Belief in the “reality of Allah” and his “inaccessible mystery,” as the Qur’an writes, took diverse forms in West Africa. On one end of the spectrum was a tolerant strand that existed peacefully with animists, even combining pre-Islamic practices with Islamic rites like divination and sorcery, that in theory should have been forbidden by qur’anic law. In this sense, Islam in West Africa, especially in rural areas, looked much like the fusion of Catholic saints and Native American gods that took root in much of Spanish America. The historian Lansiné Kapa writes that West African ancestor worship could exist side by side with Islamic monotheism, with “lesser spirits” believed to derive their power from Allah. On the other end was a jihadist orthodoxy that waged war on both nonbelievers and apostates.7
In both cases, West African Islam was a creed with a strong egalitarian ethos and sense of justice. Its menace was that it challenged Catholicism on its own terms, with a universal monotheism and belief in a mysterious, unseeable, and eternal god.* Catholics had recognized the threat in Iberia, where its theologians often depicted Islam as a profane plagiarizer, perverting the true Church’s rituals, vestments, and beliefs (like celebrating its weekly holy day on Friday—viernes, in Spanish—rather than Sunday, even though, as one Catholic priest wrote, “we know that Venus was a shameless whore”).8
And they recognized the threat in West Africa. Speaking of black Muslims along the Gambia River system, a sixteenth-century Portuguese trader reported that their clerics “count months as we do.” Like Catholicism, West African Islam was a literate religion. They “write in bound books,” he continued, in which “they tell many lies.” Like Catholics, they had a clergy, but their “heathen priests go about looking thin and worn out by their abstinences, their fasts and their dieting, since they will not eat flesh of a creature killed by a person who is not one of them.” Their clerics wore robes, like Catholic priests, “with large black and white hats.” And they practiced rites similar to the Holy Mass: “They make their ritual prayers with the faces turned towards the East, and before doing this, first wash their nether parts and then their face. They recite their prayers all together, in a high voice noisily, like a group of clerics in choir, and at the end they finish with ‘Ala, Arabi.’” And “black ears … believe the lies.”9
Yet unlike the Latin Catholic Mass, the Word in West Africa wasn’t just received. It was discussed in language the faithful could understand. Literacy and faith were intertwined. One eyewitness account written in 1608 by a Jesuit describes Mandinka Muslims establishing mosques and schools through West Africa where “they teach reading and writing in the Arabic script.” Books were written out and bound in cities like Gao and Timbuktu or arrived from northern Africa and Arabia, brought by “trading moors,” and included not just Qur’ans and qur’anic commentaries but scientific treatises and Arabic language versions of the Psalm of David, the Book of Isaiah, and the Pentateuch of Moses. By the late seventeenth century, Timbo, in the northern highlands of Guinea with a population of 10,000, was a respected center of learning. “Considerable attention,” wrote one American observer, “is devoted to the acquirements of knowledge,” which included law, arithmetic, astronomy, and languages. It was mostly men who had the privilege of literacy, but not always. A slaver traveling through the region said that he often had seen elderly women “at sunset reading the Koran.” Other travelers reported seeing girls learning to read.10
Teaching could be rote. Most young men “had read the Qur’an several times and copied it at least once.” The learned son of the Islamic ruler of Fouta Djallon, Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, captured and made a slave in 1788, was literate in both Arabic and Pular and educated in schools in Timbo, Djenné, and Timbuktu. He said that he wrote out his lessons “forty-eight hours a day.”11
Yet even with all the rigidity that memorization through endless repetition entails, this combination of pedagogy and religious instruction could still be empowering, creating a common community of believers among diverse peoples. Unlike the Latin Catholic Mass, which awed the faithful from a distance, Islam in West Africa fused together received truth, participatory education, and historical experience, giving it a force that the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, writing in the early 1600s, described like this:
