London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

a Negro man, named Emanuel Sankey, who endeavoured to escape from his miserable bondage, by concealing himself on board of a London ship: but fate did not favour the poor oppressed man; for being discovered when the vessel was under sail, he was delivered up again to his master. This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back.⁴⁰

      The Interesting Narrative is invaluable as a book about witnessing. It is a record of horrible things seen, horrible events from which the author would rather have averted his gaze, which, he hopes, might be brought to an end as a result of his describing them. London, in contrast, is a place where looking is a pleasure, not a duty. A place full of entertaining spectacle, not evil: ‘Though I had desired so much to see London, when I arrived in it I was unfortunately unable to gratify my curiosity; for I had at this time the chilblains.’⁴¹ Equiano found himself unable to stand up and had to be sent to St George’s Hospital where his condition deteriorated. The doctors, fearing gangrene, wanted to chop off one of the twelve-year-old boy’s legs. He recovered just in time only to find that, on the brink of being discharged, he had contracted smallpox. By the time many months later he had regained his health he was needed to sail to Holland and then on to Canada, having seen almost nothing of the capital except the inside walls of a hospital dormitory.

      Such dismal experiences didn’t turn Equiano against the city. When he returned two years later in 1759 he had a much better time. While serving three sisters in Greenwich, the Guerins, he decided to learn skills that might hasten his liberty. He attended school to improve his English and got himself baptized at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster. He watched how the nobility comported themselves and what made them tick. For a while he became rather besotted by them: ‘I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us.’⁴²

      As he attended Miss Guerin around town, ‘extremely happy; as I had thus very many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’, he also saw many sights – public executions, a white negro woman – that imprinted themselves on his memory.⁴³ No doubt he would have seen other blacks, in situations not dissimilar to his own, working as coachmen and footmen for the aristocracy. Such sightings would have alerted him to the fact that some black people in London were not as blessed with good fortune as he was, and that not only could he strike up friendships with them, but he could also help to improve their lots.

      On Equiano’s own daily perambulations, though, danger and delight were never far away. Once, hanging around a press-gang inn located at the foot of Westminster Bridge, he was playing with some white friends in watermen’s wherries. Along came two ‘stout boys’ in another wherry and started abusing him. When they suggested that he should cross over to their boat, Equiano, eager to placate them, tried to do so but was pushed into the Thames, ‘and not being able to swim, I should unavoidably have been drowned, but for the assistance of some watermen, who providentially came to my relief’.⁴⁴

      Equiano never forgot London. Through the years he spent at sea it stuck in his memory as a brief interlude of joy. The moment he gained his freedom in 1766 his thoughts turned back to the grey, sportive city across which he had once ranged. At dances in Montserrat his freshly purchased clothes caught the attention of pretty women: ‘Some of the sable females, who formerly stood aloof, now began to relax, and appear less coy, but my heart was still fixed on London, where I hoped to be ere long.’⁴⁵ Over the course of the next fifteen years Equiano’s ‘roving disposition’, his attraction to the ‘sound of fame’, and the poor wages that domestic service offered in comparison to seafaring led him back to the ocean time and again. Yet he always returned to the capital.

      Perhaps the pivotal moment in Equiano’s life came in 1773 after his return from Lord Mulgrave’s Arctic expedition. Arriving in London he went to a lodging house in the Haymarket near the Strand. He had stayed in this area before, during which time he had learned to dress hair and to play the French horn and had persuaded a neighbouring Reverend to teach him arithmetic. Now he felt much less resourceful: ‘I was continually oppressed and much concerned about the salvation of my soul, and was determined (in my own strength) to be a first-rate Christian.’⁴⁶ He began to go up and talk to anyone he thought might be able to succour him in his hour of spiritual need. When this proved to be useless he wandered dejectedly around the streets of central London. Soon he was visiting local churches, including St James’s and St Martin’s, two or three times a day, always searching for fresh answers. He approached Quakers, Catholics, Jews. Yet ‘still I came away dissatisfied: something was wanting that I could not obtain, and I really found more heart-felt relief in reading my bible at home than in attending the church’.⁴⁷ He fled to Turkey. In 1779 he resolved to become a missionary in Africa, but, despite visiting the Bishop of London to seek permission, was refused ordination.

      Equiano’s memoir is couched as a spiritual autobiography, a genre that was hugely popular during the eighteenth century. It required its authors to talk at length about their sinful lives and about how, just before they decided to surrender themselves unto Christ, they experienced extreme guilt and self-abasement. The phrases they used to do so were often tired and hackneyed. In contrast, Equiano’s account of this troubled period in his life is far from formulaic. It also seems somehow implausible. Black people who roam London’s streets in this period usually do so because they’re panhandling or because they’re on the run from their masters. That they would dizzy themselves searching for faith is especially noteworthy given that throughout history most chroniclers of London have tended to dwell on its venal and secular aspects. Those who chart the immigrant experience associate faith with faith in the motherland or see it as a metaphor for resilience during hard times. In Equiano’s narrative the capital becomes a crucible for transformation, one that hoists him from servitude to freedom, from the choppy waves of agnosticism to the pure shores of Christian salvation – a double emancipation. This rebirth acted as a prelude to his decision to begin campaigning on behalf of his fellow black Londoners. The city was worth enskying – not just because as sailor, servant and activist he had flourished there – but because all those experiences had added up to make him a figure of such public importance as to merit an autobiography, one that helped accelerate the abolition of slavery, under which system he had been brought to the metropolis in the first place.

      Equiano may be the most famous black writer of the eighteenth century but his is by no means the most substantial, nor the most astonishing chronicle of exilic London. That accolade belongs to Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), whose life, perhaps because it wasn’t quite as buffeted as that of Equiano or of Gronniosaw, has often been discussed in rather dismissive terms. He has been described as a Sambo figure and as ‘one of the most obsequious of eighteenth-century blacks’.⁴⁸ Yet those who compare him unfavourably to the more ‘righteous’ Equiano rarely mention the fact that not only did the latter come from a slave-owning family, but that he gained his freedom through purchase rather than escape and, in so doing, ‘implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery’.⁴⁹ Moreover, he later went on to buy slaves whom he set to work on a Central American plantation.

      Sancho was born aboard a slave ship heading for the Spanish West Indies. His mother died before he was two years old; his father committed suicide. Soon after, he was brought over to England where his master gave him to three maiden ladies who lived in Greenwich. Like wicked sisters in a fairy story, they refused to educate him and bestowed, as did many wealthy families who owned blacks in the eighteenth century, a preposterous surname upon their new possession in the belief that he bore a passing likeness to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s much put-upon squire.

      Fortunately, a godfather in the form of the eccentric John, second Duke of Montagu,