April 14, 1532
Two. A reason to remember so much pain.
Much too busy with convent duties for two suns, today I rush to continue this work, and I am quickly flushed in the greenery of my memories. In this little room that the monks have allowed me, stiff-legged as I am, soft stomach, aching teeth, I still have my mind. For six years, as we have shared an existence in this convent’s stone buildings, the friar has asked many questions, bringing up old times and writing down my stories. But now I feel the freedom of my hand, I draw my words on this paper, these words that will carry and be read by others.
I put pen to paper, close my eyes and I am there, almost forty years ago, but now fresh in my sudden memory, during those first days when close behind young Rodrigo, my new friend and captain’s servant, I snuck under the poop deck of the Santa Maria (Marie Galante, the admiral always called her), anchored still on the small bay of my home island of Guanahaní, right into his master room. The admiral was bent over a table and quietly Rodrigo and I watched him from behind. He never took notice. That was the first time I saw him scratching the ink marks in his ship’s log, engrossed in his mind, resembling one of our behikes in full ceremonial prayer. That act of the admiral’s I pondered even at my early age. Later, as I learned their different ways, this writing on paper that could be taken over long distances and read directly again and again appealed to me. I think on that: that I, too, now can write, and it warms me.
I confess to the sky and I hope the friar can forgive me when he reads these words. I do intend to tell, to write on paper, what I did see and how I do see it. For the good father and for whomever else might read these pages, I will stall my anger, restrain my hate, retain my cagüayo lizard spirit, my revolving eye, the coolness in my body to see them clearly, and I will write what I have learned of their actions, their speech, during the early years and on to the present. But I confess: I am no longer enchanted by anything Castilian, anything Iberian, Portuguese, anything Genoese, or whatever else they have across the great open waters. Even as I write, and freely, I still ponder: How will these, my own words scratched on paper, how will they free my spirit? Or will they capture my thoughts, my heart? Will they betray me?
I am nervous to write of those times and those places where once flourished my Taíno relatives. The wounds of these forty years cut deep into my heart and so will mostly these pages. So I sit and I cry, and hurriedly before he returns, I sit down to pen these few words of a beginning, on my own. Many things I can say about the admiral that he will not like. And many things I can tell, too, about the great world of my ancestors, the people of the islands that the Castilians call Antilles but which to the eye of my mind I see as our long Cuban lizard (Caymán-Cubanakán), the land of great mountains (Haití-Bohío), the center of dancing (Borikén) and the little Carib turtles, hicoteas, in our language, arching south to the great forest.
And I start with this: What I do for this friar, our great defender, I do because I know what he endures for my people. But it is for my people, too, for that world in which we lived and which we lost, that I want to write also what I know of who we were, how we felt and believed, and what has happened. I want to be this friar’s witness, by Yucahuguama Bagua Maórocoti, great spirit of my ancestors, I do, and even by the baby Jesus, I do, but in my witness I will write for you, my Taíno-ni-taíno, natural guaxeri-ti relatives, for those of you who will survive, for those of you in times to come who will remember that your fathers and your mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers were a people.
April 15, 1532
Three. An introduction of myself.
My Christian name in the Castilian language, from the time of my adoption by the admiral, is Diego or Dieguillo Colón. Fifty-two is the count of my rains. Of origin, I am from Guanahaní, the first land sighted in my world by the covered men of Castile. I am of the Taíno people and in my native language my name is Guaikán—the remora fish. My mother was Nánache, from the canoe-building clan of the yukaieke, or village, called Old Guanahaní. My father had several names but was most prominently called Cohobanax, after his functions and title in the council of the Cohoba. He was from our island’s central village, called Guanahanínakan, but he lived on the coast with my mother’s people, who esteemed him as a fisherman of great skill.
