(21)
1647: Santiago de Chile
Chilean Indians’ Game Banned
The captain general, Don Martín de Mujica, proclaims the prohibition of the game of chueca, which the Araucanians play according to their tradition, hitting a hall with curved sticks on a court surrounded by green boughs.
One hundred lashes for Indians who do not comply; and fines for others, because the infamous chueca has spread widely among the Creole soldiery.
The captain general’s edict says that the ban is imposed so that sins so contrary to the honor of God Our Father may be avoided and because chasing the ball trains Indians for war: The game gives rise to disturbances and thus afterward the arrow flies among them. It is indecent, it says, that men and women foregather for the chueca almost naked, clad in nothing but feathers and skins of animals on which they base their hopes of winning. At the start of the game they invoke the gods to favor their prowess and speed their feet, and at the end, all in a big embrace, they drink oceans of chicha.
(173)
1648: Olinda
Prime Cannon Fodder
He was a boy when they took him from his African village, shipped him out from Luanda, and sold him in Recife. He was a man when he fled from the canefields and took refuge in one of the black bastions of Palmares.
As soon as the Dutch entered Brazil, the Portuguese promised freedom to slaves who would fight the invaders. The runaways of Palmares decided that the war was not theirs; it mattered little whether those who held the lash in canefields and sugarmills were Portuguese or Dutch. But he, Henrique Dias, went to volunteer. Since then he commands a regiment of blacks who fight for the Portuguese Crown in northeastern Brazil. The Portuguese have ennobled him.
From Olinda, Captain Henrique Dias sends an intimidating letter to the Dutch army quartered in Recife. He says that his regiment, the Legion of the Henriques, consists of four nations: Minas, Ardas, Angolans, and Creoles: These are so malevolent that they have and should have no fear; the Minas so wild that their reputation can subdue what they cannot reach with their arms; the Ardas so fiery that they want to cut everybody with a single blow; and the Angolans so tough that no work tires them. Consider, now, if men who have broken everything are not destined to break all Holland.
(69 and 217)
1649: Ste. Marie des Hurons
The Language of Dreams
“Poor things,” thinks Father Ragueneau, watching the Huron Indians surround with gifts and rituals a man who, last night, dreamed a mysterious dream. The community puts food in his mouth and dances for him; the young girls stroke him, rub him with ashes. Afterward, all seated in a circle, they set about interpreting the dream. They pursue the dream with flashed images or words and he keeps saying, “No, no” until someone says “river,” and then among them all they succeed in capturing it: the river, a furious current, a woman alone in a canoe, she has lost the paddle, the river sweeps her away, the woman doesn’t cry out, she smiles, looks happy. “Is it I?” asks one of the women. “Is it I?” asks another. The community invites the woman whose eyes penetrate the most obscure desires to interpret the symbols of the dream. While drinking herb tea, the clairvoyant invokes her guardian spirit and deciphers the message.
Like all the Iroquois peoples, the Hurons believe that dreams transfigure the most trivial things and convert them into symbols when touched by the fingers of desire. They believe that dreams are the language of unfulfilled desires and have a word, ondinnonk, for the secret desires of the soul that wakefulness does not recognize. Ondinnonks come forward in the journeys made by the soul while the body sleeps.
“Poor things,” thinks Father Ragueneau.
For the Hurons, one who does not respect what dreams say commits a great crime. The dream gives orders. If the dreamer does not carry them out, the soul gets angry and makes the body sick or kills it. All the peoples of the Iroquois family know that sickness can come from war or accident, or from the witch who inserts bear teeth or bone splinters in the body, but also comes from the soul when it wants something that it is not given.
Father Ragueneau talks it over with other French Jesuits who preach in the area. He defends the Indians of Canada: It’s easy to call irreligion what is merely stupidity …
Some priests see Satan’s horns protruding from these superstitions and are scandalized because at the drop of a hat the Indians will dream against the Sixth Commandment and the next day plunge into therapeutic orgies. The Indians go about practically naked, looking at and touching each other in devilish liberty, and marry and unmarry whenever they want; and an order from a dream is all it takes to let loose the andacwandat fiesta, which is always the occasion for frenetic sinning. Father Ragueneau can’t deny that the Devil can find fertile ground in this society without judges, or policemen, or jails, or property, where the women share command with the men and together they worship false gods, but he insists on the basic innocence of these primitive souls, still ignorant of God’s law.
And when the other Jesuits tremble with panic because some Iroquois may dream one of these nights of killing a priest, Ragueneau recalls that that has already happened several times and that when it did, all that was necessary was to let the dreamer rip up a cassock while dancing his dream in an inoffensive pantomime.
“These are stupid customs,” says Father Ragueneau, “but not criminal customs.”
(153 and 222)
An Iroquois Story
It is snowing outside and in the center of the big house the old storyteller is talking, his face to the fire. Seated on animal skins, all listen as they sew clothing and repair weapons.
