One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Unknowingly, they had crossed through lands that once had been home to bustling urban centers on both sides of the Mississippi. The mound-building cultures that dominated the southeastern woodlands from the ninth century to the fifteenth had produced cities with populations in the tens of thousands. They would have been rivals to all but the largest of European cities at the time, and would not be matched in North America until Philadelphia surpassed 20,000 inhabitants around 1760. Indeed, the total population of the territory of which Narváez had absurdly been declared governor would not be equaled by the descendants of European settlers for nearly three hundred years.

  With a few notable exceptions, the cities that large numbers of this vast population once called home have become invisible to all but archaeologists. Many were already in ruins by the time Zemmouri landed in Florida. Yet far more of what remained of these civilizations could have been seen then than now. The major structures at sites today found scattered throughout the American south—in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—were ceremonial mounds, some as tall as one hundred feet, the height of a ten-story building. Surrounding these mounds were villages built of thatch and mud, filled with people who created and sustained sophisticated agricultural systems. The mounds themselves were built in formations that defined a large central plaza, which served as the locus of religion and governance. They were, in a sense, the cathedrals of the Americas, sites of both political and spiritual power, which also, like any medieval cathedral, served the further purpose of attracting commerce of all kinds.

  For a time the mound-building cultures were so successful their problems seem disconcertingly modern: runaway populations, overuse of resources, rising political rivalries, war, famine, and disease. Despite the persistence of the narrative that native cultures knew no such trouble before the arrival of Europeans, it is worth remembering that none of the mound-builders’ cities was utopia. Ceremonial mounds the size of the U.S. Capitol do not form themselves, and it is doubtful they were built because the thousands involved in their construction wanted to spend their days hauling the heavy clay of the Mississippi watershed. They were formed instead by a society segmented and enforced through religious hierarchy. Long before the arrival of the Spanish and their Requerimiento, America was a place already grappling with the demands of men who claimed to speak for the gods.

  Zemmouri, Cabeza de Vaca, and the other survivors of the Narváez Expedition endured five years of captivity and forced labor at the hands of a number of native peoples. They were passed and traded from one tribe to another, each man becoming at times a curiosity and a possession of distinction, but most often treated as mere chattel. They were put to work carrying heavy loads and doing other chores the tribes felt beneath them, and often were beaten for sport. True to the Spanish explorers’ tendency to turn to religious conflicts of the past to make sense of the present, Cabeza de Vaca noted that they “were there made slaves and forced to serve with more cruelty than the Moor would have used.”

  But soon they began to perform other tasks as well. While the Spanish lay dying on the sands of the Island of Misfortune, the Karankawa had watched from a distance as the one remaining priest of the Narváez Expedition went from man to man blessing each with the sign of the cross. Apparently impressed with this ritual, and believing it must have some curative power, the elders of the tribe insisted the survivors should make use of this same magic in exchange for the hospitality they had received.

  “On the island I have spoken of,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “they wanted to make medicine men of us without any examination or asking for our diplomas.” They believed the priests they had seen could “cure diseases by breathing on the sick, and with that breath and their hands they drive the ailment away. So they summoned us to do the same in order to be at least of some use.” Trained as military men, the Spanish balked at the suggestion that they had spiritual powers. “We laughed, taking it for a jest, and said that we did not understand how to cure.”

  Yet the Karankawa persisted. As four survivors of hundreds, Zemmouri and the others were seen as having been clearly set apart for some special purpose. This purpose fit naturally with the Karankawa understanding of the world, in which medicine men were so ontologically distinct from other people that they were even treated differently in death. “Their usual custom is to bury the dead,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “except those who are medicine men among them. These they burn, and while the fire is burning, all dance and make a big festival, while some work grinding the bones to powder. At the end of the year, when they celebrate the anniversary, they scarify themselves and give to the relatives the pulverized bones to drink in water.”

  The Karankawa and other tribes soon came to believe the bodies of the four survivors were similarly powerful. What choice did they have but to try? The form their attempts at faith healing ultimately took became yet another example of American religious syncretism: “The way we treated the sick was to make over them the sign of the cross while breathing on them, recite a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray to God, Our Lord, as best we could to give them good health,” Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación recounts. “All those for whom we prayed, as soon as we crossed them, told the others that they were cured and felt well again. For this they gave us good cheer.”

  As Cabeza de Vaca wrote, among the various tribes with whom the four survivors interacted, Zemmouri soon came to take on a unique role. Born into a city at the crossroads of the world’s cultures and customs, he was a natural intermediary. He spoke for the group, becoming the lone necessary member of the expedition, even as the narrator and self-imagined hero of the adventure rarely deigned to call him by name. “It was the negro who talked to them all the time,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. “He inquired about the road we should follow, the villages—in short, about everything we wished to know.”

