Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  I was in Marysville for perhaps the third or fourth time, having just digested a thickly mayonnaised sandwich at the diner, when the phone call came.

  I had wandered behind the Taoist temple and up the path that led to a view of the Yuba. It was ugly: trampled sand and shit-colored rocks. Unfinished, graffiti-splattered concrete walls rose up on either side. I was standing there, looking out at the land beyond the river, the land now half-dead with drought, the land that belonged mostly to history, when my phone began to buzz. Perhaps it was my state—suspended as I was between eras and realities—that made me answer the unfamiliar South Bay number.

  “Neeraj fucking Narayan,” came the voice. “It’s been a minute.”

  Below, a hunched figure emerged from a fluttering blue tarp. He began to rustle in a shopping cart stocked with miscellany—tin cans, ripped shirts, a single in-line skate, a deflating basketball—before lifting a few objects to the sky, as if to inspect them in the dwindling daylight.

  “Sorry? Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, dummy.”

  Who? “Who?”

  “Anita!”

  “Anita?”

  I felt one of my old selves tap me on the shoulder and take up residence in me once more. My ears rang and my eyes filled with something briny—not tears, no. Something else was happening because of the presence of an old creature, a creature to which I was a little allergic.

  “Yeah, her, me.”

  “Anita? How’d you get my number?”

  “Uh, I kept it. I got a new one in college. Okay. Maybe I should have started differently. How’s this? Hi. Hello, again.”

  “I, er—I saw your mom the other day.”

  “I heard.”

  “And Prachi saw you—it’s like—” I almost said It’s like I conjured you. “Small world.”

  “It’s always been a little claustrophobic to be an ABCD,” Anita said. “No exit.”

  The tarp’s resident—and I—watched a yellow windbreaker try to make its way downriver. It caught on a rock and flapped, an accidental flag.

  “Prachi looked right through me,” Anita continued. “She never did like me.”

  “That’s not true.” The man was removing his shoes and wading into the river to unhook the windbreaker. Freed, it was soon carried out of view. “I hear you’re not getting married.”

  She laughed. “If there’s an extreme opposite of getting married, I’m that.”

  My chest untightened, as it had when Anjali Auntie had denied it; there was something about hearing Anita’s own coarse dismissal of the possibility. It confirmed that she had not chosen the life that could have by now subsumed her—Prachi’s life, the life of a future-oriented South Asian professional.

  “I think that’s just called being single.”

  The man sent several more objects from his shopping cart downriver. I discerned a piece of wire, a saucepan, a red bandanna. I had a terrible thought that he was ridding himself of all this in preparation for some self-obliteration. I started to walk down the slope toward him.

  “Somehow that doesn’t seem strong enough,” she said. “Hey. I googled you. You’re a historian? Sorry, do I have to say an historian?”

  “You don’t have to say either. I’m just a grad student.”

  Close up, this man didn’t look like a person about to absent himself. He just looked leathered by sun and time. He pointed over my shoulder. Behind me, to the west, the sun was setting over the bursting red of the Bok-Kai temple.

  The man splashed the river onto his face, lifted his eyes to the sky, then walked back to his tarp. I pictured Snider making these gestures, kneeling at the bank, brushing the water.

  Had I been silent too long? “Your mom,” I said. “She looked different.”

  “Yes,” Anita said. “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. It’s about my mom.”

  I followed the man’s tread marks down to the water and dipped my fingers in as he had. The lick of the cold Yuba on my hand made me shudder, and a wave of visceral déjà vu passed over me. After a moment, the initial uncanny jitter ceased, but I still felt like the very surface of the Yuba was glistening with recognition.

  Of course, though, it was just the girl on the line, Anita’s old voice, skewing time.

  “Listen,” she went on. It was as though her words were reaching me not across miles but across decades. I had to ask her to speak up. “I’m out of town for a few weeks hustling up vendors for this ridiculous event I’m working on, a bridal expo,” she said, louder. “I’ll be back in two weeks. I know it’s been ages. But can we meet up?”

  7.

  Those next two weeks were a kind of bardo; I hung between lifetimes. Flashes of who I had been ten years ago struck me in the mornings. One time I rolled over, my eyes foggy as strange dreams receded, to see that it was eight a.m.—I have a chemistry test! I thought, before realizing I was not sixteen. It was early August; San Francisco’s most flamboyant denizens had caravanned off to Burning Man, and Berkeley’s college students had been replaced by talented youths attending debate camps, science camps, philosophy camps, summer honors colloquia. I stepped into the sunlight only to buy the crap I ate but couldn’t call food, spicy hot Cheetos and ramen, and one afternoon bumped into a short brown boy with a bowl cut, maybe twelve years old. His bright blue shirt read berkeley summer honors enrichment program. Go on, enrich yourself, I considered shouting. Look at how wealthy all that enrichment made me. The boy spied something unstable in my pupils and bolted.

  Another time, on the way back from meeting Chidi’s dealer, I passed the shop on University that sold Bollywood cassette tapes and georgette saris and Nepali prayer flags. Through the window I saw the owner in his full Indian dad attire—hoodless Hanes sweatshirt and white socks tugged halfway up his shins. He was still, taking in the passersby, his whole figure milky colored through the glass. His face did not warm when I stopped to reread, for the thousandth time, the yellow lettering. shree krishna’s—berkeley. since 1976. He simply held his arms behind his back and regarded me as though he had seen me a thousand times before, his expression as precise and calculating as my father’s as he readjusted the pharmacist coat in the mirror. The drugs were hot against my thigh. Are you making use of all you took? I raced home to suck the fresh, pure powder up my nose until my sinuses froze over with this so requited cold, as I did it again, again.

