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One Drop of Blood
The American Misadventure of Race
By Scott L. Malcomson Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2000 Scott L. Malcomson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3607-1
CHAPTER 1
"ALL THINGS IN ABOUNDANCE"
COLONIAL AMERICA AS EDEN
* * *
Our country, at the beginning, was already a work of art. When the earliest European colonists arrived on the shores of North America, they were astonished by the beauty of their surroundings. Native tribes generally practiced both hunting and agriculture, and both of these required fire. One burned brush to remove the hiding places of game animals and to clear land for planting. The result of this was a man-made ecology that created great stretches of meadow and airy forests; together they resembled what we now call "English" parks. Fire-resistant trees grew tall, shading vast tracts free from undergrowth. You could, an English traveler noted, drive a coach through these woods. In such an environment valuable plants flourished, plants that provided food: persimmons and plums, wild grapes and strawberries and mulberries, black walnuts and hickories.
Colonial agricultural methods necessitated ending the fires; the great trees were felled for lumber; the brush returned, and choked away the persimmons and mulberries. Similarly, the meadows created by regular burning had attracted elk and bison from their pastures across the Appalachians, pastures that had themselves been extended and maintained by native burnings. Such large grazing animals, too, would disappear with time. But as long as native methods prevailed the land retained this park-like quality. Today we can only imagine its loveliness. In Cherokee-dominated northern Alabama it persisted into the nineteenth century; John Abbott, traveling with the famous colonel David Crockett, described the landscape there in 1813: "Upon the banks of a beautiful mountain stream there was a wide plateau, carpeted with the renowned blue grass, as verdant and soft as could be found in any gentleman's park. There was no underbrush. The trees were two or three yards apart, composing a luxuriant overhanging canopy of green leaves, more beautiful than art could possibly create. Beneath this charming grove, and illuminated by the moonshine, which, in golden tracery pierced the foliage, there were six or eight Indian lodges scattered about."
Some early travelers believed they had found paradise, though they had actually found something more significantly American — namely, that which comes just after paradise while keeping a paradisal memory. The distinctively American combination of aggression and nostalgia, of crude self-advancement permeated by wistful sentiment and loss, a culture obsessed with responsibility and its avoidance: this peculiar mind-set was born in the earliest days of our collective experience, and is with us still. Thoughtful colonizers of a biblical bent knew they were enacting the Fall and that the first step in creating their new society was to make, so to speak, its ruins.
Following Columbus's landing on the island of Hispaniola, now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1492, the Spanish and Portuguese set the tone for American life. Their model was essentially one of war followed by enslavement of the defeated natives — soon, also, of imported Africans. These slaves were expected to mine the earth, particularly to dig up gold and silver. There seems never to have been any doubt among the Iberians that their slaves, whether African or American, did not want to be slaves. They were dying in unimaginable numbers. The several million Arawaks on Hispaniola in 1492, for instance, were down to two hundred within fifty years. The Spaniards and Portuguese knew well what they were doing — they kept good records, and ruled their parts of America with efficient bureaucracies. The horrors of this time are mainly known to us now thanks to Iberian writers who, early on, were moved to set them down on paper.
The historian Robin Blackburn has written, "The most disturbing thing about the slaves from the slaveholder's point of view was not cultural difference but the basic similarity between himself and his property." This was true also between colonizers and Indians. People from European, African, and Indian tribes met one another in the bizarre New World and were puzzled by their similarities. Many tried to make sense of these similarities by emphasizing the differences — taking, for example, certain conceptions of race and using them to make a grid of social meaning. Consider the fate of Estevan, Morocco-born, the first African whose individual presence in America has been recorded. He left Spain with his master, Andrés Dorantes, in 1527, as part of an expedition to Florida and whatever might be beyond it. Once on land, the explorers marched briskly from misfortune to disaster. By 1529 their numbers had dropped from about four hundred to sixteen. After five years of enslavement by Gulf Coast Indians, only four travelers remained: Estevan, Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. They escaped together, found friendlier natives, and spent the next two years crossing the Southwest to Mexico.
In Mexico City, Dorantes sold Estevan to the Spanish governor, and the slave told many a story about cities of gold. In 1539 the governor dispatched an expedition to find these cities, with Estevan as guide. Estevan, according to the chronicler Pedro de Castañeda, broke away from the group and pushed northward in pursuit of "reputation and honor." Upon reaching an Indian town, Estevan submitted to questioning by the local leaders. "For three days," Castañeda writes, "they made inquiries about him and held a council. The account which the negro gave them of two white men who were following him, sent by a great lord, who knew about the things in the sky, and how these [men] were coming to instruct them in divine matters, made them think he must be a spy or a guide from some nations who wished to come and conquer them." Why did they not believe Estevan? "Because it seemed to them unreasonable to say that the people were white in the country from which he came and that he was sent by them, he being black. Besides these other reasons, they thought it was hard of him to ask them for turquoises and women, and so they decided to kill him. They did this."
