinction was a significant one.
The master of an indentured servant owned that servant’s labor for a restricted period of time, usually in exchange for payment of debt, or, in the case of children, in exchange for training or education. The master of a chattel slave owned the slave’s person for life. Within the period of an indentured servant’s bondage, however, his “time” could be freely bought, sold, or traded, and leased for a period of up to one year.
The indentured servant held certain advantages over the chattel slave, including the limited time of service, the right to own property, and, because an actual contract existed, better protection via the courts.
To the indentured servant’s disadvantage was the fact that his master might work him harder and feed him less than he did a slave, especially near the end of the indenture, having no long-term investment in keeping his “property” in working order.
In the case of the indentured servant who voluntarily emigrated to America, his debt was usually incurred in exchange for his passage money, sometimes fraudulently inflated with extra charges to insure that on his arrival in America he carried a hefty financial obligation that would require extended years of work. Some indentured servants were forcibly emigrated to America: convicts, prisoners of war, or poor or orphaned children spirited off the city streets and essentially sold into a slavery that would not terminate until their adulthood.
But not all indentured servants were immigrants. An American-born young male might be put under contract to a tradesman by his parents in order to learn that trade or receive an education; on Cape Cod where Christian missionaries had marked effect, an Indian or mulatto girl might be bound out by her parents “to learn the English Bible” in exchange for her labor. In fact, any child could be bound out by their parents or by the town fathers if they deemed their care inadequate at home. In the latter case, Massachusetts law declared that the selectmen or overseers of the poor, with the assent of two justices of the peace, could bind out to work any child seven years of age whose parents should be thought “unable to maintain them,” males until the age of twenty-one, females until the age of eighteen. Provision was made for the education of such children: males were to be taught to read and write; females were to be taught to read as they “may be capable.” The selectmen were themselves bound by law to inquire from time to time after the welfare of any child they bound out and to “endeavor to defend them from any Wrongs or Injuries.” The law further stated that any “Servants that have served diligently and faithfully to the benefit of their masters seven years, shall not be sent away empty.” In Massachusetts, the standard for not being sent away empty seems t have been a gift of two suits of clothes.
An indentured servant could not marry without his or her master’s permission; any misbehavior on the part on an indentured servant, such as running away, fornicating, or bearing a child, legitimate or otherwise, would allow the master to add to the servant’s contract for the time missed. A runaway might receive an additional seven days for each day absent. A pregnant woman might receive an additional year to make up for her diminished productivity during pregnancy and child care, as well as a “fine” of added time for the act of fornication.
Estimates indicate that through the middle of the eighteenth century between 150 and 250 foreign-born indentured servants arrived in the port of Boston each year. During the Revolution the influx of immigrants fell off and the practice began to die out, at least for a time; according to twenty-first century reports, the recruitment and exploitation of indentured workers is on the rise today. In fact, according to John Berger, CEO of The Emancipation Network, an organization whose mission is to end human trafficking by promoting economic self-sufficiency for survivors and at-risk groups, “There are more people living today in indentured servitude, or debt bondage, than in any time in history. Debt bondage is one of the most common forms of slavery worldwide, including in the U.S. Currently, there are an estimated 27 million people living in slavery.”
Excerpted from Bound © Copyright 2008 by Sally Gunning. Reprinted with permission by William Morrow. All rights reserved.
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