  The Spaniards would later maintain that they had Zemmouri speak for them because they believed their authority could be maintained only by remaining aloof. But considering how low they had been brought by their experiences, it is difficult to imagine they believed themselves to have any authority left. Zemmouri, on the other hand, was increasingly finding himself in a role that might have been familiar to anyone from Azemmour. The Narváez Expedition may not have truly discovered mosques and alfaquíes in the land of Anahuac, but they did encounter a people who regarded the comingling of diverse prayers and rituals with an attitude of openness to spiritual innovation similar to that of those practicing the maraboutism of Morocco. And like the mujahideen back home who drew on the eclectic teachings of Sufi masters to defend their land against crusaders from the north, Zemmouri found a way to use the blending of beliefs in service of his own struggle, the jihad that would, for a time, set him free.

  In September 1534, more than six years after their disastrous landing in Florida, the four survivors of the Narváez Expedition finally escaped their captors. Slipping off into the wilderness, they followed the sun in a direction they hoped would lead south and west to New Spain. Apparently by this point their reputation as medicine men had preceded them throughout the region: Wherever they traveled during the months that followed, they were welcomed as healers. Zemmouri even began carrying the symbolic marker of a shaman, a sacred gourd rattle that Cabeza de Vaca later described as a ceremonial object of great importance, used only “at dances, or as medicine, to cure,” which “nobody dares touch” except the rightful owner. Made from a calabash strung with dried cascabel chiles, these rattles were said to have the power to call down spirits from the heavens; Zemmouri carried one because the Indians he met increasingly came to believe he had come from the heavens himself. He continued to make the sign of the cross over those who hoped to be healed, but now the gesture was less a marker of the Christian identity forced upon him than a signifier of his growing separation from it.

  He and the rest of his troupe of accidental faith healers began to be followed by a crowd of Indians wherever they went. If Cabeza de Vaca’s accounting is to be trusted, the
se processions sometimes numbered thousands. Even assuming the likelihood of exaggeration, the following these shipwrecked survivors amassed must have been a sight to behold.

  It was during one such procession, eighteen months after their escape, that the leaders of this strange parade happened upon the first Christians they had seen in years: a Spanish slave-hunting expedition on the coast of the Gulf of California. With their crowd of acolytes bereft at their departure, the four survivors followed the slavers to Mexico City, where three of the four men received a hero’s welcome.

  Not so for Zemmouri. For the better part of a decade he had been made first an equal by circumstance, and then a leader by necessity. To return now to the “land of Christians,” as Cabeza de Vaca called it, was to lose all that he had gained. He was perhaps relieved, then, when he was directed to join another scouting mission back into the Northern Mystery.

  The journey that followed completed one of the most remarkable transformations in history. Though it is often said that there are no second acts in American lives, here was Zemmouri, beginning not only his second or his third but his fourth. Born in Africa, a slave in Europe, an explorer in the first of his American expeditions, what else was there for him to become?

  The final act in the life of Mustafa Zemmouri began almost as soon as the four survivors found themselves in the relative safety of New Spain, near what is now Mexico City. While they had arrived empty-handed, the three Spaniards were full of stories of dangerous peoples, sufferings endured, and places that seemed unimaginably exotic even to their fellow adventurers. Of particular interest to their astonished audiences were the notes in their saga that suggested that the objects of that ancient Iberian desire—the Seven Cities of Cibola—were finally within reach.

  Some of the descriptions the three Spaniards offered referred to things they had actually seen—particularly intriguing was “a hawkbell of copper, thick and large, figured with a human face,” which Andrés Dorantes had been given in exchange for a healing—while other details were pure hearsay, full of rumors filtered through miscommunication and overstatement. Dorantes’s bell, they had been told, was made of a material in great abundance in regions to the north, where plates of precious metal could be found everywhere buried in the ground. Cabeza de Vaca likewise claimed to have heard that there were “pearls and great riches on the coast… and all the best and most opulent countries are near there.”

  These tales were not merely the stuff of idle talk reliving past glories. They were also repeated in official testimony given to the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza. According to a relación left by Pedro de Castañeda, Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca regaled the ranking Spanish official in the hemisphere with accounts of “large and powerful villages, four and five stories high of which they had heard a great deal in the countries they had crossed.” Free to editorialize when writing his account twenty years after the fact, Castañeda added that the survivors of the Narváez Expedition had likewise reported “other things very different from what turned out to be the truth.”

  While the three Spanish survivors obviously told these tall tales for their own self-aggrandizement, it is possible that Zemmouri had the most to gain from the exaggeration. Had it not been for the lies of his fellow travelers, he would likely have returned merely to servitude and obscurity. He probably would not have gone on to blaze a trail into the heart of the continent.

  After hearing the accounts that seemed to suggest the Seven Cities of Cibola might be within reach, Viceroy Mendoza arranged for a reconnaissance trip north. Planning to personally preserve any glory that might be gained through this mission, he called for it to be led by men who, he hoped, would not dream of claiming wealth or status for themselves: two Franciscan friars and a slave.

