Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (6 page)

But what about borrowing and lending? Borrowing and lending would seem to exist in a shadowland — neither “taking” nor “trading”— changing their natures depending on the final outcome. They’re like those riddles in fairy tales:
Come to me neither naked nor clothed, neither on the road nor off it, neither walking nor riding.
A borrowed object or sum is neither taken nor is it traded. It exists in a shadowland between the two: if the interest exacted for a loan is of loan-shark magnitude, the transaction verges on theft from the debtor; if the object or sum is never returned, it also verges on theft, this time from the creditor. Thus it’s “taking,” not “trading.” But if the object is borrowed and then returned with a reasonable amount of interest, it’s clearly trading. Hostage-taking is the same kind of shadowland transaction: part theft or taking, part trade.

THERE IS, HOWEVER
, another kind of ambiguous financial arrangement: pledging an item that may be redeemed, or bought back, at a later time. Or it may not be bought back, in which case whoever is holding the object is allowed to keep it. Pledging is a very old practice. For instance, Deuteronomy 24: 6 says, “No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge: for he taketh a man’s life to pledge.” Much of Deuteronomy is taken up with laws governing fairness — laws that set a limit on how far you’re allowed to go. Not taking a millstone meant that you couldn’t take away something a man needed in order to earn his living, because — obviously — he would never then be able to pay his debt to you and get the millstone back. Thus taking away a man’s main tools as a pledge was as bad as stealing. And if it was a small household mill, you’d literally be taking the bread from the family’s mouths.

This kind of intermediate transaction is still very much with us. We call the pledging of items “pawning,” and we do it in establishments called “pawnshops.” These places have a whiff of brimstone about them, as anything existing in the shadowland between clear categories risks having.

MY AUNT JOYCE
Barkhouse of Nova Scotia, who is now ninety-five, tells the following story involving a pawnshop.

When my brother was born, in mid-February 1937 — in the depths of the Great Depression — there was a special Valentine’s Day excursion price on the train from Nova Scotia to Montreal. It cost ten dollars. My aunt and a girlfriend scraped together the ten dollars each and went to Montreal to help out my mother with her newborn baby. When they got there, my mother was still in the hospital, because my father hadn’t received his monthly paycheque and thus couldn’t pay the bill and bail her out, hospitals at that time having a lot in common with debtors’ prisons. My father was finally able to spring my mother, but paying the hospital bill — ninety-nine dollars, as I found from looking in my mother’s account book — used up all of the paycheque.

My parents didn’t have a bean at that time, so my father had no cash reserves, and he pawned his fountain pen in order to take my aunt out for a thank-you lunch. (The fact that he felt the need to do this shows that he understood the need for a gift of gratitude in return for a gift of care and service, which was what my aunt had bestowed.) When my aunt and her friend took the train back to Nova Scotia, they were also given two valuable going-away presents: a bunch of grapes and a small box of Laura Secord chocolates — and this is all they had to eat during the train ride. They had no berths, so they had to sit up the whole time, and this was uncomfortable; but a man was renting pillows for twenty-five cents each. Alas, they had only forty-eight cents between the two of them, but they offered the forty-eight cents and two of the chocolates — fluttering their eyelashes, said my aunt — and their offer was accepted. Thus they slept in comfort.

When I heard this story as a child, I rejoiced at the successful securing of the pillows, and remembered the lesson of the haggling procedure: if you don’t offer a deal, you won’t get one. Later, having become interested in pens, I thought, What kind of fountain pen was it? And considering the fact that my parents didn’t have a bean, how could my father have had a fountain pen that was expensive enough to pawn? Still later, I marvelled at the cheapness of the train trip — ten dollars would hardly get you a bottle of water and a few potato chips now — and the high value placed on the bunch of grapes.

But now I think, My father! That man of rectitude! Going into a pawnshop! How incongruous! Indeed, this part of the story was told in a hushed but delighted tone, as if the pawnshop episode was disreputable — like sneaking into a girly show — and transgressive — some line had been crossed — but also courageous and self-sacrificing: look what my father was willing to put himself through in order to do the right thing!

