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1682: Accra
All Europe Is Selling Human Flesh
Not far from the English and Danish forts, a pistol shot away, rises the Prussian trading post. A new flag flies on these coasts, over the tree-trunk roofs of the slave depots and on the masts of ships that sail with full cargoes.
With their Africa Company the Germans have joined in the juiciest business of the period. The Portuguese hunt and sell blacks through their Company of Guinea. The Royal Africa Company operates for the English Crown. The French flag waves from ships of the Company of Senegal. Holland’s Company of the West Indies is doing nicely. Denmark’s enterprise specializing in the slave traffic is also called Company of the West Indies; and the Company of the South Sea lines the pockets of the Swedes.
Spain has no slave business. But a century ago, in Seville, the Chamber of Commerce sent the king a documented report explaining that slaves were the most lucrative of all merchandise going to America; and so they continue to be. For the right to sell slaves in the Spanish colonies, foreign concerns pay fortunes into the royal coffers. With these funds have been built, among other things, the Alcazars of Madrid and Toledo. The Negro Committee meets in the main hall of the Council of the Indies.
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1682: Remedios
By Order of Satan
He trembles, twists, howls, dribbles. He makes the stones of the church vibrate. All around steams the red earth of Cuba.
“Satan, dog! Drunken dog! Talk or I’ll piss on you!” threatens inquisitor José González de la Cruz, parish priest of Remedios, as he knocks down and kicks the black woman Leonarda before the main altar. Bartolomé del Castillo, notary public, waits without breathing. He clutches a thick bundle of papers in one hand, and with the other he waves a bird’s quill in the air.
The Devil romps contentedly in the charming body of black Leonarda.
The inquisitor swings the slave around with a blow and she falls on her face, eats the dust, and bounces. She raises herself up, and turns, blazing and bleeding, handsome, on the checkerboard tiles.
“Satan! Lucifer! Nigger! Start talking, stinking shit!”
From Leonarda’s mouth come flames and froth. Also noises that no one understands except Father José, who translates and dictates to the notary:
“She says she is Lucifer! She says there are eight hundred thousand devils in Remedios!”
More noises come from the black woman.
“What else? What else, dog?” demands the priest and lifts Leonarda by the hair.
“Talk, you shit!” He does not insult her mother because the Devil has none.
Before the slave faints, the priest shouts and the notary writes; “She says Remedios will collapse! She is confessing everything! I have him by the neck! She says the earth will swallow us up!”
And he howls: “A mouth of hell! She says Remedios is a mouth of hell!”
Everyone cries out. All the residents of Remedios jump about, screaming and shouting. More than one falls in a faint.
The priest, bathed in sweat, his skin transparent, and his lips trembling, loosens his grip on Leonarda’s neck. The black woman collapses.
No one fans her.
(161)
1682: Remedios
But They Stay On
Eight hundred thousand devils. So there are more devils in the air of Remedios than mosquitos: 1,305 devils tormenting each inhabitant.
The devils are lame, ever since the Fall that all the world knows about. They have goats’ beards and horns, bats’ wings, rats’ tails, and black skin. Circulating in Leonarda’s body is more enjoyable to them because they are black.
Leonarda weeps and refuses to eat.
“If God wants to cleanse you,” Father Jose tells her, “He will whiten your skin.”
The plaintive song of cicadas and grasshoppers is that of souls in torment. Crabs are sinners condemned to walk crookedly. In the swamps and rivers live child-robbing goblins. When it rains, the scuffling of devils is heard from caves and crannies, furious because the flashes and sparks they have set off to burn down the skies are getting wet. And the harsh, nasal croak of frogs in the Boquerón fissure: is it foretelling rain, or is it cursing? Does the light that shines in the darkness come from the firefly? Those eyes, are they really the owl’s? Against whom does the snake hiss?