  Led by the bumps, I met with my one welcome ghost, Isaac Snider. I was writing things down about him, things I intuited but could not yet prove. It was the first time I’d written like this, with something that felt like truth flowing through me so quickly my hands struggled to keep up. Cold academic work yielded none of this transcendence; the many baffling components of my life had never converged so clearly as they did when I wrote toward Isaac Snider. I let myself forget the professionalization of the study of the past, because my private project felt like a purer communion. Maybe I looked at him because it was easier than looking at myself. He, my Bombayan gold digger, and the story I spun of him, was just about the only thing that took my mind off the impending meeting.

  The Tale of Isaac Snider

  He was an immigrant, like all those forty-niners who crossed Death Valley or rode the Pacific or braved the Great Basin, tempted by the Californian promise. In 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 motherl
and 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 to dig in places others believe tapped out. He offers a third of anything they strike. “Just one third?” they sometimes demand. But Snider taps his temple and points out, using reason to delight a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer, that the idea to dig in this unlikely place had been his.

  Snider is hardly the only person discovering that the rush is not just a loner’s game. Solo panners are taking up in groups to mine with Long Toms. Enterprise flourishes. American corporations germinate. Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss. Few call this new force greed. No, we say ambition.

  In June 1859, Snider rests in the back of a general store with two Mormons who have taken a liking to his scrappy doggedness. They are reviewing an idea of his with skepticism. Consider them his investors, him their entrepreneur. The notion: to build a dam on the Yuba River—the same waters that once saved him. He swears there is gold beneath those rapids, worth extracting. Privately, he knows he won’t just turn that gold into money; he’ll consume some of it, and its blessing and power will let him into the main corridor of American history.

  It takes five men over a month to pile up the rocks for the dam. It is physically risky, and each worker fears he is forfeiting easier gains. But when the month closes and the dam is finished, the cry goes up, one that rhymes with Sam Brannan’s original call, the one that knocked down the first domino: “Gold! Gold! Gold in the Yuba River!”

  Isaac Snider’s ambition is not, however, to be some great figure in history. He only wishes to possess the singular identity of an uncolonized man. As the rush abates, like the last days of a war, he finds that he has built himself a network of allies. He marries the young niece of a local Bavarian immigrant. Adah. Adah Eckman. He meets her in her uncle’s dry-goods store. On the night of their wedding, she notices something—a central flaw in his claim to be Jewish. She says nothing at the sight of his foreskin. As though she knew all along? As though the gold’s power occludes her vision.

  Snider begins editing a newspaper—the ultimate hiding place, for who would suspect a professional writer of English to be an outsider? Make use of all you took. Write yourself into America.

  It is after covering one particular event that Snider’s identity is strained. The locals have never spared much love for the Chinese laborers living on the edge of town, praying in that Bok-Kai temple, wearing their hair in pigtails, working endless hours for astonishingly low pay. By the late 1860s, a new restlessness grows. California is settled. People live not in lean-tos but in houses; the currency is coin, not gold dust. Some bristle at the prospect that the Chinese might actually stick around. People say such things about Snider’s community, too—there’s talk of a Jewish tax, more than once.

  One evening, a group of drunken white men comes upon one such Chinese fellow stepping out of the Bok-Kai temple. The whites believe they recognize the man: the proprietor of an opium den in San Francisco, since shut down by vice laws. A man who cheated countless smokers out of gold as they lay half-comatose in his sinners’ palace. These white men are the same sort who, decades earlier, took it upon themselves to form committees of vigilance, to prosecute Snider when he was still brown. They are the same sort who developed a protocol for lynching disruptive blacks and Mexicans and Chileans and Native Ameri
cans. They are the same sort who will, in another few decades, form a mob in Oregon to murder more than thirty Chinese miners; the same sort who will, soon after that, chase throngs of Sikhs from Washington. These white men beat the Chinese man and hang him from a tree overlooking the Yuba. Later, it’s revealed that he was no opium supplier, but the owner of a small laundry.

  It is Snider’s unhappy job to write up the incident in the local paper: brutality, obviously brutality! But his colleagues say it would be folly to pretend the mob did not circle some fair point, that now that American jobs are scarcer, it is time for these coolies to go home, to take with them their pigtails and opium and work ethic. And so Snider, sick with himself but afraid of reminding people of the darkness of his skin, condemns the Chinese as much as he does the assailants. The best gesture he can offer, at the end of his editorial, is a plea to end the rhetoric of ridding the whole nation of the Chinese, for . . . How costly would this effort be? Let foreigners sink quietly into our new society.

  Cresting into the 1870s, Snider has watched the Indian struggles from afar. American papers report on it occasionally, with indifference, but he risks it, writing in the Gold Star: As Americans have given up the castes of nobility, Lord, Duke, and aristocracy, in favor of Democratic ideals, so their Revolutionary brethren wish to cast off unearned hierarchies, across the seas. . . . Ah, who would read such musings of an old man, these vain gestures of the mind? But it means something to a dislocated young man in Berkeley. I experience a twitch of recognition, the shudder of time folding in on itself, a shiver, an intuition. Time, perhaps the truest magic, full of the unprovable.