This language sounds like the speech of demons in hell.… In Guinea, the main priests of this cursed sect are Mandingas, who live along the Gambia River and inland more than five hundred leagues. They not only drink the poison of Mohammed’s sect themselves but also take it to other nations. They bring it with their trade goods to many kingdoms.… These priests have mosques and a clerical hierarchy similar to our rankings of archbishops and bishops. They have schools where they teach the Arabic letters they use to write their scrolls. When the high-ranking clergy travel, they are received in different places as if they came from heaven. When they arrive in a new town, they announce the day when they will begin their sermons so that many people from all over the region will know to gather there at that time. They decorate a plaza and hang a few scrolls that seem to give their lies some authority. Then the priests stand and raise their hands and eyes to heaven. After a while, they prostrate themselves before the infernal writings and bow to them. After getting up, they give thanks to Allah and to his great prophet Mohammed, sent to pardon their sins. Then they praise the doctrine written on the scrolls and ask everyone to pay attention. No one speaks, sleeps, or lets their eyes wander for two hours as they read and discuss the writings. Orators praise their kings and lords, puffing up their vanity, as the priests speak of their victories and those of their ancestors. They mix many lies into their stories, degrading our holy faith and praising Mohammed’s cursed sect, eloquently persuading the kings and everyone else to reject Christianity.*
Centuries later, in the early 1800s, a Protestant traveler among the Fulbe similarly observed the importance of education in Islam conversion. Poor and rural families, he said, would embrace Allah in order to secure an education for their children. “The spread of Islam has been by these means so rapid,” he wrote, that it would soon “supersede Paganism throughout Western Africa.” He grudgingly admitted the attraction: its “influence is to a certain extent humanizing,” offering something “on which the tired spirit may rest.”12
* * *
No one knows how many Muslims were among the 12,500,000 Africans brought in chains to America. Some estimate as many as 10 percent. They were present in the earliest slave ships that began to arrive in 1501. Over three and a half centuries later, they were among some of the last. Muslims disembarked in America’s northernmost slave ports, in New England, and its southernmost, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
For some enslaved Muslims brought to America, Islam was the religion of rule, the faith of expanding courtly states like the Mali and Songhai empires. These societies were highly literate in both Arabic and local languages and organized around urbane mosques, libraries, and schools. In other areas, Islam was a religion of resistance, of pastoral or farming qur’anic communities fighting to win or keep their autonomy from unjust or unholy overlords. In 1804, for instance, Fulani and Hausa nomads launched a jihad against the Islamic rulers of the city-state of Gobir, who were enslaving freeborn Muslims. The insurgency was led by a rural Sufi preacher named Uthman dan Fodio, who freed slaves who joined his cause and advocated for the manumission of those who converted to Islam. The war lasted for over a decade and transformed much of West Africa, an event the historian Manuel Barcia has argued was as important to the history of the Atlantic world as were the French and Haitian revolutions. As fighting convulsed the upper Niger valley, Muslims and non-Muslims alike were captured in raids, sold to Europeans, and shipped to America, their religious differences giving way to the shared horrors of the Middle Passage. It was around this time that Babo, Mori, and the other Tryal rebels were first enslaved.13
Islam, then, provided American slaves with the law (a set of rules and expectations governing what constituted righteous slavery), the spirit (the e
xperience of jihad or insurgency against illegitimate enslavers) needed to contest their bondage, and the literacy and theology to process their experience. One English traveler noted that in Brazil, some Muslim slaves “write Arabic fluently, and are vastly superior to most of their masters.”14
Muslims were part of the first major slave revolt in America, which took place on Christmas Day, 1521, on a plantation run by Christopher Columbus’s son. Scores of Wolof men taken from Senegal revolted, killing Spaniards, burning plantations, and winning a week of freedom until they were captured and hung. After this rebellion, Spanish authorities issued the first edict, of many to follow, prohibiting the enslavement of Africans believed to be Muslims. Among those banned were blacks from the Levant or raised among Moors, people from Guinea, and “Gelofes,” or Wolofs, inhabitants of the region around the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. The Spaniards thought Wolofs to be especially “arrogant, disobedient, rebellious, and incorrigible.” They had, wrote one Spanish poet, “vain presumptions to be knights.”15