The buzz of the blind nocturnal bat: if it brushes you with its wing, you will go straight to hell, which is down there beneath Remedios; there the flames burn but give no light, and eternal ice chatters the teeth of those who on earth sinned with randy heat.
“Stay back!”
At the smallest alarm, the priest makes one jump into the font of holy water.
“Satan, stay back!”
With holy water lettuces are washed. People yawn with their mouths shut.
“Jesus! Jesus!” the parishioners cross themselves.
There is no house unadorned by strings of garlic, no air that the smoke of sweet basil does not impregnate.
“They have feet but do not reach me, iron but do not wound me, nooses and do not bind me …”
But people stay on. No one leaves. No one abandons the town of Remedios.
(161)
1682: Remedios
By Order of God
The church bells, outlined against the sky, ring for service. All of Remedios turns out. The notary sits in his place to the right of the altar. The crowd presses in through the open doors.
There is a rumor that Father José is to hear testimony from God. It is hoped that Christ will unpin his right hand from the cross and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Father José advances to the main altar and opens the tabernacle. He raises the chalice and the host; and before the body and blood of the Lord, on his knees, formulates his request. The notary takes notes. God will show Remedios’s inhabitants where they have to live.
If the Devil spoke through the mouth of Leonarda, Leonardo will be the vehicle for his invincible enemy.
With a bandage, the priest covers the eyes of Leonardo, a boy who does not reach to his waist, and Leonardo dips his hand in the silver pyx in which lie some bits of paper with names of places.
The boy picks one. The priest unfolds it and reads in a very loud voice: “Santa Maria de Guadalupe! Take note, notary!” And he adds triumphantly: “The Lord has had pity on us! He, in His infinite mercy, offers us protection! Up, people of Remedios! The time has come to go!”
And he goes.
He looks behind him. Few are following.
Father José takes everything along: chalice and host, lamp and silver candlesticks, images and wood carvings. But the barest handful of devout women and scared men accompany him to the promised land.
Slaves and horses drag their effects along. They take furniture and clothes, rice and beans, salt, oil, sugar, dried meat, tobacco, and also books from Paris, cottons from Rouen, and laces from Malines, all smuggled into Cuba.
The trek to Santa Maria de Guadalupe is long. Located there are the Hato del Cupey lands that belong to Father José. For years the priest has been seeking buyers for them.
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1688: Havana
By Order of the King
All over Cuba it is the sole topic of conversation. Wherever people gather to gossip, bets are laid.
Will the people of Remedios obey?
Father José, abandoned by his faithful, remains alone and has to return to Remedios. But he continues his war, a stubborn holy war that has found echoes even in the royal palace. From Madrid, Charles II has ordered that the population of Remedios should move to the Hato del Cupey lands in Santa Maria de Guadalupe.
The government’s captain general and the bishop of Havana announce that once and for all the king’s will must be respected.
Patience is giving out.
The people of Remedios continue playing deaf.
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1691: Remedios
Still They Don’t Move
At dawn Captain Pérez de Morales arrives from Havana with forty well-armed men.
They stop at the church. One by one, the soldiers receive communion. Father José blesses their muskets and battle-axes.
They get the torches ready.
At noon, the town of Remedios is a big bonfire. From afar, on the road to his Hato del Cupey lands, Father Jose watches bluish smoke rise from the flaming rubble.
At nightfall, close to the ruins, the people emerge from hiding in the thickets.
Sitting in a circle, eyes fixed on the continuing clouds of smoke, they curse and remember. Many a time pirates have sacked this town. Some years back they carried off even the chalice of the Most Holy Sacrament, and a bishop was said to have died of disgust—a good thing, they said, that the scapulary hung on his breast at the time. But no pirate ever set fire to Remedios.
By the light of the moon, beneath a ceiba tree, the people hold a town council. They, who belong to this red-soiled clearing in the forest, resolve that Remedios shall be rebuilt.
The women clutch their young to their breasts and stare with the eyes of mother tigers ready to spring.
