Respectable Trade (64 page)

I do ask you to contribute anything that you can readily afford to Gardens for The Gambia. The country is the poorest in Africa (excluding those damaged by war), and the people work tremendously hard and effectively with the little help they get. The climate is getting drier, and the Sahara Desert is encroaching. Any sum of money you wish to donate will go direct
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Philippa Gregory

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Gardens for The Gambia
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Gardens for The Gambia is applying for charitable status in the UK and is a registered charity and nongovernmental organization in The Gambia. In an official survey, it is the biggest donor of wells for primary schools in the country.

All donations will be acknowledged. Please look at my Web site,
www.PhilippaGregory.com
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A TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE

A Respectable Trade

I
NTRODUCTION

The devastating consequences of the slave trade in eighteenth-century Bristol, England, are explored through the powerful but forbidden attraction of well-born Frances Scott and her Yoruban slave Mehuru. Bristol in 1787 is booming, from its shipping docks to its elegant new houses. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs ready cash and a well-connected wife.

A marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah’s protection, Frances enters the world of Bristol merchants and finds her life and fortune depend on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves.

Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba. From the opposite ends of the earth, despite the enmity of slavery, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their needs for love and liberty.

Q
UESTIONS
& T
OPICS FOR
D
ISCUSSION

1. What is Mehuru’s role in his African tribe? To what extent do his gift of prophecy and his linguistic abilities enable him to endure the hardships of the middle passage and his enslavement in England?

2. “We can never leave the trade. It is the only thing we know.” How do Sarah Cole’s attitudes about the trade and the risk involved in her family’s shipping business
compare with those of her brother, Josiah? To what extent do Sarah’s views prevent her from welcoming her sister-in-law, Frances, into the family?

3. Before Frances meets the slaves she is to instruct in English, she says: “I have taught children, but they were human children. I wouldn’t know how to teach niggers.” Based on the statements made by slaves, their owners, and abolitionists, describe the range of racial views held by the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Bristol.

4. Why do Frances and Josiah allow Sir Charles Fairley to rape one of the female slaves? What do they have to lose by refusing his request? What do they have to gain by looking the other way while he commits his sexual assault?

5. Why does Josiah wish to ally himself with the Scott family through his marriage to Frances? What does such an alliance represent to the society figures of Bristol? To what extent are Josiah’s naïveté and unchecked ambition responsible for his being cheated by fellow members of the Merchant Venturers?

6. Why does Mehuru’s involvement in the abolitionist movement threaten Frances? To what extent does Mehuru qualify as a radical in his efforts to gain his freedom from his owners? Why didn’t he try to escape during one of his nighttime expeditions to the coffeehouse?

7. “Only a free man can give his friendship. If you wish us to be friends I have to be free. Anything else is slavish devotion—it means nothing.” Why does Frances wait until her death to set Mehuru free? What would his freedom represent to her in her lifetime?

8. “Maybe one day there will be a world where a man and a woman like us might love each other, d’you think?” Is the romance that develops between Mehuru and Frances challenged more by their different social stations as slave and owner or their different racial backgrounds? To what extent is the “forbidden fruit” aspect of their love responsible for the undeniable intensity?

9. Why does Frances Cole conceal her pregnancy from Mehuru and choose to reveal the baby’s paternity to her physician and her slave Elizabeth? Why do you think Philippa Gregory chose to end the novel at such a dramatic moment?

10. To what extent do you see the end of
A Respectable Trade
as a tragedy? In what ways does it represent a victory for Mehuru? How did this ending affect your appreciation of the story as a whole, and what kind of future do you envision for the interracial son born to Frances and Mehuru?

A C
ONVERSATION WITH
P
HILIPPA
G
REGORY

In
A Respectable Trade,
you convey the horrific conditions endured by Mehuru and others on slave ships voyaging from Africa. What kind of research did you do to write so authoritatively about the eighteenth-century slave trade?

I started with the very many powerful histories of the slave trade, reading most of the key works, then I went to the public library at Bristol and read accounts and even saw the financial books of the slave traders. I became very interested in the development and prosperity of Bristol and Clifton—the story of the Hot Well is based on history.

Many of your historical novels have examined the kind of status anxiety Frances and Josiah Cole experience as newcomers to Bristol society. What attracts you to this theme?

The eighteenth century (and the Tudor period) is one of great change and opportunity. Status, and the representation of status, becomes absolutely key to people who are living (and trying to rise) in a rapidly changing world. The opportunities are tremendous for them, but the dangers loom very great.

What do you think accounts for the inability of English traders like Sarah and Josiah to recognize the inherent evil of slavery?

