Africans had the good fortune of being saved from this hell by the slave trade. Baptism opened the door to Paradise.
The Vatican had foreseen it. In 1454, Pope Nicholas V gave the king of Portugal authorization for the slave trade as long as he converted the Africans. A couple of years later another bull from Pope Callixtus III established that the capture of Africa was a Crusade of Christianity.
Back then, most of the African coast was still out of bounds due to fear: ship-eating serpents lay in wait in the boiling waters, and white sailors turned black as soon as they set foot on African land.
But over the following centuries, all or nearly all the European crowns built forts and outposts along the length of that ill-reputed coast. From there, they ran the most profitable business of all. And to fulfill the will of God they sprinkled holy water on the slaves.
In the contracts and in the accounts, slaves were referred to as “pieces” or “merchandise,” even though baptism placed souls in those empty bodies.
CANNIBAL EUROPE
The slaves trembled as they boarded the ships. They believed they were going to be eaten. They were not far off. When all was said and done, the slave trade was the mouth that devoured Africa.
Long before, African kings held slaves and fought each other, but the capture and sale of people became the axis of the economy and of everything else only after the kings of Europe devised the venture. Black Africa was then bled of young people and, thus emptied, its destiny was sealed.
Mali is now one of the poorest countries in the world. In the sixteenth century it was an opulent and cultured kingdom. The university at Timbuktu had twenty-five thousand students. When the sultan of Morocco invaded Mali, he did not find the yellow gold he sought, because little was left. But he found black gold to sell to the European traffickers, and thus profited even more: his prisoners of war, among whom were doctors, judges, writers, musicians, and sculptors, were enslaved and marched off to the plantations of America.
The slavery machine demanded hands and the hunt for hands demanded arms. The war economy of Africa’s kingdoms came to depend more and more on things come from afar. A catalog published in 1655 in Holland listed the weaponry most coveted on the African coast, and also the best offerings with which to entice those stage prop kings. Gin was highly prized, and a fistful of Murano glass beads was worth seven men.
FASHION
The sale of slaves unleashed a shower of imported products.
Although Africa produced good quality iron and steel, European swords were status symbols for the monarchs and courtiers of the many kingdoms and principalities that sold blacks to the white companies.
It was the same story with African fabric made of fibers ranging from cotton to tree bark. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Portuguese navigator Duarte Pacheco reported that palm-leaf clothing from the Congo was “soft as velvet and so beautiful that Italy does not have better.” But imported clothing, which cost twice as much, conferred prestige. Price dictated value. Being cheap and abundant, slaves were worth nothing, while expensive and scarce objects were coveted. And the less practical the better: the fascination with what came from abroad gave pride of place to useless novelties and changing fashions, today this, tomorrow that, the day after who knows what.
These fleeting splendors, symbols of power, separated the rulers from the ruled.
Like today.
CAGES UNDER SAIL
The slave trader who loved freedom more than anything named his finest ships the Voltaire and the Rousseau.
Several traffickers christened their vessels with religious names: Souls, Misericordia, The Prophet David, Jesus, Saint Anthony, Saint Michael, Saint James, Saint Philip, Saint Anne, and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.
Others paraded their love for humanity, nature, or their girlfriends: Hope, Equality, Friendship, Hero, Rainbow, Dove, Nightingale, Humming-bird, Desire, Charming Betty, Little Polly, Lovable Cecile, Prudent Hannah.
The most forthright called their ships Subordinator and Vigilante.
These ships laden with human cargo did not announce their arrival in port with sirens or fireworks. No need. Their presence could be felt from afar, by the stench.
In the hold, their pestilent merchandise was piled high. The slaves lay together day and night without moving, packed in so tightly no space was wasted, pissing on each other, shitting on each other, chained one to another, neck to neck, wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle, and all of them shackled to long iron bars.
Many died on the ocean voyage.
Each morning the guards tossed those packages overboard.
PROGENY OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
The leaky little tubs which the sea devours are the granddaughters of those slave ships.
Today’s slaves, though no longer called by that name, enjoy the same freedoms as their grandparents who were driven by the lash to the plantations of America.
They do not simply depart: they are pushed. No one emigrates by choice.
From Africa and from many other places, the desperate flee wars and droughts and exhausted lands and poisoned rivers and empty bellies.
Shipments of human flesh are nowadays the most successful export from the south of the world.
FIRST SLAVE REBELLION IN AMERICA
It happens at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
A couple of days after Christmas, the slaves rise up at a sugar mill in Santo Domingo owned by the son of Christopher Columbus.
Following the victory of Divine Providence and James the Apostle, the roads are lined with black men, hanged.
STUBBORN FREEDOM
It happens in the middle of the sixteenth century.