When I was very young, I used to think that pawnshops had something to do with chess — you could buy extra pawns there to replace those that were always vanishing down behind the sofa cushions. But this is not the case. The chess kind of pawn comes from “peon,” or peasant — the pawns are the foot soldiers, and you send them out first and make pawn sacrifices with them because they’re worth relatively little. The pawnshop kind of pawn comes from a word meaning “pledge”— you leave something in the pawnshop and the pawnshop owner gives you some money and a ticket with a number on it, and you can come back later and “redeem,” or buy back, your item by presenting the ticket and paying the original sum, plus extra for the use of the money and the cost of the transaction. But if you don’t come back with the cash within a stated period, you lose your right to buy the thing back, and the item belongs to the pawnbroker, who can sell it and keep the profit.

As for why pawnshops had a seedy reputation by the time my father went into one with his fountain pen, opinions are mixed. As with anything that has two sides and involves the balance between them — a scale for weighing the soul against the feather of truth, a dispute over mother-murder versus father-murder, a good-deeds recording angel and a bad-deeds one, your monthly budget or the good and bad effects of pawnshops — it’s hard to get the two sides exactly equal.

PAWNSHOPS GO BACK
at least to classical Greece and Rome, and, in the East, to 1000
B.C.E
. in China. The negative view of them comes from their reputation as the last resort of down-and-outers and the suspicion that robbers used them to dispose of stolen goods: pinch something, sell it to the pawnbroker, then just never come back to collect it. There was another dodge too: a man intending to go bankrupt or skip town could buy goods on credit, pawn them, and then take off with the cash.

The positive version is that pawnshops are happy-to-help do-gooders for the unwealthy, a sort of poor man’s banker: both the Franciscans of the Middle Ages and the Buddhist monks of Ancient China ran pawning operations for the benefit of the poor. Such pawnbrokers would provide tiny sums that those without a lot of collateral couldn’t borrow from the more pompous lending bodies: in effect, they were microfinancers. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of pawnbrokers — there’s a touching legend whereby he provides dowries for three poor girls who can’t get married without them, and the dowries were three bags of gold — hence the three gold balls you see hanging outside every Western pawnshop. (In China it’s not three gold balls, it’s a good-luck bat — but that’s another story.)

There’s nothing whatsoever to the other legend about Saint Nicholas — that he comes down the chimney every December 25 with a sackful of stuff he’s nicked from the pawnshop. It is however true that the nineteenth-century colloquial expression “Old Nick”— meaning the Devil — is directly connected with Saint Nicholas. There are other clues. Note the red suit in the case of each; note the hairiness, and the association with burning and soot. We get the slang term “to nick,” meaning “to steal,” from . . . But I digress, pausing simply to add that Saint Nicholas, as well as being the patron saint of young children, those sticky-fingered elfin creatures with scant sense of other people’s property rights, is also the patron saint of thieves. Saint Nicholas is always found in the vicinity of a big heap of loot, and when asked where he got it he’ll tell an implausible yarn involving some non-human labourers hammering away in a place he euphemistically calls his “workshop.” A likely story, say I.

As for those three gold-coloured balls, the dowry story is lovely, but a more substantial account is that the balls were part of the armorial bearings of the Medicis, who were very rich; and that they were then adopted by the House of Lombard, bankers and lenders who wanted people to think they were very rich; and quite soon — because this early form of suggestive advertising and sympathetic magic worked — they
were
very rich.

AMONG THE FIRST
things that people were able to pawn were other people. The Code of Hammurabi of Mesopotamia, which dates from about 1752
B.C.E
., is a set of amendments to existing laws, which means that debt law itself is even older. By reading this code, we learn that a man in debt could pawn his wife and his kids, and his concubines and their children, and his slaves, as debt slaves to a merchant in return for money to repay his debt; or else he could sell his household members outright. In the latter case, he couldn’t redeem them: they’d remain slaves for life. But if they were put up as pledges for a loan and the loan was repaid within a certain period, the debt slaves would be restored to him. He could also — if he was really desperate — sell himself into debt slavery, in which case he’d most likely stay a slave because no one would come forward to redeem him.