I think now of my father’s death, only weeks before the admiral’s arrival, in a moment of joy, climbing lazily on the overlapping branches of a palm tree, reaching over to the tree of the fruit called mamey, his tight muscular body, like the great mahá snake, with a stick he struck down two, three bundles of ripe mamey. Then, stretching for one more fruit, arm extended, body extended along thick, broad leaves like a brown cagüayo lizard, a sharp crack and how he dropped, long and hard and with no sound, all silent but the snap, the crack when the flat branch broke, as he dropped fast and hit rock.
My first sadness comes back to me now, the worst and best, and I must stop. Thinking of my parents, of their generation and their elders, fills me with longing.
This is all in me. I pull away now, lift the pen. I leave my father be. Slowly, I will approach it. There is so much. Again today my mind swims with colors and faces, turns of words and the many smells of the sea. The friar’s request has filled me with force, my chest is warm and my mind turns. Even the pain of my right side, past injuries I carry from the time of my betrayal, when even his name that I still carry could not protect me, even the old pain that stiffens my arm and leg, even my tired limbs, have warmed so that my heart can almost feel glad.
April 21,1532
Four. The good friar’s argument.
At lunch today the good friar took his meal, as I usually do, with the Indian servants of our convent. We shared with him our cassabe tort, axiaco soup, and a fresh red snapper caught out in his canoe in the early morning by young Silverio. Don Bartolomé comes to eat with us quite regularly. Today, before taking seat, he was already agitated with our cause. As part of his prayer, he said, “Almighty God, help us condemn the encomienda system, brutal destroyer of our good Indian brothers.”
The good friar is very forceful. Once he intends to go in a certain direction, he will not be dissuaded. Every day, for his ideas about our Indian people, he suffers. Today, I watched him mop around his soup bowl with a piece of cassabe as we heard the first yeller. The shouting came from the stone road that runs down the hill by the convent, and you could hear the culprit hurrying by. “Las Casas, the great whoreson! Boogs the she-dogs and their sons!” he yelled.
Two or three come by every day. They shout their insults to the friar and run away before the younger monks can have at them. Most are sons or guards of encomenderos. They hate Don Bartolomé. Once, he was in the vegetable garden, picking our Taíno peppers that he loves so much, when several of the criminals pelted him with stones. They truly hate him and I believe would kill him if given a chance.
As usual, today Don Bartolomé sat quietly through the insults, his hawk’s face and nose tilted down over his bowl with only the slightest of furrows lining his ample forehead. Two monks came back from a brief chase, empty-handed, and Don Bartolomé ignored them. He put his plate away and requested I follow him to my little room.
“How is the writing?” he asked, walking straight to the window as I closed my door.
“I am only starting,” I said.
“I need your memory,” he said. “I intend to sail to the kingdom soon. I will pretend to go to Puerto Rico. But from there I will go before the court in Castile. The king will hear my case.”
“Why now, Father?” I asked.
“These bastards have no backbone. The whole island is terrified.”
He spoke the truth. As we stood and talked today in the convent at Santo Domingo, a young countryman of mine, Enriquillo, the warrior chief of the Bahuruku mountains, remains at large. For thirteen years, Enriquillo and his warriors, among them his war captain, Tamayo, have been free in remote camps in the southwest mountains of the island.
“Enriqu
illo’s warriors attacked a farm this side of La Maguana just eight days ago,” Father Las Casas continued. “The governor is trying to keep it quiet, but four soldiers were killed and their weapons seized.”
I asked the good friar if perhaps now the king might not be angrier with the rebel cacique, thus complicating his mission.
“The king will be upset. But with whom? Enriquillo’s case is now well-known. Everyone wants the mountains pacified, including the king. My intent is to remind him that Enriquillo is a baptized Indian, a Christian. And he is at war for very good reasons. Others have argued with the king on that account. It is the brutal abuse of the encomienda that caused Enriquillo to war.”
The good father was right and as always I was glad to hear him say it, but what he said pricked me. Indeed, Enriquillo was baptized. But, this I do not see as so great an achievement.