To start with it was something which just was not questioned; the role of working people in society in Elizabethan England was so poor that the status of the slave was not very different. As the slave trade developed there were all sorts of justifications made for the business, from a claim that Africans were not human, to the “Christian” argument that it was better that they should be enslaved and converted than left in paganism. Finally there was the last-ditch argument that slavery was justified by the wealth it would bring to Christians who would make good use of it. By the time that Josiah and Sarah are entering the business, the men and women of conscience are engaged in the abolition movement, and the more clever entrepreneurs have foretold the end of the legal trade and are getting out. But as we know, many traders stayed in till the very end, and some of them traded illegally—after the abolition of the slave trade. For them it must simply have been a matter of greed. By 1790 nobody could have thought that slave trade was anything but terribly cruel.

What enables Mehuru to overcome his contempt for his owners and fall in love with Frances?

I think his character is always exceptional. He has spiritual gifts which enable him to see beyond his own immediate circumstances. He understands that Frances is unfree in her society, and he pities her. I think he is also sympathetic for what he sees as her physical frailty and contradictions. He is also quite proud of his maleness; even though she is absolutely his owner and has complete
power over her, he is able to think himself her equal, if not her superior.

You adapted
A Respectable Trade
into a four-part television program that aired on the BBC. What were some of the challenges you encountered in adapting your novel for the medium of television? Should we expect to see your other novels on the big or small screen?

My novel
The Other Boleyn Girl
is now in production as a major film starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, and I am working as consultant on the film but I doubt I will personally adapt another book. I find the process of writing a novel so very satisfactory that I don’t really like to convert it into another art form. Also—I have to admit that I am a real solo operator—I like to work alone and see my imagination coming to life on the page.

A Respectable Trade
ends with Frances’s death in childbirth and her granting Mehuru his freedom. Throughout the novel, Frances says that everything she has belongs to her husband, Josiah. Why would Mehuru’s freedom from enslavement be assured through Frances’s will?

The Cole slaves—like most slaves brought to England—won their freedom by their own courage and ability. They simply ran away. Frances’s will is her wish for her husband and sister-in-law: that they take the goods they admired so much, that they give up slavery, and that the slaves are freed. Technically, Frances can own no property of her own under eighteenth-century marriage laws, so the slaves are Josiah’s property. He would have to catch them first, and the history of slaves in England is
that they were often successful in getting away, and indeed, often successful at protecting their freedom in the English courts, which were ambiguous about their status.

Do you have a favorite story of star-crossed lovers? If so, did it inspire any part(s) of
A Respectable Trade?

There are some very poignant stories of interracial love in the history of slavery in England, and some of them were successful marriages which account for the disappearance of color from these early enslaved immigrants whose children were half white and then three-quarters white, and so on. I have met a farmer in northeast England whose grandfather, five generations ago, was an African slave, and he is white skinned and blue eyed and was amazed to learn of his family history. I suppose what makes the story of Frances and Mehuru so very tragic for me is that if they had been in slightly different circumstances they might have become lovers and husband and wife. What divides them is pride, and Frances’s desire for gentility and fear of poverty, just as much as color.

Do you have plans to write historical fiction set in countries other than England?

I am very tempted by the history of other countries, but I am very conscious of how difficult it is to enter the mind-set of another culture. Also, the intensity of the research I like to do before writing a novel does mean that a whole new area is a bit daunting. Having said that, in
Virgin Earth,
I really enjoyed researching the history of early America and the Powhatan people, and in
The Queen’s Fool
I did a lot of research into Jewish history.
The Constant Princess
opens in Spain in 1490.

What is your connection to the children of Sika village in Gambia, to whom you dedicated
A Respectable Trade
?

I visited Sika when I was researching
A Respectable Trade,
and went to look at the slave forts along the river Gambia. I paid for a well to be dug in their vegetable garden, which now waters an orchard of citrus and walnut trees and a garden of vegetables which they eat at lunchtime. After the success of this well I founded a small charity with the then headmaster of Sika Primary School called Gardens for The Gambia, and we have dug to date more than sixty wells in schools and community gardens. We depend entirely on the generosity of people who hear of the project and send funds to me. And you can log onto my website,
philippagregory.com
, to see pictures of the gardens.

E
NHANCE
Y
OUR
B
OOK
C
LUB

1. To read more about the complicated history of the African slave trade and its sweeping international consequences, visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_slave_trade

2. Visit
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slaveship.htm
to read more about the inhumane conditions on slave ships of the kind Mehuru endures in
A Respectable Trade
.

3. Would you like to know more about Bristol, where
A Respectable Trade
is set? Visit
http://www.10best.com/Bristol/locationDetails.html#cityfacts
to learn ten little-known facts about one of England’s most fascinating cities.