The slaves who fail in their first attempt to escape are punished by mutilation: an ear cut off, or a tendon sliced through, or a foot or hand removed, and in vain the king of Spain outlaws “cutting off parts that cannot be named.”
Repeat offenders lose whatever is left and then end up on the gallows, at the stake, or on the chopping block. Their heads are exhibited on pikes in town squares.
But all over the Americas bastions of freedom proliferate, in the depths of the jungle or in mountain hideaways, surrounded by quick-sand that looks like firm ground and by false paths sowed with sharpened stakes.
The runaway slaves come from different African nations and become compatriots through the humiliations they share.
KINGDOM OF THE FREE
It happens throughout the seventeenth century.
The havens of escaped slaves sprout like mushrooms. In Brazil they are called quilombos, an African word that means community, although racism translates it as disorder, revelry, or whorehouse.
In the quilombo of Palmares, former slaves live free of their owners and also free of the tyranny of sugar, which allows nothing else to grow. They plant all sorts of seeds and eat everything. The diet of their former owners arrives by ship. Theirs comes from the earth. Their smithies, built in the African way, give them hoes, picks, and shovels to work the land, and knives, axes, and lances to defend it.
QUEEN OF THE FREE
It happens in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The international division of labor decides that Jamaica exists to sweeten Europe’s table. The land produces sugar, sugar, and more sugar.
In Jamaica, as in Brazil, diversity of diet is a privilege of those who escape. Although fertile land is hard to find high in the mountains, the maroons figure out how to grow everything, and even raise pigs and chickens.
Hidden here, they see without being seen, they sting, and then they vanish.
In these windward Blue Mountains, Nanny has her temple and her throne. She is queen of the free. Once a machine for birthing slaves, now she wears necklaces made of the teeth of English soldiers.
ART OF THE FREE
It happens in the middle of the eighteenth century.
The sanctuaries of freedom in Suriname resist by staying on the move. When Dutch troops discover thei
r villages, after much pain and anguish, they find nothing but ashes.
What things do they need most? Sewing needles, colored thread, the maroons ask of the occasional peddler, who by mistake or madness runs across them. What would become of their lives without brightly colored clothes made from bits of scrap cloth expertly arranged and sewn?
From the sails of plantation windmills, broken in pieces, they make rings, bracelets, and ornaments that lend a warrior dignity. And with what the forest offers, they invent musical instruments to give rhythm to their bodies yearning to dance.
KING OF THE FREE
It happens at the end of the eighteenth century.
The colonial powers hang Domingo Bioho yet again, but he still reigns.
Here in Palenque, not far from the port of Cartagena de Indias, the maroons choose the bravest among them to inherit the name passed down from king to king. Domingo Bioho is one and many.
IN SEARCH OF ESCAPED PROPERTY
It happens at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
At the dinner table, the aristocracy talks of weddings, inheritance, and nigger dogs.
The newspapers of Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina advertise the services of such dogs at five dollars a day. The ads praise the virtues of the mastiffs, which hunt down escaped slaves, capture them, and return them intact to their owners.
Their noses are crucial. A good hunting dog can follow a scent many hours after the prey has passed by. Also highly prized is speed and tenacity, because to erase their scent the slaves swim rivers and streams or spread pepper in their wake, and the hound that deserves its bone never gives up, never stops scouring the ground until it picks up the trail.
But most important of all is the extensive training that teaches the dog not to make hamburger of black flesh. Only the legitimate owner has the right to punish the bad behavior of his animals.
HARRIET
It happens in the middle of the nineteenth century.
She escapes. Harriet Tubman carries with her as souvenirs the scars on her back and a crack in her skull.
She leaves her husband behind. He tells her:
“You’re crazy. You can get away, but you won’t live to tell the tale.”
She escapes, tells the tale, returns to Maryland, and rescues her parents, Ashantis captured in Africa. She returns again and rescues her brothers. Nineteen trips she makes from the plantations of the South to the lands of the North, traveling at night, night after night, freeing more than three hundred blacks over ten years.
None of her fugitives is captured. People say Harriet cures exhaustion and regret with a gunshot. And people say she says with pride:
“I have never lost a single passenger.”
She has the highest priced head of her generation. Forty thousand dollars cold cash is the reward they offer.
No one collects it.
Her theatrical disguises make her unrecognizable, and she throws the bounty hunters off with false trails and routes never imagined.
DON’T MISS IT!
No lawyer will defend them. Neither can they defend themselves, for the law does not believe in the oaths of Negroes.
The judge finds them guilty in the blink of an eye.
The number of fires in New York City in the year 1741 demands an iron hand against slaves ruined by too much freedom. If those found guilty are indeed the ones who set the fires, the punishment will be just. If they are not, the punishment will be a warning.