  One of the friars assigned to this mission was Father Marcos. According to Castañeda’s account: “The negro Estéban had been ordered by the viceroy to obey Friar Marcos in everything, under pain of serious punishment.” Like Cabeza de Vaca before him, the priest left a relación that consigns Zemmouri to a supporting role. Father Marcos instructed him to travel ahead, and the two devised a code by which they could communicate what he found across a great distance.

  “I sent Estéban de Dorantes, the black, whom I instructed to follow to the north for fifty or sixty leagues, to see if by that route he would be able to learn of any great thing such as we sought,” Father Marcos wrote, “and I agreed with him that if he received any information of a rich, peopled land, that was something great, he should not go farther, but that he return in person or send me Indians with this signal, which we arranged: that if the thing was of moderate importance, he send me a white cross the size of a hand; if it was something great he send me one of two hands; and if it was something bigger and better than New Spain, he send me a large cross.”

  As it would turn out, the man from Azemmour would show himself unwilling to play the part of obedient servant to other men in search of glory.

  Zemmouri departed on Passion Sunday, two weeks before Easter. Four days later, messengers arrived in Friar Marcos’s camp with “a very large cross, of the height of a man.” The messengers told the priest Zemmouri had advised that he follow immediately, “because he had reached people who gave him information of the greatest thing in the world.” The report Marcos heard was “that there are seven very large cities… with large houses of stone and lime; the smallest one-story high, with a flat roof above, and others two and three stories high, and the house of the lord four stories high.… And on the portals of the principal houses there are many designs of turquoise stones, of which he says they have a great abundance. And the people in these cities are very well clothed.” According to the report the Franciscan heard that day, the slave from Azemmour had found “the first city of that country, which city he said was called Cibola.”

  The excitement likely caused by this news cannot be overstated. The object of decades of Spanish exploration now seemed tantalizingly close. Zemmouri then sent another cross, bigger than the last. At every village Father Marcos encountered they told him of the great cities to be found only a few days ahead. For weeks the friars traveled this way, with both Zemmouri and the prize of the Seven Cities always just out of reach.

  This story of separation and dislocation seems in the Franciscan’s telling to be the inevitable outcome of attempts to communicate across the expanse of an unknown land. Yet the other side of the story emerges in the account of Castañeda: “It seems that, after the friars I have mentioned and the negro had started, the negro did not get on well with the friars, because he took the women that were given him and collected turquoises, and got together a stock of everything.” Even before the friar suggested he travel ahead, it seems Zemmouri had made preparations. “Besides, the Indians in those places through which they went got along with the negro better, because they had seen him before,” Castañeda continues. “This was the reason he was sent on ahead to open up the way and pacify the Indians, so that when the others came along they had nothing to do except to keep an account of the things for which they were looking.”

  As the Spanish came to understand the story, after Zemmouri took his leave of the friars, “he thought he could get all the reputation and honor himself, and that if he should discover those settlements with such famous high houses, alone, he would be considered bold and courageous. So he proceeded with the people who had followed him and attempted to cross the wilderness.”

  While the Spanish were searching for Cibola, however, it is possible Zemmouri was searching for something else—perhaps a place not unlike a ribat, the desert fortress well known in the Morocco of his youth, at once a hostel for travelers, a refuge for mystics, and a garrison from which mujahideen could repel Christian invaders. Carved of sand-colored stone with small square windows set high in walls tall enough to provide a view of any who approached, the North African ribat’s physical resemblance to the cliff dwellings built by some of the native tribes of the American Southwest is of co
urse entirely coincidental, but even to a man without memories of similar outposts, such “high houses” would have seemed an obvious place to find protection.

  In short order, “he was so far ahead of the friars” that he had traveled “80 leagues beyond” where Father Marcos had instructed him to remain. For Mustafa Zemmouri, it seems, this was not a scouting mission undertaken for the Viceroy of New Spain but an elaborate escape plan all his own, a journey to a place where he would not be seen as the slave he was when he arrived in America but recognized for what he had become.

  If Zemmouri remembered anything by this point of the religious traditions of the country in which he was born, he would have recalled the way the marabout found within each ribat was rewarded for his ability to blend the beliefs and practices around him. Moreover, the power of the marabout was thought to intensify as he ventured far from home, and so it is a role that has found particular resonance through immigration. Centuries later, the place of the marabout within some Muslim cultures is largely unchanged. As Donald Martin Carter wrote in his recent study of North African Muslims in Europe, they are known primarily by what their followers believe about them. “Marabout are assumed to have mystical powers.… Marabout are assumed to be able to perform miracles and alter the course of worldly events. The Marabout may intercede for the follower in a whole range of activities.” As a Moroccan-raised man with devoted followers who, it was later said, “believ[ed] that under his protection they could traverse the whole world without danger,” it seems that something like a marabout is precisely what he considered himself to be.