Muslims kept being captured and shipped to America. And they kept revolting. They were among those Africans and descendants of Africans who fought for their freedom in the Haitian Revolution. They were found on George Washington’s Mount Vernon farm and probably at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. They were part of Simón Bolívar’s army of freed slaves and mulattos that ended Spanish colonialism in South America. The largest concentration of Africans who professed Islam was in Bahia, Brazil, where well into the nineteenth century they read the Qur’an, worshiped in mosques, dressed in white linen, and kept Islamic holy days, fasting during Ramadan and celebrating under Eid’s full moon. In 1835, they staged the largest urban slave rebellion in the Americas. The day they chose to start their uprising was the same day Babo and Mori started theirs three decades earlier—Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power.16
INTERLUDE
Abominable, Contemptible Hayti
When Herman Melville was trying to decide what to call the slave ship in Benito Cereno, one option was to keep the vessel’s actual name, the Tryal. It was resonant enough. Abraham Lincoln hadn’t yet, when Melville started writing the story in early 1855, used the biblical phrase fiery trial to refer to the slavery crisis. But it was a common metaphor in the oration Melville grew up on, often used to refer to the American Revolution. Instead, Melville settled on calling the ship the San Dominick, identifying it with Haiti’s old French colonial name, Santo Domingo.1
Though the former slave colony had declared independence in 1804, it would take more than half a century before the United States would recognize the country. Washington would receive no “black ambassadors,” said one Missouri senator, since to do so would be to honor the murderers of “masters and mistresses.” Even many of the most passionate abolitionists didn’t want to make much of Haiti, fearing defenders of slavery would use the savagery that had been unleashed during its revolution to discredit their cause. “That abominable, contemptible Hayti” was how Harriet Beecher Stowe had a sympathetic character describe the country in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But others, despairing that slavery was growing ever stronger, started to celebrate the revolution and praise its founding father, Toussaint Louverture, declaiming poems, giving speeches, and staging plays honoring his memory.2
Throughout the 1850s, for instance, Frederick Douglass’s newspaper reported on this Toussaint revival, including a review of the opening performance of a play titled Toussaint L’Ouverture in Paris, at the Porte St.-Martin theater: “A crowd collected round the doors as early as twelve o’clock; at the opening the throng was immense. In the first scene the population of St. Domingo was exhibited collected on the banks of the sea, upon whose blue surface was reflected the brilliant light of the sun; the black Marseillaise was sung with enthusiasm.” “The slave owners are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes,” Douglass said in 1849. Six years later, Melville asked whether Benito Cereno’s San Dominick was “like a slumbering volcano” waiting to “let loose energies now hid.”3
Maybe Melville, in naming his ship the San Dominick, was extending a small literary recognition to the long-denied island republic. Or perhaps he was simply struck by the way the historical Benito Cerreño denied Haiti’s existence to Babo, Mori, and the others and so decided to make him master of, and then held captive on, a ship named after the country.
Melville made other changes to Delano’s true account, details that added to the atmosphere of the “strange craft,” with its “strange history,” and “strange folks on board.” At the beginning of the story, he has Delano notice that the ship’s prow is wrapped in canvas, underneath which is scrawled the phrase “follow your leader.” Later, as Delano’s men are retaking the ship, the tarp is pulled away to reveal a gruesome sight: Alejandro Aranda’s skeleton. The rebels had substituted what had been the San Dominick’s Christopher Columbus figurehead with Aranda’s bones, the implication being that they cannibalized him. It’s also revealed that Babo forced each surviving crew member and passenger to come forward, asking them, as he pointed to the skeleton in the prow, “whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white’s.” “Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal,” the West African warns, “or you shall in spirit, as now in body, ‘follow your leader.’”