“The most splendid tree had grown in the sky,” says the old man. “It had four big white roots, which extended in four directions. From this tree all things were born …”
The old man relates that one day wind completely uprooted the tree. Through the hole that opened in the sky fell the wife of the great chief, carrying a handful of seeds. A tortoise brought her soil on its shell so that she could plant the seeds, and thus sprouted the first plants that gave us food. Later that woman had a daughter, who grew and became the wife of the west wind. The east wind blew certain words in her ear …
The good storyteller tells his story and makes it happen. The west wind is now blowing on the big house; it comes down the chimney, and smoke veils all the faces.
Brother wolf, who taught the Iroquois to get together and listen, howls from the mountains. It is time to sleep.
One of these mornings, the old storyteller will not wake up. But someone of those who heard his stories will tell them to others. And later this someone will also die, and the stories will stay alive as long as there are big houses and people gathered around the fire.
(37)
Song About the Song of the Iroquois
When I sing
it can help her.
Yeah, it can, yeah!
It’s so strong!
When I sing
it can raise her.
Yeah, it can, yeah!
It’s so strong!
When I sing
her arms get straighter.
Yeah, it can, yeah!
It’s so strong!
When I sing
her body gets straighter.
Yeah, it can, yeah!
It’s so strong!
(197)
1650: Mexico City
The Conquerors and the Conquered
The family crest rears itself pompously in the ornamented iron over the gate, as if over an altar. The master of the house rolls up in a mahogany carriage, with his retinue of liveried attendants and horses. Within, someone stops playing the clavichord; rustlings of silks and tissues are heard, voices of marriageable daughters, steps on soft, yielding carpets. Then the tinkle of engraved silver spoons on porcelain.
This city of Mexico, city of palaces, is one of the largest in the world. Although it is very far from the sea, Spanish and Chinese ships bring their merchandise and silver shipments fr
om the north end up here. The powerful Chamber of Commerce rivals that of Seville. From here merchandise flows to Peru, Manila, and the Far East.
The Indians, who built this city for the conquerors on the ruins of their Tenochtitlán, bring food in canoes. They may work here during the day, but at nightfall they are removed on pain of the lash to their slums outside the walls.
Some Indians wear stockings and shoes and speak Spanish in hope of being allowed to remain and thereby escape tribute and forced labor.
(148)
From the Náhuatl Song on the Transience of Life
We have but one turn at life.
In a day we go, in a night we descend
to the region of mystery.
We came here only to get to know each other.
We are here only in passing.
In peace and pleasure let us spend life.
Come and let’s enjoy it!
Not those who live in anger:
broad is the earth.
How good to live forever,
never to have to die!
While we live, our spirit broken,
Here they harass us, here they spy on us.
But for all the misfortunes,
for all the wounds in the soul,
we must not live in vain!
How good to live forever,
never to have to die!
(77)
1654: Oaxaca
Medicine and Witchcraft
The Zapotec Indians, who before falling to earth were brightly colored songbirds, told a few secrets to Gonzalo de Balsalobre. After living among them for a time and after investigating the mysteries of religion and medicine, Don Gonzalo is writing in Oaxaca a detailed report that he will send to Mexico City. The report denounces the Indians to the Holy Inquisition and asks for punishment of the quackeries that monks and ordinary justice have been unable to suppress. A while back, Alarcón left the university to share for nine years the life of the Cohuixco Indian community. He got to know the sacred herbs that cure the sick; and later he denounced the Indians for devilish practices.
In the first period of the conquest, however, indigenous medicine aroused great curiosity in Europe, and marvels were attributed to America’s plants. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún collected and published the wisdom of eight Aztec doctors, and King Philip II sent his personal physician, Francisco Hernández, to Mexico to make a thorough study of native medicine.
For the Indians, herbs speak, have sex, and cure. It is little plants, aided by the human word, that pull sickness from the body, reveal mysteries, straighten out destinies, and provoke love or forgetfulness. These voices of earth sound like voices of hell to seventeenth-century Spain, busy with inquisitions and exorcisms, which relies for cures on the magic of prayer, conjurations, and talismans even more than on syrups, purges, and bleedings.
(4)
1655: San Miguel de Nepantla
Juana at Four
Juana goes about constantly chatting with her soul, which is her internal companion as she walks on the bank of the stream. She feels all the happier because she has the hiccups, and Juana grows when she has the hiccups. She stops and looks at her shadow, which grows with her, and measures it with a branch after each little jump of her tummy. The volcanos also grew with the hiccups when they were alive, before their own fire burned them up. Two of the volcanos are still smoking, but they don’t have the hiccups now. They don’t grow anymore. Juana has the hiccups and grows. She gets bigger.
Crying, on the other hand, makes you smaller. For that reason old women and the mourners at funerals are the size of cockroaches. That isn’t in her grandfather’s books, which Juana reads, but she knows. These are things she knows from talking so much to her soul. Juana also talks to the clouds. To talk to the clouds you have to climb the hills or to the top branches of the trees.
“I am a cloud. We clouds have faces and hands. No feet.”
(16 and 75)
1656: Santiago de la Vega
Gage
In a hammock stretched between two palms, the Anglican clergyman Thomas Gage dies in Jamaica.