The air smells of burning but not of sulphur nor of Devil’s dung.
The sounds rising among the trees are voices in discussion and a newly born babe wailing for some milk and a name.
(161)
1691: Mexico City
Juana at Forty
A stream of white light, limelight, sprays Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, kneeling at center stage. Her back is turned, and she is looking upward. There bleeds an enormous Christ, arms open, on the lofty ramp lined with black velvet and bristling with crosses, swords, and flags. From the platform two prosecutors make their accusations.
Everything is black, and black the hoods that conceal the prosecutors’ faces. However, one wears a nun’s habit, and beneath the hood peep out the reddish rolls of a wig: it is the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, in the role of Sister Filotea. The other, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sister Juana’s confessor, represents himself. His aquiline nose bulges from beneath the hood, moves as if it wanted to get free of its owner.
SISTER FILOTEA (embroidering on a frame): Mysterious is the Lord. Why, I ask myself, would He have put a man’s head on the body of Sister Juana? So that she should concern herself with the wretched affairs of the earth? She does not deign to approach the Holy Scriptures.
THE CONFESSOR (pointing at Sister Juana with a wooden cross): Ingrate!
SISTER JUANA (her eyes fixed on the Christ over the prosecutors’ heads): Indeed I repay badly the generosity of God. I only study to see whether studying will make me less ignorant, and I direct my footsteps toward the summits of Holy Theology; but I have studied many things and learned nothing, or almost nothing. The divine truths remain far from me, always far … I sometimes feel them to be so close yet know them to be so far away! Since I was a small child … at five or six I sought those keys in my grandfather’s books, those keys … I read and read. They punished me and I read secretly, searching …
THE CONFESSOR (to Sister Filotea): She never accepted the will of God. Now she even writes like a man. I have seen the manuscripts of her poems!
SISTER JUANA: Searching … I knew quite early on that universities are not for women and that a woman who knows more than the Paternoster is deemed immodest. I had mute books for teachers and an inkpot for a schoolmate. When books were forbidden to me, as happened more than once in this convent, I studied the things of the world. Even cooking one can discover secrets of nature.
SISTER FILOTEA: The Royal and Pontifical University of the Pancake! The frying-pan campus!
SISTER JUANA: What can we women know except the philosophy of the kitchen? But if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more. That makes you laugh, does it? Well, laugh, if it pleases you. Men feel themselves to be very wise, just for being men. Christ, too, was crowned with thorns as King of Jests.
THE CONFESSOR (erases his smile, hits the table with his fist): Ever hear the like of that? The learned little nun! She can write little songs, so she compares herself with the Messiah!
SISTER JUANA: Christ also suffered from this unfairness. Is he one of them? So he must die! He is accused? So let him suffer!
THE CONFESSOR: There’s humility for you!
SISTER FILOTEA: Really, my daughter, you scandalize God with your vociferous pride …
SISTER JUANA: My pride? (Smiles sadly) I used that up long ago.
THE CONFESSOR: The common people applaud her verses, so she thinks herself one of the elect. Verses that shame this house of God, exaltation of the flesh … (coughs) Evil arts of the male animal …
SISTER JUANA: My poor verses! Dust, shadow, nothing. Vain glory, all the applause … Did I ask for it? What divine revelation forbids women to write? By grace or curse, it was Heaven that made me a poet.
THE CONFESSOR (looks at the ceiling and raises his hands in supplication): She dirties the purity of the faith, and Heaven is to blame for it.
SISTER FILOTEA (puts embroidery frame aside and clasps hands over stomach): Sister Juana has much to sing to the human spirit, little to the divine.
SISTER JUANA: Don’t the Gospels teach us that the celestial expresses itself in the terrestrial? A powerful force pushes my hand …
THE CONFESSOR (waving the wooden cross, as if to strike Juana from afar): Force of God, or force of the king of the proud?