Was Melville, in writing this scene, trying to symbolically reverse the “entire story of New World history told from the European American point of view,” revealing the “rudiments of its own carnage,” as one scholar has suggested? Did he intend to turn the slave master into “the sacrificial emblem of his own vicious system of power”? Did he think that only by rendering flesh down to bleached bones could the sin of slavery be expunged from America?4
It is impossible to know—Melville left no letters or journal entries, or at least none yet found, indicating what motivated him to write Benito Cereno. But in February 1855, just two months before Melville submitted Benito Cereno to Putnam’s Monthly, Charles Wyllys Elliott gave a lecture on the Haitian Revolution at the Mercantile Library on Astor Place in Manhattan. He started his remarks with the New World’s first major slave revolt—the one led by West African Wolofs in 1521 on Christopher Columbus’s son’s Santo Domingo plantation. “The slaves had risen, slain their overseers,” Elliott said, “and been hung by scores.” Elliott, a writer and urban planner who traveled in the same circles as did Melville and whose lecture would be published by the same press that put out Benito Cereno, reminded his audience that Haiti used to be called Santo Domingo, where Christopher Columbus first landed. Soon after which, a “million of the simple natives” would be “sacrificed” for gold. Once this first New World genocide was complete, the Spaniards turned to Africa “to steal, to seduce, and to buy negroes … blessed by the Pope, encouraged by the State.”5
“This was but the beginning,” Elliott said. Follow your leader indeed.
PART VI
WHO AINT A SLAVE?
Freedom is the name for a thing that is not freedom.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MARDI
20
DESPERATION
In February 1805, as Amasa Delano cruised south along the coast of Chile heading to Santa María Island on the Perseverance’s second sealing voyage, the white-capped Andes took his mind off his troubles. From north to south, as far as Delano could see, mountains rose beyond mountains “with awful sublimity.” The self-taught sailor meant that word as it was then used by men who had read Edmund Burke or some other eighteenth-century philosopher or poet. To describe a thing as sublime was to say that it evoked both terror and pleasure—terror from facing nature’s infinity and pleasure from doing so at a distance. There’s privilege implied, for only fortunate souls got to experience dread from a safe place, like Amasa Delano on his “ship’s deck, eight or ten miles off shore.”
The sky was clear, and starboard’s near-setting sun cast its light on the range’s western foothills, creating a lattice of light and shadow. The Perseverance was moving at a steady pace on a calm sea. Amasa’s eye follo
wed the rolling water as it flowed into the coast’s undulating plains, tracing the contour of the land until it shot up with a startling steepness. The mountains were “magnificent beyond description,” he thought. “In some places beautifully shaded, where one mountain stands a little in front of another, making the most interesting and splendid appearance that can be conceived of.”1
* * *
The Perseverance, along with the Pilgrim, built in expectation that this second skinning expedition would do as well as the first, had set sail from Boston seventeen months earlier, practically almshouses for the Delano family. The Pilgrim was captained by Amasa’s brother Samuel and carried his other brother, the “badly-clubfooted William.” Amasa was on the Perseverance, along with his nephew and ward Charles, who was seven years old yet “wanted as much attendance” as a child of three. The boy had lost the use of his arms and Amasa was obligated to care for him, a responsibility that had, he said, a “more powerful effect” on him “than all the other causes put together.”2
Though his last voyage had made a profit, family obligations and debts had built up while Amasa was away. In June, he married the widow Hannah Appleton, who ran a respectable Boston boardinghouse. But money remained a problem. On shore, Delano felt the burden of responsibility. Samuel was a shipbuilder and he had property in Duxbury, so he could take care of himself. The twenty-year-old William, who years later would die at sea, was a more hapless figure. And his three sisters, particularly Irene, just a year younger than him, were not well off.
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 20