I know the story of Enriquillo. I knew his father and his uncles, including his great aunt, the cacica Anacaona, hereditary tribal mother of the Xaraguá region, sister of the wise old cacique Bohekio and widow of the feared warrior cacique Caonabó. All are now dead, victims of betrayal, victims of slaughter, almost thirty years ago.
“At the court they call you idolaters, heathen, barbaric people,” he pressed me. “I want to argue that your people’s beliefs were actually a form of Christianity, that you worshipped under similar ideas. Do you see? As Christians we are to conquer and war upon heathens at will; but a people who have had a measure of Christianity can command more consideration…”
I nodded, though not with the vigor he wanted.
“Yes or no?” he persisted. “Do you agree with what I maintain, that our best argument to the court is on religious grounds?”
“In truth, Father,” I told him. “I do not hope so much for that argument as you do.”
The good friar meant to press on. “I may convince the monarchs by asserting that your own religious beliefs before our coming are not so different from the Christian catechism,” he said.
Deeply in my heart of palm I refuse to accept this argument from Don Bartolomé. I like what he tries to do, how tirelessly he argues on our behalf, but it angers something deep in me.
“The closer to Christianity you are, the more the kings must care for you. Among all the abhorrent practices of your old behikes, I know some Christian notions were apparent. The idea of Heaven and Hell, for instance, maybe thoughts about a celestial trinity, things like this, which could lead to a king’s recognition. A royal declaration is what your people need.”
“We need only to be left alone,” I said, in an eruption of words. I must confess that his inquiries and assertions have triggered my memory. I am agitated. I do not mean to be blunt with the good friar, but he speaks sometimes without thinking.
The good father listens to me sometimes, and I feel his acceptance of my truth. But other days he walks as in a waking trance, like a guilty man smitten by the cohoba. Then, he admonishes me: “Only through the Lord Jesus Christ can you find salvation.” Or he says: “Bringing Christ on the cross was our mission to you. Before, it is true, you were lost.” When he is like that, when he must own not just my memory but my very own spirit, I shrink from his verbal embrace. Today, at first, it was like that. We couldn’t talk. I withdrew into my silence rather than argue, and my good Castilian friend, this brother of Christ who so much has suffered for my people, he, too, withdrew, mumbling quietly to himself, his gaze roaming the valley beyond my window.
Five. The story on Enriquillo.
A full hour went by before the good friar continued.
“Let’s stick to Enriquillo,” he said. “As I understand it, twice before going to the mountains, Enriquillo filed complaints. He tried to use the lawful means to achieve justice.”
I know that story, too. I know exactly who Enriquillo is and how he comes to have hundreds of Indians in the bush mountains of the Bahuruku, how he has changed our lives, and what he means to the Indians and African Negroes of this island.
“And he is a Christian, is he not?” Las Casas said, to pull my tongue.
I reminded the priest that Enriquillo is a survivor of the Massacre of Anacaona’s Banquet, which in 1503 destroyed the last major Taíno cacicasgo on Española. I myself saved Enriquillo’s father, then took his young boys at my side, though I did not say so. That was the time when Governor Nicolás de Ovando, a friar and, in my estimation, an assassin, pretended friendship and accepted Anacaona’s hospitality. Then, on his signal, Castilian soldiers attacked the friendly village, shooting and hacking and stabbing. I did remind the good friar of my presence at that massacre.
“But I didn’t know Enriquillo was there,” he said.
“Yes, he was,” I said. “And, you should know, before he was taught the catechism, he was brought up for the cohoba.”
“Leave the cohoba aside. It is a drunkenness by any other name.”
This is a regular conversation between the good priest and me. He knows I will defend our cohoba ritual to him. I won’t attack him, but I will argue with him.
“You have your wine. And you use it in ceremony, in communion with the Christ.”
