Boughten Boyhood

By John Elson

TITLE: THEORY OF WAR

AUTHOR: JOAN BRADY

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 257 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: A poignant novel explores slavery's destructive power.

In Kansas after the Civil War, Negroes (to use the term of the age) could no longer be enslaved, even surreptitiously. White orphans and the children of destitute ex-soldiers, however, were fair game. It was common practice for innocent minors to be "bound out," or indentured, to hardscrabble farmers, often by their own parents. They were deprived of hope, happiness and the dreams of childhood until they died, escaped or earned their freedom at 21. For many, the psychic scars of servitude lasted till the grave.

That is the factual background of this vivid historical novel -- part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic. Like the author herself, a former ballet dancer and granddaughter of a white slave, the narrator is an American woman residing in Britain who returns home to learn the true story of her grandfather, which he had recorded in coded diaries. Jonathan Carrick had been a "boughten boy," indentured when he was four for $15 to an ice-hearted tobacco farmer named Alvah Stoke. Dickensian is too amiable a word for Jonathan's ordeals. He slept on a dirt floor with the animals. He was horsewhipped and chained after he tried to run away. One night Alvah and a traveling salesman subdued Jonathan and with a copper wrench pulled all his teeth, which could be sold abroad for $2 each.

"Just grow up as fast as you can," a storekeeper advised Jonathan, and so , he did, throttling the hatred that gave his life meaning. He learned to read from his only possession, a secondhand McGuffey's, and molded himself a crude set of false teeth. At 16, he ran away to Denver and got a job as a railway brakeman. He also made a friend, nicknamed College, whose family in Maine welcomed Jonathan after their son's death. Jonathan traveled the country in a vain search for his father -- someone to give him an anchor and a bloodline. In time he became a circuit rider and a pioneer farmer. He married and sired children. He neither forgot nor forgave the past. The novel's climax is a fatal, vengeful encounter with his boyhood nemesis, Alvah Stoke's son George, who had become a U.S. Senator.

The novel shifts easily and cinematically from present to past. Some contemporary passages are a bit dutiful, but at her best Brady writes with a poet's economy, evoking Jonathan's chaotic century in brief detonations of imagery. Without preachment, Theory of War says slavery involves more than the loss of freedom. It also means life without illusion and a lingering nightmare of anger that can pass from parent to child. That "secret bond," as Brady calls it, may be the most terrible consequence of America's greatest tragedy.