but were ready to use their existing system of indentures.
> 
> For a good discussion for the shift to slavery, I would suggest, 
> Anthony S. Parent's Foul Means as a place to start.  The 
> standard source for the status of the earliest Africans in 
> Virginia is T.H. Breen and Stpehen Innes, Myne Own Ground, but 
> there is also an excellent study by Douglas Deal -- (though I 
> regret my memory cannot recall the title! -- mea culpa).
> 
> David Kiracofe
> 

Thanks for the mention, David. My book is Race and Class in Colonial Virginia. I would take issue with your suggestion that the colonists in Jamestown were ":ready to use their existing system of indentures" with the first Africans brought into the colony. If they had, I think we would see more evidence of those indentures (contracts) in the records. In fact, we see very little such evidence. I think that, at best, the first Africans were caught in a kind of limbo between two types of bound labor, neither of which was well defined at the time in the colony of Virginia. 

Another book that presents new information and hypotheses about these early Africans in the mainland colonies is Linda Heywood and John Thornton's Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of the Americas, 1585-1660. 

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego  

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