Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  The streets are almost empty at lunchtime, when people retreat into restaurants and bodegas to eat. I rush toward the former residence of the country’s twenty-second (twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth) president, Ulises Heureaux—it’s now home to the Academia Dominicana de la Historia—to visit its elusive director, Frank Moya Pons. Moya Pons has written more about the history of this island and the rest of the Caribbean than one can possibly read in a lifetime. If any person can steer me in the right direction, it is El Maestro, the man I affectionately call The Teacher.

  I’m a few minutes late for our lunch meeting. “Excuse me,” I ask a receptionist on the second floor, “is Dr. Moya Pons here? He’s expecting me for lunch.”

  “Yes, he was expecting you a little earlier,” she responds, barely looking up from the stacks of paperwork mounted on her large wooden desk. “He couldn’t wait for you anymore. He’s out to lunch. I will tell him you came by.”

  The one person in the entire country upon whom I don’t want to make a bad impression has left the building, or rather, the dreamy two-story Spanish colonial mini-manse. ¡Carajo!

  I stand by the entrance of the academia for a few minutes, looking down both sides of the street, trying to guess which route will take me longer to arrive at my great-uncle Jorge’s botanica.

  I want to spend a few hours lost in this district of ghosts, to share the narrow sidewalks with them and the tourists, the white- and blue-collar workers, the shoe shiners, stray dogs, and squatters who’ve bum-rushed entire buildings in the area. This colorful district is as complicated as it was when it was first established in 1498 by Bartolomé Colón, the younger brother of the New World’s greatest Space Invader, after the epic failures that were La Isabela in 1494, and La Navidad in 1492 in modern-day Haiti. The third try to establish a city—this time erected on the southern coast of the island—proved a charm for Bartolomé and the European settlers. Originally coined La Nueva Isabela and later renamed Santo Domingo, the settlement, for the most part, jumped off. Today the area is called the Ciudad Colonial and, colloquially, La Zona.

  * * *

  Let me backtrack a bit.

  There were human beings living on the island of Hispaniola, née Quisqueya, before Cristóbal Colón’s arrival (to use the name il italiano answered to back then). The Indigenous people of Quisqueya and the surrounding islands had gradually made their way to the region in four waves from the Orinoco Delta, starting between 400 and 3000 BC.

  The first group of migrants were nomadic people who made do living in natural shelters like caves, rivers, and inlets, subsisting on fish. The Andalusian-born chronicler and priest Bartolomé de las Casas—we will revisit him later—met some of them in the 1500s living in Punta Tiburón on the west side of the island, modern-day Haiti, and on the far west side of Cuba. He called them Ciboneys.

  The second group were masterful ceramicists descending from the Arawaks, who still live in the tropical rain forests of South America. They eventually broke out and spread throughout parts of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and most of the Lesser Antilles, absorbing and displacing the aforementioned wave of Amerindians. The Igneri, as they are traditionally known, were fishermen, farmers, and hunters.

  The third group covered an extensive wave of Arawak-descended people from modern-day Venezuela and Guyana called the Taínos, meaning “noble” and “good” people. Their movement lasted about a thousand years, and they absorbed and eliminated some of their pre-Columbian predecessors. Taínos, who themselves were mixed with other Antillean groups of Amerindians, were masterful pharmacists, artists, and inventors. They learned how to strain cyanide from yucca to make a staple we eat on the island today, called cassava bread. They could hunt, farm, fish, and cure almost anything with their knowledge of herbs and nature. They built large canoes to travel between islands, developed biological warfare in the form of pepper gas, and contributed words to the Dominican and North American vocabulary we use today. If not for the Taínos, there would be no hammocks, or hamacas, to nap in after stuffing ourselves with barbecue, or barbacoa.

  The last wave, the Caribs, were also descendants of the Arawak but differed from the Taínos in that they were already skilled and more developed navigators and hunters, wicked with the bow and arrow.