Debt slavery is by no means a thing of the distant past. Consider present-day India, where a man may be a virtual debt slave all his life — many get into this position through having to provide dowries. Think, too, of the smuggling of illegal immigrants from Asia into North America, where the person smuggled is told he has to work without wages forever in order to pay off the cost of his travel experience. In the nineteenth century, in the mining villages of northern Europe, the company store supplied the place of the slave owner: the miners had to buy their food and the necessities of life from the store, where these things cost more than the miners could ever earn.

In Émile Zola’s most celebrated novel,
Germinal
— named for one of the new month-names brought in by the French Revolution, Germinal being April — this system is described in all its sordid and gritty detail. The store manager is a nasty man with the age-old view that sex is a marketable commodity, so he takes the debt out in trade, using the wives and daughters of the miners for this lecherous purpose. You’ll be pleased to learn that there’s a famous riot scene in which the wives and daughters get their revenge, and the genital organs of the store owner are skewered on a stick that’s carried in triumphant procession through the streets — a crude form of entertainment, granted, but there was no
TV
then. Another form of nineteenth-century debt slavery was that practised by those who rented rooms and clothing to prostitutes, or ran brothels in which the girls’ food and clothing were charged on a running tab that could never be worked off. Some form of this is still going on, although the cost of addictive drugs has been added onto the running tab. All of these means of keeping people bound to your will and working for bare subsistence wages are recipes for despair: they’re a nightmare treadmill that you can never get off.

By the time the Code of Hammurabi was written down, slavery itself had been going on for a long time. Where did it come from? In
The Creation of Patriarchy
— by “patriarchy” is not meant genial Dad sitting at the head of the table carving up the Sunday roast, but the system by which it was a man’s right to treat his wife or wives and children as if he owned them absolutely and could dispose of them at will, like chairs and tables — Gerda Lerner has this to say: “Historical sources on the origin of slavery are sparse, speculative, and difficult to evaluate. Slavery seldom, if ever, occurs in hunting/ gathering societies but appears in widely separated regions and periods with the advent of pastoralism, and later agriculture, urbanization, and state formation. Most authorities have concluded that slavery derives from war and conquest. The sources of slavery commonly cited are: capture in warfare; punishment for a crime; sale by family members; self sale for debt; and debt bondage. . . . Slavery could only occur where certain preconditions existed: there had to be food surpluses; there had to be means of subduing recalcitrant prisoners; there had to be a distinction (visual or conceptual) between them and their enslavers.” She goes on to postulate that the first slaves were women, because they could be more easily controlled, and that male war captives were usually just brained or shoved off a cliff until someone thought of the clever device of blinding them — thus giving us Samson Agonistes, in John Milton’s poem of the same name: “. . . eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.”

Samson is an Old Testament hero whose God-given strength depends on his not divulging his secret, which is that he’ll lose all his power if his hair is cut off. And it is cut off, by a treacherous woman — they leak like a sieve, those women; don’t tell them anything unless you want the neighbours to hear. But Samson redeems himself from his enemies and tormenters — he buys back the freedom of his soul — at the cost of his own physical life. How fascinating that we say a person “redeems himself” when he’s been guilty of a disgraceful action and then balances it out with a good or noble one. There’s a pawnshop of the soul, it appears, where souls can be held captive but then, possibly, redeemed; and that is what I’d like to discuss next.

FIRST, A CURIOUS
manifestation of this pawnshop of the soul: the Sin Eater. The custom of sin-eating appears in a 1924 novel by Mary Webb called
Precious Bane
, the title of which comes from John Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
Book I. After his fall from Heaven into Hell, Satan sends out a mining expedition:

There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top
Belch’d fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire
Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore,
The work of Sulphur. Thither wing’d with speed
A numerous Brigad hasten’d. As when bands
Of Pioners with Spade and Pickaxe arm’d
Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field,
Or cast a Rampart. MAMMON led them on,
MAMMON, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks & thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Op’nd into the Hill a spacious wound
And dig’d out ribs of Gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best
Deserve the pretious bane.