Since the old days when he roamed the lands of America in a Catholic friar’s cassock, preaching and spying and enjoying the chocolate and guava desserts, he dreamed of being the first English viceroy of Mexico. Back in London he switched sects and convinced Lord Cromwell that it was necessary and possible to fit out a good fleet to conquer the Spanish colonies.
Last year, Admiral William Penn’s troops invaded the island of Jamaica. England seized from Spain the first bit of its American empire, and the inheritors of Columbus, marquises of Jamaica, lost the best of their revenues. Then the Reverend Thomas Gage delivered a patriotic Protestant sermon from the pulpit of the largest church in Santiago de la Vega, while the Spanish governor came in the arms of his slaves to surrender his sword.
(145)
1658: San Miguel de Nepantla
Juana at Seven
She sees her mother coming in the mirror and drops the sword, which falls with a bang like a gunshot, and Juana gives such a start that her whole face disappears beneath the broad-brimmed hat.
“I’m not playing,” she says angrily as her mother laughs. She frees herself from the hat and shows her mustachios drawn with soot. Juana’s feet move awkwardly in the enormous leather boots; she trips and falls and kicks in the air, humiliated, furious; her mother cannot stop laughing.
“I’m not playing,” Juana protests, with tears in her eyes. “I’m a man! I’ll go to the university, because I’m a man!”
The mother strokes her head. “My crazy daughter, my lovely Juana. I ought to whip you for these indecencies.”
She sits beside her and says softly: “Better you were born stupid, my poor know-it-all daughter,” and caresses her while Juana soaks her grandfather’s huge cape with tears.
(16 and 75)
Juana Dreams
She wanders through the market of dreams. The market women have spread out dreams on big cloths on the ground.
Juana’s grandfather arrives at the market, very sad because he has not dreamed for a long time. Juana takes him by the hand and helps him select dreams, dreams of marzipan or of cotton, wings to fly with in sleep, and they take off together so loaded down with dreams that no night will be long enough for them.
(16 and 75)
1663: Old Guatemala
Enter the Printing Press
Bishop Payo Enríquez de Ribera is one of the most fervent advocates of forced labor for Indians. Without the allotments of Indians, the bishop reasons, who will cultivate the fields? And if nobody cultivates the fields, who will cultivate souls?
When the bishop is preparing a document on the subject, he receives from Puebla the first printing press to reach Guatemala. The learned spiritual head of this diocese has had it brought with cases of type, typography and all, so that his theological treatise Explicatio Apologetica may be printed here.
The first book published in Guatemala is not written in Mayan or in Castilian but in Latin.
(135)
1663: The Banks of the Paraíba River
Freedom
The hounds’ baying and the slave-hunters’ trumpeting have long since faded away. The fugitive crosses a field of stubble, fierce stubble higher than himself, and runs toward the river.
He throws himself on the grass, face down, arms open, legs wide apart. He hears the accomplice voices of grasshoppers and cicadas and little frogs. “I am not a thing. My history is not the history of things.” He kisses the earth, bites it. “I got my foot out of the trap. I’m not a thing.” He presses his naked body to the dew-soaked ground and hears the sound of small plants coming through the earth, eager to be born. He is mad with hunger, and for the first time hunger gives him happiness. His body is covered with cuts, and he does not feel it. He turns toward the sky as if embracing it. The moon rises and strikes him, violent blows of light, lashes of light from the full moon and the juicy stars, and he gets up and looks for hi
s direction.
Now for the jungle. Now for the great screen of greenness.
“You heading for Palmares, too?” the fugitive asks an ant crawling up his hand. “Guide me.”
(43)
Song of Palmares
Rest, black man.
The white doesn’t come here.
If he comes,
the devil will take him.
Rest, black man.
The white doesn’t come here.
If he comes, he’ll leave
with a taste of our cudgels.
(69)
1663: Serra da Barriga
Palmares
On some nights when there is lightning, the incandescent crest of this mountain range can be seen from the Alagoas coast. In its foothills the Portuguese have exterminated the Caeté Indians, whom the pope had excommunicated in perpetuity for eating the first Brazilian bishop; and this is where fugitive black slaves have found refuge, for the last many years, in the hidden villages of Palmares.
Each community is a fortress. Beyond the high wooden palisades and the pointed-stake traps lie vast planted fields. The farmers work with their weapons within reach; and at night, when they return to the citadel, they count bodies in case anyone is missing.
Here they have two harvests of corn a year, and also beans, manioc, sugar, potatoes, tobacco, vegetables, and fruits; and they raise pigs and chickens. The blacks of Palmares eat much more and better than the people of the coast, where all-devouring sugarcane, produced for Europe, usurps all of everyone’s time and space.
As in Angola, the palm is king in these black communities: with its fiber they weave clothing, baskets, and fans; the fronds serve as roof and bed; from the fruit, the flesh is eaten, wine is made, and oil for lighting is extracted; from the husk, cooking fat and smoking pipes are made. As in Angola, the chiefs perform the noble office of blacksmith, and the forge occupies the place of honor in the plaza where the people have their assemblies.