  At the time of Colón’s arrival, the Taínos were thriving in and controlling most of the Greater Antilles. They discovered the admiral and his crew on Christmas Eve 1492 after his flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground on the northern coast of modern-day Haiti. Colón observed that some of the Taínos were rocking gold ornaments, which compelled him to leave behind the thirty-nine crewmen who couldn’t fit on the two remaining smaller vessels, the Pinta and Niña, to construct a fort out of the remnants of the ship. Upon his return from Spain a year later, the admiral found that all of the men in his crew had been killed for raping the Indigenous women and killing some of the men. So, what now? Colón must have thought.

  The admiral decided he would establish the formal American colony farther east from La Navidad, in modern-day Puerto Plata. He named the settlement La Isabela in January 1494, in honor of his Spanish patroness. Almost immediately after the establishment of the intended commercial outposts, all sorts of maladies plagued the settlers, causing illness and death. There was a shortage of labor, food, and medicine. To make matters worse, members of the Spanish lesser nobility started to bug the hell out when Colón suggested—in what one might consider a pre-Communist move—that everyone work without the distinction of social rank. Things went from bad to worse. Colón lost control, and his paranoia ultimately led to the unleashing of two violent military campaigns against the Taínos. Colón had high hopes of trying to make slaves out of the indios in order to appease the disgruntled capitalists up north. It’s a good thing for future colonialists that the admiral kept hope alive.

  The Taínos and Caribs were enemies, which made it fairly easy to divide and conquer them. There is a school of thought that persists about the Caribs raiding Taíno villages to feast on the flesh of Taíno men and enslave the women as cooks and concubines. While warring tribes across the globe have ritualistically tasted and eaten parts of their enemies, there’s another, more plausible way to look at the picture. It’s possible that the Taínos may have bloated the facts about their foes to the Spanish, who in turn never questioned them; they simply took note of the accounts without investigating whether they were true. This version of events could be used to justify the need to save the savage souls on the island to their hard-core Catholic masters on the throne back home. Whatever the case, it worked.

  On December 20, 1503, the Spanish Crown legally sanctioned Indigenous slavery in the form of encomiendas—under the condition, naturally, that the slave masters would teach their captives the Catholic faith. It was a win-win situation. For being exemplary Catholics, the Spaniards on the island were rewarded with VIP passes to heaven and the free labor they desperately needed to extract gold from the mines and toil the colonial plantations. And the Taínos? They got to learn all about and, because of severely shortened life spans under Spanish rule, meet Jesus at the gates of heaven before their European masters.

  The earliest days of contact (forced and otherwise) between the Spaniards and Taínos resulted in children with mixed destinies. Some were recognized by their Spanish parents and totally assimilated into European culture. Some moved back to Spain with their parents, and others blended in with the colonial communities across the island. The majority, however, maintained their mothers’ inferior social status in the community.

  Although the invasion of the island of Hispaniola was the American colonial springboard, what happened to the Taínos at the hands of the colonists is one of those ungodly narratives that played itself out over and over throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. One can substitute Columbus and the Taínos with any number of explorers and the people who had the misfortune of discovering them. On the island of Hispaniola, the effects were devastating.

  During the first few decad
es of Spanish occupation, the numbers of Taínos decreased at a rapid-fire pace. They had no defenses against a laundry list of European diseases that included smallpox and the measles; some committed suicide rather than live as slaves; some died in combat, raging against the colonial machine; and countless others fled to the mountains, caves, and other hiding places beyond their enemies’ reach. Some scholars estimate that the Taíno population, reaching upward of three million in Hispaniola, was wiped out in the first few decades of European occupation, with clusters surviving around the Caribbean.