SISTER JUANA: … and I’ll continue writing, I’m afraid, as long as my body makes a shadow. I fled from myself when I took the habit, but I brought myself along, wretch that I am.
SISTER FILOTEA: She bathes in the nude. There are proofs.
SISTER JUANA: Oh, Lord, put out the light of my understanding! Leave only what suffices to keep Thy Law! Isn’t the rest superfluous for a woman?
THE CONFESSOR (screaming harshly like a crow): Shame on you! Mortify your heart, ingrate!
SISTER JUANA: Put me out. Put me out, my God! (The play continues, with similar dialog, until 1693).
(58 and 75)
1691: Placentia
Adario, Chief of the Huron Indians, Speaks to Baron de Lahontan, French Colonizer of Newfoundland
Nay, you are miserable enough already, and indeed I can’t see how you can be more such. What sort of men must Europeans be? What species of creatures do they retain to? The Europeans, who must be forc’d to do good, and have no other prompter for the avoiding of Evil than the fear of punishment …
Who gave you all the countries that you now inhabit? By what right do you possess them? They always belonged to the Algonquins before. In earnest, my dear brother, I’m sorry for thee from the bottom of my soul. Take my advice, and turn Huron; for I see plainly a vast difference between thy condition and mine. I am master of myself and my condition. I am master of my own body, I have the absolute disposal of myself, I do what I please, I am the first and the last of my nation, I fear no man, and I depend only upon the Great Spirit. Whereas, thy body, as well as thy soul, are doomed to a dependence upon thy great Captain, thy Vice-Roy disposes of thee, thou hast not the liberty of doing what thou hast a mind to; thou art afraid of robbers, false witnesses, assassins, etc., and thou dependest upon an infinity of persons whose places have raised them above thee. Is it true or not?
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1692: Salem Village
The Witches of Salem
“Christ knows how many devils there are here!” roars the Reverend Samuel Parris, pastor of the town of Salem, and speaks of Judas, the devil seated at the Lord’s table, who sold himself for thirty coins, £3/15/0 in English pounds, the derisory price of a female slave.
In the war of the lambs against the dragons, cries the pastor, no neutrality is possible nor any sure refuge. The devils have planted themselves in his own house: a daughter and a niece of the Reverend Parris have been the first ones tormented by the army of devils that has taken this Puritan town by storm. The little girls fondled a crystal
ball, wanting to know their fate, and saw death. Since that happened, many young girls of Salem feel hell in their bodies, the malignant fever burns them inside and they twist and turn, roll on the ground frothing at the mouth and screaming blasphemies and obscenities that the Devil puts on their lips.
The doctor, William Griggs, diagnoses evil spells. A dog is given a cake of rye flour mixed with the urine of the possessed girls, but the dog gobbles it up, wags his tail, and goes off to sleep in peace. The Devil prefers human habitations.
Between one convulsion and the next, the victims accuse.
Women, and poor ones, are the first sentenced to hang. Two whites, one black: Sarah Osborne, a bent old woman who years ago cried out to her Irish servant, who slept in the stable, and made her a place in her bed; Sarah Good, a disorderly beggar who smokes a pipe and grumbles when given alms; and Tituba, a black West Indian slave, mistress of a hairy devil with a long nose. The daughter of Sarah Good, a young witch aged four, is in Boston prison with fetters on her feet.
But the agonized screams of Salem’s young girls do not cease, and charges and condemnations multiply. The witch-hunt spreads from suburban Salem Village to the center of Salem Town, from the town to the port, from the accursed to the powerful. Not even the governor’s wife escapes the accusing finger. From the gallows hang prosperous farmers and businessmen, shipowners trading with London, privileged members of the Church who enjoy the right to Communion.
A sulphurous rain is reported over Salem Town, Massachusetts’ second port, where the Devil, working harder than ever, goes about promising the Puritans cities of gold and French footwear.
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Genesis Page 28