by John Keene
After a spree which stretched from the city of Boston west to the edges of Middlesex County, the slave played his worst hand when he committed lascivious acts just across the county line on the person of a sleeping widow, Mary Shaftesbone, near Shrewsbury. Having broken into her home and reportedly taken violent liberties with her, unaccountably Zion did not flee the town, but entered a nearby tavern and began a round of popular songs, to the delight of a crowd of locals and the horror of the violated woman. The sheriff arrested him without delay. When he realized the notoriety of the criminal he had in his hands, he suggested to the local magistrate that, although this most recent felony had occurred in Worcester County, the criminal ought to be returned to the General Court in Boston, which had the apparatus to deal with such evil. The magistrate responded that given the current worsening political situation in the capital, it appeared unlikely that the slave’s crimes would receive rapid adjudication. Mrs. Shaftesbone, demanding justice, or at least compensation, therefore had word sent to Job Hollis, who was negotiating the sale of his business in the anticipation of an assault against Boston’s northern waterfront. The violated widow suggested a cash settlement, with the proviso that Hollis sell the criminal out of the colonies, preferably to the French West Indies. Hollis, who still held title to Zion, agreed to this arrangement, and collected him, now restrained in wrist irons, from the town jail. They rode westward, where Hollis’s real plan was to sell the slave down at Albany to assure a good price and guarded transport down the Hudson. But on the way, in the town of Pittsfield, they encountered the Hampshire County sheriff, who claimed to possess warrants for the Negro from Worcester and Suffolk Counties. In the confusion arising over the validity, scope and authority of the documents, Zion, as if aware of the tenuous state of justice for blacks in New York State, seized his master’s musket, knocked both men out, mounted the sheriff’s horse, and rode back eastward.
Jurisdiction
The following day, the Crown’s military authorities captured Zion in an alder wood outside Worcester and placed him in the town garrison under heavy local guard. But at nightfall he inexplicably slipped away. He then committed a series of robberies and violent acts throughout the entire span of the county until his capture on September 17, 1774, again by the military authorities, who pressed to try him under the statutory laws of Britain, though that country’s influence was now nearly at ebb tide. The colonial judiciary objected, and instead rushed this particular case along, despite a growing criminal and civil case backlog. Problems of jurisdiction always mirror much greater crises of authority. At Worcester, Zion was tried and found guilty of rape by a judge who considered the slave’s affinity for civil disobedience and social disruption to be intolerable in light of the present state of alarm throughout the region. He ordered a hanging. Mindful of his rights under the law, Zion implored the court for a “benefit of clergy.” This the General Court of Worcester County, after half a year’s consideration of his records, with documentation from the neighboring courts and his former owners, denied.
Confession
The night before he was to be led to the gallows, Zion sang a dirge that brought tears to the eyes of a townswoman standing nearby. He then gave a short testimony of his life and self-destruction, which ended with the following admonition, in a keening voice, to all bondsmen and women of the colony and of New England: “To all fellow Brothers and Sisters of Africk and other wise in Bondage in this common Wealth of Massachusetts take heart that ye avoid Drunkenness and Lewdness of the Flesh for the only true Liberty lies in holding Free—do keep the Faith—”
This confession was duly witnessed and indited by an Anglican minister from Leominster, who included it among his personal effects when he returned a year later to his home parish outside London. The account was subsequently lost, however; he was the only one of those present who later recalled it.
Theory (Outtake)
The prevalence of the doctrine of liberty may be accounted for, from another cause, viz., a false sensation or seeming experience which we have, or may have, of liberty or indifference, in many of our actions.” David Hume
Eclipse
On the morning of April 1, 1775, the authorities did not find the Negro named Zion in his cell. Given the severity of the crimes and the necessity of preserving the ruling order, another Negro, whose particular crimes are not recorded, was hanged in the Worcester Town Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among them the widow Shaftesbone; and the newly-married Sarah Wantone Fleet and her husband George, of Worcester, a Lockean and member of a local militia. Also present was Jubal, now calling himself Mr. John Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a Negro brigade in Boston.
Of their response there is no record. The rest of the town, absent from the proceedings, was preparing, one must suppose, for the swiftly approaching conflagration.
A LETTER ON THE TRIALS
OF THE COUNTERREFORMATION
IN NEW LISBON
“What is the nature of the recurring irrationality of culture which precludes a victory of modernizing rationality?”
Aby Warburg
“If I could fly to you on the wings of eagles . . .”
Yehuda HaLevi
“I want the essence. My soul is in a hurry.”
Mário de Andrade
“The disquiet that lurks beneath the placid surface . . .”