  The Spanish chroniclers and census takers may have gotten it all wrong. We need to revisit these numbers. As in the rest of the Americas, there was no way to account for the Taínos who revolted, escaped, and found ways to survive and resist European colonialism. Taínos contributed much more than cassava bread to the Dominican Republic: They left a genetic imprint, a footnote that reads, “We may not be living in huts or dressing in the traditional garb of our ancestors, but we’re here, albeit in fragments.”

  In the 1950s, before ancestral DNA testing, researchers studied a fairly new popular Taíno settlement in the northeast, originally founded by Enrique, one of the last caciques of the colonial period. They saw high percentages of blood types found in Indigenous-Native-Americans: O positive, with no Rh-negative factor, like Dad. In the ’70s, they studied dental records that proved Indigenous retention in the same village: shovel-shaped incisors in thirty-three out of seventy-four people, also characteristic of Native-Americans and their Asian ancestors.

  In 2006 a national haplogroup-A mitochondrial DNA survey on the island examined hair root samples taken from sites throughout the Dominican Republic. The results indicated that the northern, central, and eastern regions of the country had the highest percentage of Amerindian ancestry. Hapologroups B and C obtained higher frequencies in the east, and one of only two samples taken in the west belonged to haplogroup A. When further analyses were conducted on the haplogroup A samples, nine lineages were identified in the Dominican Republic: three post-Columbian and six pre-Columbian.

  Studies with healthier population samples should be undertaken because the Dominican Republic currently has a population of over ten million people. If more studies are done, more pre-Columbian history—silenced due to genocide by academia and European chroniclers—will reveal a rich and diverse narrative.

  * * *

  I find my great-uncle Jorge helping a customer at his botanica San Miguel. It’s a shame I can’t collect a DNA sample from him; Jorge and Dad’s father had different mothers. Before I left, Dad told me that his father’s oldest full brother, Arquimedes, was still alive, so I packed a mitochondrial DNA kit, hoping to trace my grandfather Ismael’s direct maternal ancestry. Dad and Jorge tell me that Arquimedes’s greatest asset is his photographic memory: he could recall dates and details of events as if they had happened earlier in the day.

  Jorge offers me a cold cerveza and a seat. “I was told you were coming back to interview Arquimedes,” he says, “but is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Yes, I want to know how you got into the African and Indigenous spiritual business. Why are you even interested in it?”

  “There are things in our blood that are just naturally passed down to us, whether we want to recognize them or not.”

  “Like what?”

  “How do I tell you?” he says. “Here we are Catholics because we believe in God. We are believers of the spirits, too, but we don’t put fukú or throw brujería on anybody. We sell things like any pharmacy would.” Jorge pauses to help a woman looking for an herb associated with La Virgen de la Altagracia. He continues, “God gave everyone gifts, and because of genetics, many men and women in our father’s line have been given the ability to see things, to transmit spirits and such.”

  “I’ve heard stories—”

  Jorge excuses himself to help a woman looking for herbs she can wash with in order to conceive.

  My stomach churns. Until now, the few people I’ve met on Dad’s side have been zealously staunch church ladies, the kind of killjoys who made Dana Carvey’s Saturday Night Live Church Lady come across like Mary Magdalene when she was tricking. I remember one summer when my aunt Esperanza asked her son’s friend, “Are you the son of the devil?” with unnerving calm. “Because we know that his children are left-handed.” I almost choked on pizza crust as the boy sat there, speechless and confused.

  Years later, Esperanza and Rebecca—I had just met Rebecca, Ercilia’s daughter from the next man—asked if I thought gay people would go to hell on Judgment Day.

  “If I were God, I would send all the deadbeat dads to hell first, rather than a guy just because he is gay.”

  “Ay, Dios mío que estas en el bendito cielo.” Esperanza gasped, clenching her blouse as if she were about to have a nervous breakdown. “I can’t believe you would think such a thing.”

  I wonder what Ercilia and her daughters would say, watching Jorge carefully attend to one person after another looking for saints, special herbs, and prescriptions for all sorts of universal maladies like reversing bad luck, enticing a lover back, losing weight, or getting rid of a husband’s mistress.

