Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

later years, as he assimilated, the Bombayan would claim he crossed the United States from St. Louis. By then his English was passably American and he had changed his name—Isaac Snider, a moniker to mask his origins.

Watch him, as I watched him, climbing aboard an East India ship bound for China. His lanky body wedged among the wares that came from ravagings. “Colonization of India was primarily economic,” a professor lectured in college, which made the whole thing sound like the Brits had merely pickpocketed a few wallets. But in the gold digger, see the emasculation of colonization. The only way out is as an export. Through the porthole, his motherland shrinks.

In China, he trades labor for a ride to Hong Kong, and then for a foot of space aboard one of the vessels carrying migrants to California—Gold Mountain, the Chinese call it. Even the foul smells of pork and men relieving themselves and the queasiness of the voyage are preferable to shouldering tea onto a company ship.

In California, he barters his way to a pan of his own; the most basic technology suffices when gold runs free and clear in streams. Those early rush days are marked more by chaos than by calculation. There is no point in musing about geology, trying to figure out what caused the earth to bubble up such a product. The gold digger follows rumors, the gossip, if you will. He sleeps near other laborers, often Chinese, occasionally Mexican. Transient tent cities bordering the goldfields. Waking up with the dawn to the yellow landscape. More than once he thinks California is burning, burning, but that is just what light looks like when skies are clear.

When the easiest of plunders of a given deposit have been shaken clear of quartz sand and water and dried in the sun, then the metal is yours—not to be plucked from your arms by a leering Company man. He presses the nuggets and dust to his skin. It warms him as the sun falls.

He is surviving, a solo man among solo men, until that day, recorded in Ramesh Uncle’s German travelogue, when the whites capture him. But he escapes.

I picture it like this: The gold digger, hunched on the ground, sustaining the beating, says a very rapid, old prayer. He places two golden nuggets in his mouth and swallows, thinking wildly that in these nuggets lie the very blessing and promise of America. He prays that this blessing be given him. He feels the nuggets melt in his mouth, like ghee on one’s tongue. Warm and sweet and full of hope. Briefly, he wonders if he’s gone mad: Did he just drink away wealth? But then something calms him, and says to wait, wait for the blessing.

A blessing—some blessing—comes: the whites cannot find any gold on him, only his empty poke and useless sheath knife. He runs; a few of them, drunk, follow, shooting as he races through woods as dark as a grave. He trips over the leg of a corpse that an animal has tugged from the dirt. And then he’s struck. A bullet tears through his flank. All goes black. When he looks up, he is not in the woods but on the banks of the Yuba River, where it meets the Feather.

He thinks of the holy Ganges, how auspicious it is to die near its banks. He edges to the river and begins to whisper prayers into it, all of his past selves floating downstream. He dips one hand in the water and a shudder runs through his body. A sacred river. The world-splitting pain halts, as quickly as it began. He lifts himself to his feet, presses his hand to the spot where the bullet ripped through him, and finds closed, healthy flesh.

He weeps, and as tears fall, the whole river turns the color of gold, like the water lifting Midas’s curse. I see all this as clearly as the shape of my own hands above the keyboard as I type. The Bombayan, Isaac Snider, was saved, was preserved in history, was let into America by pure Californian gold.

He camps that night near Marysville and is kept awake by the drunken hoots of other gold diggers pushing through clacking saloon doors, wasting gains on games of monte and drink. In the morning, the call goes up: a gulch nearby, full of riches. Instead of following the line of sunburnt men scurrying out of town, the gold digger looks up at the sky. Rain is bulging in the air. It seems obvious. Instead of going to the north side of the gulch, he treks to a flat bank just south. When the rain strikes, the Bombayan is the only miner working that territory. There is the precious metal, washing toward him.

On he goes like this, beginning to make sharp calculations, returning to places where the top of the gold has been skimmed off, but digging deeper—sometimes banding with Mexican laborers. They dig until that sight: a veiny pattern of gold in the bedrock. The immigrant work ethic couples with luck. Now he does not chase blindly but instead plots the habits of the gold—how it appears, where it might show itself next.

He practices English, becomes literate. He writes and reads whatever he can—dispatches from the Midwest and East Coast, letters other miners send to loved ones. Even after a long day of labor, he studies. He loses the accent—might his skin even lighten a little? He insists upon a new name. Isaac Snider, Isaac Snider; he repeats it like a prayer.

No longer does he have to pay that foreigner’s tax of three dollars a month to dig. He slips in step with the region’s Jews, many of them only a few years removed from their own migrations—from Poland, from Prussia. Perhaps the blessing of the gold makes passing possible. Perhaps there is a quiet understanding, a solidarity, an invitation to hide among other outsiders.

With the help of his adoptive community, he goes on, hiring subcontractors