Manoel Aries D’Azevedo
June 1630
TO:
Dom Inácio Lisboa Branco
Sacred and Professed House
Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy Ghost
in care of the Bishopric of Bahia
São Salvador da Bahia dos Todos os Santos
New Lusitânia (Brazil)
DOM FRANCISCO,
I write you in the expectation that you will soon discover this missive, concealed, as you regularly instructed the members of the professed house in Olinda, during the period that you led it, within the binding of this book that has been sent to you and which you, having discovered the letter, have just set down. The book is the very Lives of the Martyrs you bequeathed to those remaining before your flight in the spring of last year. The Netherlandish authorities under Nassau-Siegen persist in demonstrating toleration, and reason, not only in matters of the Faith, and though they are masters at war, proceed without cunning concerning our vernacular handiwork; and so it is unlikely that they will have seized this innocuous volume as contraband or scuttled it on censorious shores before it moors upon your writing table.
Nor is it likely that they will have laid a finger on the few other and sundry effects of yours, which include a rosary of colored Italian glass, an embroidered muslin handkerchief, a chasuble of black silk, embroidered in resplendant hues of violet, and a tattered and faded red vest of common linen that I am told you once wore faithfully during your conversions along the upper Capabaribe River. These effects I have entrusted separately with Amaro (Gaspar) Leite, the messenger who sails to your city under a letter of safe passage, and who, upon seeing you, shall pass on the shibboleth that confirms the existence of the very communication your eyes now feast upon.
All these gifts he brings to the new house in which you and those who departed with you have now settled, in the name of the gentle and good Provost there, Dom Felix Silva Matos, whose name was passed on by those who knew him well during his years in the aldeias. As a man of the Faith he never once laid an injurious finger on native or African, nor on any who shared the bloodlines of the two. Moreover, in sending these treasures, including the book, to you, I am of the mind that
no officials of the Crown, nor the Bishop of Bahia, nor least of all the Holy Office, if it should make a visitation, will impound them.
The most valuable of all, however, is this written missive, as you will certainly soon agree. As you also shall see, you will gain full access to it only by the application of another trick you conveyed to those in your care, underlining how well your lessons took root, like cuttings, even in distant fields. Thus the special care I have taken. If you should please see fit, do let the lit candlewick linger upon this document once you have read it, as that would be in the utmost order, though it is of no matter to me, for it should be declared that I am beyond the reach of those laws, earthly or divine, that would condemn you, on the very fact of possession of the written account I shall shortly begin.
Do know that the one to whom you had intrusted the preservation of the Faith is in no immediate harm. This letter sails to you, in its clever guise, out of an abiding desire to convey to you the truth of what occurred at ALAGOAS; rather than let the waters of rumor fertilize the vineyards of discussion in the capital, I have dowsed for you here the spring of truth. I gather that you already foresaw the calamity, at least from the perspective of the Lusitanians, that would descend upon this land, which is why you began to employ the vehicle of the Gospels to arouse a spirit of resistance not only among the members of the Order, but among the citizens of the Captaincy and the far and nether regions; for, as you often said, and I have heard many times repeated, while we do rightly fear the saber and the carbine, it could be a single man’s tongue, and the written record of its issue, that mark the greatest danger.
Yet even knowing this, did you foresee what was to come at Alagoas? Did you not foresee the implications of sending Joaquim D’Azevedo as your spiritual agent? Evidently not, and so I shall now recount to you how that absence of portents, like your Scriptures, failed you. That is, I shall now tell of that series of events, unforeseeable at least to some of those who lived them, that inverted worlds, bringing those whom you knew, or thought you knew, intimately, northward in retreat to Olinda from the south, just as you bore only the clothes on your back and your Bible in your departure south for the capital city of the Savior. How do I know these facts, their recounting never having passed any man’s lips? This, as with so many other things, I shall reveal in due time.
To return to the present narrative, I cannot be certain that you have heard even a single account from any of the other members of the Brotherhood who were there; no knowledge has revealed itself of where those creatures went who had long been in residence, or where they are today. Perhaps they too are at Bahia, or, like the numerous ghosts that haunt the coast of this infernal land, slipped onto a ship and are now promulgating their vileness in Cape-Verde or among the Luandans. May even Hell be rid of them. I ask only that you understand given all that has transpired since you last spoke face to face with any of those at that now accursed house, that some who have been condemned to the most foul contumely do reside, nevertheless, in Truth, and so this missive proceeds from that strange and splendid position.
It was, you will remember, during the period shortly preceding All Saints’ Day, which is to say in late October of that year, 1629, that you sent a certain priest, Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo, from Olinda to assume the position of provost of the foundation at Alagoas, in the southern region of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, of the Professed House of the Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy Ghost. You made the appointment; the order came from your hand. The Alagoas monastery had been without a leader since the untimely drowning, under mysterious circumstances, of the prior Provost, Dom Affonso Travassos, also sent by you, in the waters just after the Feast of Saint John, in June 1629; and one year before that, the prior leader, Dom Luiz Duran Carneiro, had succumbed, allegedly, to the temptations of the Devil himself, and disappeared into the interior. These occurrences were hardly known by anyone in the order, beyond those remaining at Alagoas, but you were unsure whether the news had spread throughout the various precincts of the nearby town and region. Yet either way, without a firm spiritual base the monastery there, much like its pastorate, risked falling into moral and mortal decay.