  “On your father’s father’s side, we ride a different current,” says Jorge.

  I’ve heard different versions of the same story since I was a kid living in Paraíso. I was told that once upon a time, in a barrio not far from here, a man was accused of sexually assaulting a young child. He ran into someone from the Cepeda family who told him, “Listen, if you did commit this unjust crime against an innocent, you will lose the hand you used as a weapon.” The man laughed and went on his way. Very soon thereafter, the alleged pedophile, a factory worker, lost his arm in an accident on the job.

  “Is this true?” I ask Jorge.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “There are many stories like that out there about us.”

  “You know that my father also has religious fanatics in his family,” I say.

  “Sure, some people take after their mothers, and others somehow remember what’s in their father’s genes.

  “Look at you, for instance. I can see that you were born and basically raised over in that land, and still you walk with spirits, like part of your family does here,” Jorge says. “I know you can see things.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  She Who Walks Behind Me

  My guess is that it comes from the mother or, at least, from her spirit.

  —LEWIS HYDE, THE GIFT

  BEFORE WE GET INTO THE SUBJECT OF “SEEING,” JORGE EXCUSES himself to help another customer fill a spiritual prescription. “Por favor, Doctor, a bath to help me sweeten my aura for my husband,” an older woman says. Jorge takes her to his brother’s botanica across the way. The last time I was here, I noticed his brother had a wall full of colorful baths for every ailment I could think of.

  To kill time, I take out my iPhone and scroll through my texts and inbox. I come across an automated email from Family Tree DNA, stating that a new result has been posted to my page. I follow the link to find that Dad’s mitochondrial DNA results have come back from the lab. I sit on the wooden crate and stare at the link. I have no freaking clue what to expect. This news will change everything. Maybe I’ll finally be able to place Dad in Matanga after all, or perhaps I’ll find out that we are Jewish. If the latter turns out to be true, Dad—who wrongly associates whiteness with Jewishness—will hold it over my head for all eternity. I hold my breath and click on the link.

  To my astonishment, I find out that Dad’s direct maternal ancestors fall under haplogroup A. Ercilia’s most recent ancestor was Indigenous, which in the Dominican Republic means Amerindian or Taíno. Dad has no matches in Family Tree DNA’s database as of this printing. Despite what history has told us about their fate, the Indigenous islanders have managed to survive, like their European and African counterparts, in varying proportions.

  * * *

  La india. This woman has come up over and over again throug
hout my life. When I think about the notion of una india, an Amerindian or Indigenous-American spiritual guide illuminating my path, I’m not terribly surprised, but I didn’t expect this guardian angel to come courtesy of Ercilia.

  “Mira, mi hija,” an old woman sitting next to me on the A train once said, “tu camina con una guerrera india.” I was a teenager and didn’t fully understand what she meant—I couldn’t see anyone walking with or behind me, much less an Indigenous-American warrior. I smiled and brushed her off as crazy. No one is walking with me—I’m sitting!

  Casimiro tried to explain what the lady meant by guías espirituales, or spiritual guides, when I mentioned what happened on the train to him. “These are seres incorpóreos that lead you out of the womb and remain with you all your life, guiding you,” he said, “and some of these spirit beings can come in the form of one or more of your antepasados, your ancestors.” I snapped, “Oh yeah? Well, tell la india to deliver me from Papi, then.”

  Years later, I was taking a stroll in East Harlem with my then-infant daughter. We went inside a popular botanica to buy incense and sage to burn in our apartment. The woman behind the counter walked over to me and said, “Oh, you’re here for the india statue, right?” I told her I wasn’t. “Well, then,” said the woman, “you should strongly consider getting one to keep in your home. I think you owe it to your guide.” Again I dismissed it. I often took for granted the messages I received from the world as new age shit, rather than show our culture and belief systems any respect. Today it’s all starting to make sense.