“This is not fruitful, Dieguillo…”
“With cohoba, our behikes, our priests, communicated, too, with our Yucahuguama, our supreme God.”
“Enough. You are going too far and twisting my intention. Tell me about Enriquillo’s life.”
“After the massacre dictated by Fray Don Nicolás de Ovando,” I said, to irk him by reminding him that the assassin was one of his brothers in the cloth. “Enriquillo was educated by the Franciscan fathers, as you know. Then, along with what remained of his village, some eighty or ninety people, he went to an encomendero named Valenzuela. When old Valenzuela died, his son, Andrés, received Enriquillo and his people for his own encomienda.”
“So he was inherited by Andrés Valenzuela from his father?” Las Casas asked.
“Yes,” I explained. “The old Valenzuela, named Francisco, died. And, you know, he was a calm man and not given to fits of temper like so many of the Iberians. Enriquillo’s people paid labor tribute but kept their own conucos and much of their dignity under him.”
“Nevertheless, by the king’s law of 1517, an Indian was to have been freed upon the first encomendero’s death. It was an illegal inheritance.”
“So it was,” I said. “Like so many, even today.”
I saw Enriquillo occasionally at the convent until 1505 or 1506, when I myself was encomended and lost touch with him. He was only seven years old then, but I remember his serious eyes and his alert mind.
It was late in the year of 1518 when the story changes for Enriquillo and his people; that was when they took their fate in their own hands. Young Andrés Valenzuela, an obscene profligate who lives in Santo Domingo even today, took away Enriquilo’s mare. The mare was special, a deathbed gift to the young Taíno cacique from Andrés’s own father. Enriquillo complained, but Valenzuela claimed it as his own father’s inheritance to him. His overseers overtook Enriquillo in a field and beat him down, bruising his ribs and breaking a finger. A month went by. To fulfill his prescribed obligation, Enriquillo took a group of his guaxeris, his working men, to the mines for a four-week period. While he was thus occupied, Valenzuela came to his home and lewdly demanded sex from Doña Mencia, his wife.
“This I had heard,” Las Casas said. “It was the rape—how Doña Mencia was raped.”
A boy was sent for Enriquillo, and he returned immediately. He complained to Valenzuela and demanded an apology to his wife. “I love my wife,” he is said to have told Valenzuela, who replied: “Neither Indians nor dogs know how to love. What would an Indian know about love?”
“Valenzuela said that?” Las Casas said, taking detailed notes as I spoke. He knows I know the Indian side of this story.
“Of course, he did. And this is well known, how Enriquillo and his wife love each other. Those two were close since early childhood and were brought up together by their families.”
“They are lineage?”
“Yes, an arranged marriage. But let me finish. Because Enriquillo, an Indian like me and educated to his legal rights by friars, followed the good course and took his complaint to the lieutenant governor, Pedro de Badillo. And again, Badillo laughed him out of court in San Juan la Maguana. Then he had him arrested for public insubordination and beaten severely.”
“It’s a miracle he survived!” the friar said.
“It took Enriquillo weeks to recover, but when he did and could get around, he went to the court in Santo Domingo, where he hoped the oidores, or judges, would hear his complaint. But they, too, laughed at him. He stood up, again and again, in court, insisting that they hear his complaint. They placed him in chains for a week, then sent him home, where, at the courthouse of San Juan la Maguana, once again, three Castilian peons jumped him and beat him severely.”
“‘I went to them three times,’ Enriquillo then told his people. ‘All the talk of the priests is for nothing.’ This time, when Enriquillo recovered, he rounded up the families under his care and took to the bush mountains of Bahuruku. Valenzuela pursued him with eleven foremen, but Enriquillo easily ambushed them, killing two of the men outright. He caught Valenzuela and stripped him naked, but merely chased him away. ‘You are lucky I don’t kill you, Valenzuela,’ he told his former encomendero. ‘Don’t let me see you again in these parts or I will.”
Taino Page 2