What most knew was that Padre Duran Carneiro and Padre Pero had constructed the foundation of that House by hand only a decade before, while D’Azevedo, that obscure figure and youngest son of that family of tax-farmers who had settled in the distant north, in the city of São Luis, in that former French colony of Maranhão, that one whom you would soon send as a shepherd to gather the flock back into the pen, was still engaged in private tutorial at home, and had not even set sail for studies and ordination in Coimbra. That was all that was well known.
This, then, is where it begins. At some point between Padre Travassos’s death and that fateful time in the spring of 1629, you, with the counsel of the Vice-Provost and several senior members of the Olinda House, decided that D’Azevedo would be the emissary of renewal in Alagoas. You selected him for what you took to be his scriptural acumen, his meticulousness with whatever task he undertook, his pecuniary skills, and literary gifts. There was also his youth, and his personal probity. You expected that he would right the Alagoas house like an overturned raft, and at every stage write you of how he did it and would next proceed.
Indeed this is what you would tell him once one of the novices—having beckoned him as he re-inspected for a third time the casks of wine in the house’s cellar to insure a correct count, his gift for precision and detail having already gained note—led him to your office. There you also delivered a brief speech about the importance of the house to the Faith in Alagoas and the priests’ role in establishing it, about which D’Azevedo was only dimly aware. You presented him with his letters of commission, written out and signed and sealed by you, as there was no time to gain the approval of the authorities in Bahia, let alone Lisbon. You told him that there were at Alagoas two priests, the said Pero and another, Padre Barbosa Pires, and one brother, Dom Gaspar Leite, sent from Olinda half a year before, whom D’Azevedo had just missed upon his return from Europe, as well as a peck of servants, all of them Africans and mulattos. Of the entire menage he heard only the essentials. You did not speak even obliquely of the malevolence lurking in that small outpost on the Atlantic Coast.
Padre D’Azevedo, cognizant of his oath and the necessity of duty, accepted willingly. He returned to the wine cellar, finished his inventory and handed it to a slave to submit to the Brother Procurator, then went and packed his trunk. Maybe he prayed, read several passages from Ezekiel or another book of Scripture which he thought might cast a light before him. He had not a single map of the plans or full estate, no contacts in the town, no specific orders written in your hand or any others, nor any guide but what what might have suddenly taken root in his head. The next morning he boarded the skiff to Recife, to catch the ship to Alagoas.
D’Azevedo arrived at the port of his chief destination as evening was falling. The voyage, not far, but over unusually turbulent seas, spent him. The heat, heightened by the approach of summer and the shoreline humidity, drained him more. He had vowed, however, to launch, like an arrow aiming for its target, into the heart of his new position as soon as he touched upon land. Though you had ostensibly sent word of his imminent arrival, it apparently had not reached Alagoas, so the house there had not dispatched an emissary to meet him. Rather than lodging at an inn, as was the custom for people arriving so late in the day, he hired a driver and cart and, after explaining his destination they headed there, climbing an undulant escarpment along the bend of the river, along whose southern banks spread a town of indeterminable siz
e, bracketed by pockets of forests and, to the north and east, the immense lagoon, at this hour dark as mourning cloth, from which the city took its name, and then further west, inland and upland until the landscape bowled into pasture, amidst which stood the monastery’s main gate as the wall of the nearby forest and the moonless night’s utter blackness, from all sides, enfolded them.
The Brotherhood’s House in Olinda, which D’Azevedo had just left, rose up in two windowed rows with bracketed latticed balconies, its walls white, its rooms commodious, its doors hewn of the finest Brazil wood, a vision of order, with a church of estimable beauty at one end, and a dining hall and kitchen at the other, with a library, a balneary, and comfortable lodgings for guests, all ringed by ample, well-tended fields, as well as a number of smaller, skillfully constructed structures. The structure that D’Azevedo now faced, presumably the monastery, lit by a single lantern suspended from a pole midway between the gate and the façade, down a curving, rutted, sandy path, leaned mean and squat, a single long storey. It was impossible at that hour to discern its color, though it hardly looked as if it could even under the brightest light be considered white. Its shutters, the ones he could make out, listed from their hinges; bushes and small trees bowed, trailed by monstrous shadows, away from its walls; its large battered wooden front door appeared to have been cut by someone little acquainted with doormaking. Almost invisible in the black cloak spreading from the lantern’s penumbra, what he took to be buildings shimmered like foxfires in the landscape round it. He could not, however, spot the monastery gate’s farther rims. Though he had not initially noticed it, when he looked around and up to take it all in, he spotted a crucifix, barely lit by the lantern’s dim light, which tilted off one end of the main building’s roof. A heavy sea breeze, it seemed to D’Azevedo, might easily topple it. Not a soul, priest or layperson, broke his line of sight.