Thirteen black men will be chained to stakes and burned alive, seventeen blacks will be hanged and will swing from the gallows until they rot, and four whites, poor but white, will march to their deaths, because someone must have been the brains behind this infernal conspiracy, and brains are white.
The spectacle is a week away and already a crowd is camping out to get the best view.
THE AGES OF ROSA MARIA
In 1725, when she was six, a slave ship brought her from Africa and she was sold in Rio de Janeiro.
When she was fourteen, the master spread her thighs and taught her a trade.
When she was fifteen, she was bought by a family from Ouro Preto, who then rented her body to the gold miners.
When she was thirty, the family sold her to a priest who practiced on her his techniques for exorcism and other nocturnal exercises.
When she was thirty-two, one of the demons that lived in her body smoked through her pipe and howled through her mouth and made her writhe on the ground. For that she was sentenced to a hundred lashes in the public square of the city of Mariana, and the punishment left her arm paralyzed for life.
When she was thirty-five, she fasted and prayed and mortified her flesh with a hair shirt, and the mother of the Virgin Mary taught her to read. They say that Rosa Maria Egipcíaca da Vera Cruz was the first literate black woman in Brazil.
When she was thirty-seven, she founded a home for abandoned female slaves and whores past their prime, which she financed by selling cakes made with her own saliva, an infallible remedy for any disease.
When she was forty, many people loyally attended her trances, where, wrapped in a cloud of tobacco smoke, she would dance to a chorus of angels, and the Baby Jesus would suckle her breasts.
When she was forty-two, she was accused of witchcraft and locked up in the Rio de Janeiro jail.
When she was forty-three, theologians confirmed she was a witch, because she withstood without complaint a lit candle held for a long while under her tongue.
When she was forty-four, she was sent to Lisbon, to the prison of the Holy Inquisition. She entered the torture chambers to be interrogated and was never heard of again.
BRAZIL SLEPT ON A BED OF GOLD
It sprouted from the ground like grass.
It drew crowds like a magnet.
It shined like gold.
And gold it was.
The bankers of England celebrated each new strike as if the gold were theirs.
And theirs it was.
Lisbon, which produced nothing, sent the gold of Brazil to London in exchange for loans, fancy clothing, and all the needs of a parasitic life.
At the heart of gold’s splendor lay Ouro Preto, “Black Gold,” so named because black were the rocks that held the gold, nights with suns deep inside, although the place could just as easily have earned its name from the black hands that dug the gold from mountains and riverbanks.
Those hands grew more and more expensive to buy. The slaves, who formed a clear majority in the mining region, were the only ones who worked.
And even more expensive was food. No one grew anything. In the early years of mining euphoria, the price of a cat was equivalent to the gold a slave could dig in two days. Chicken was cheaper, only a day’s worth of gold.
After more than a century, the price of food was still beyond belief, as were the lavish celebrations of the mine owners, who lived on a perpetual spree. But the gushing spring of gold, which once seemed inexhaustible, began to dwindle. And it became harder and harder to squeeze out of the mines the taxes that financed the torpor of the Portuguese Court, worn out from so much resting in the service of the bankers of England.
In 1750, when the king of Portugal died, the royal coffers were empty. And it was they, the bankers of England, who paid for his funeral.
DIGESTIONS
Potosí, Guanajuato, and Zacatecas ate Indians. Ouro Preto ate blacks.
The silver that came from forced labor hit Spanish soil in Seville and bounced. It landed some distance away, filling the bellies of Flemish, German, and Genovese bankers, and those of Florentine, English, and French merchants, to whom the Spanish Crown and all its income were mortgaged.
Without the silver from Bolivia and Mexico, a veritable silver bridge across the sea, could Europe have become Europe?
The gold that came from slave labor hit Portuguese soil in Lisbon and bounced. It landed some distance away, filling the bellies of British bankers and merchants, the kingdom’s creditors, to whom the Portuguese Crow
n and all its income were mortgaged.
Without the gold from Brazil, a veritable golden bridge across the sea, could the Industrial Revolution have taken place in England?
And without the buying and selling of slaves, would Liverpool have become the most important port in the world, and would Lloyd’s have become the king of insurance?
Without capital from the slave trade, who would have financed James Watt’s steam engine? What furnaces would have forged George Washington’s cannons?
FATHER OF THE MARIONETTE
Antonio José da Silva, of Brazilian birth, lives in Lisbon. His puppets bring laughter to the Portuguese stage.
For nine years he has been unable to use his fingers, mangled in the torture chambers of the Holy Inquisition, but his characters carved from wood, Medea, Don Quijote, Proteus, still delight and console adoring crowds.
It ends early. It ends at the stake: for being a Jew and a buffoon, and because his marionettes fail to show due respect to the Crown or the Church or the hooded executioners who make fools of themselves chasing each other onstage.