Such a clarifying political use of skin color was not the only choice. If skin color and behavior were consistently related, one might use the first as shorthand for the second. However, skin color by itself is an emptiness; one's actions matter, not one's color. For example, when Estevan and his three presumably lighter-skinned companions first reached New Spain, their identities, from the Indian point of view, derived not from their respective colorings but from the qualities of character they had exhibited in the course of their journey. Estevan's fellow traveler Cabeza de Vaca had admired many of the native people they met during their years of wandering, and some of the Indians evidently respected the sojourners, especially for their medical talents — so much so that when the wayward foursome and their Indian captor-companions finally encountered Spaniards, the Indians refused to give up their men. They refused because they could not believe that such good men as they knew could also be Spaniards. The Indians were willing to give their captives only to other Indians. "This sentiment roused our [Spanish] countrymen's jealousy," Cabeza de Vaca remembered. The Spaniards' leader "bade his interpreter tell the Indians that we were members of his race who had long been lost; that his group were the lords of the land who must be obeyed and served, while we were inconsequential." Why did the Indians not believe the Spaniards? Cabeza de Vaca writes: "Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone. They spoke thus through the Spaniards' interpreter and, at the same time, to the Indians of other dialects through one of our interpreters." One has the sense that Cabeza de Vaca agreed with his captors that perhaps one could not be both Spanish and humanly decent. Cabeza de Vaca's newfound countrymen went so far as to propose to him and his companions that they enslave the Indians. This idea outraged the Spanish and African wanderers: "And to think," Cabeza de Vaca wrote, "we had given these Christians a supply of cowhides and other things that our retainers had carried long distances!" Cabeza de Vaca came very near to seeing his own countrymen as foreigners, at least in moral terms, and "to the last I could not convince the Indians that we were of the same people as the Christian slavers."
It was possible to imagine, even at the time, that these visually distinct peoples among whom one moved were of the same family as oneself and that the similarities were, finally, more significant than the differences. Such was the vision of Francisco López de Gómara, part of whose Historia general de las Indias of 1552 was translated into English in 1555, along with other Spanish reports, by the enticingly named Richard Eden.
López de Gómara wrote:
One of the marvellous things that God useth in the composition of man is colour, which doubtless cannot be considered without great admiration in beholding one to be white, and another black, being colours utterly contrary. Some likewise to be yellow, which is between black and white, and others of other colours, as it were of diverse liveries. And as these colours are to be marvelled at, even so is it to be considered how they differ one from another as it were by degrees, forasmuch as some men are white after diverse sorts of whiteness, yellow after diverse manners of yellow, and black after diverse sorts of blackness ... Therefore in like manner and with such diversity as men are commonly white in Europe and black in Africa, even with like variety are they tawny in these Indies, with diverse degrees diversely inclining more or less to black or white ... By reason whereof it may seem that such variety of colours proceedeth of man, and not of the earth: which may well be although we be all born of Adam and Eve, and know not the cause why God hath so ordained it, otherwise than to consider that his divine majesty hath done this as infinite other [than] to declare his omnipotence and wisdom in such diversities of colours as appear not only in the nature of man, but the like also in beasts, birds, and flowers ... All which may give further occasion to philosophers to search the secrets of nature and complexions of men with the novelties of the new world.
This idea of human diversity as a type of blessing, while unusual, cannot but have occurred to many observers simply by virtue of its logic. The New World had so many tribes of different colors, including various shades of European, that it would have been odd not to entertain an idea of their basic unity, particularly given the powerful Christian belief that God "made of one blood all nations," as Paul wrote. López de Gómara's rhapsody was, in Eden's translation, among the most widely read American accounts in England and informed the views of the first English adventurers. These men were the religious and political enemies of the Spanish, and in the New World their ambition, tempered by circumstance, led them to attempt multiracial communities. Indeed, it was the racial hierarchy of the Spanish that made a multiracial coalition seem an obvious choice to the English.
The earliest multiracial New World coalition to include white Englishmen was led by Francis Drake. Once a slave trader himself, Drake presumably did not act from moral considerations. Such considerations were, however, part of the general mix. The English had a tradition of associating Spain with tyranny, specifically, though not exclusively, Catholic tyranny and papal rule. This tradition was very much sharpened in the sixteenth century, not least because Spain's New World wealth increased its desire and ability to threaten England, and the reports of Spanish chroniclers and others as to the brutality of New World life — the worst bits were quickly translated — transferred English hatred of Spain into a new sphere. The slowly developing ideology of English freedom, of the right of man to be free from monarchical despotism, found, when faced with the despotic vision of Spanish rule in the Americas, a foreign-policy companion. Some among the English came to believe that their role, as both lovers of freedom and lovers of power, was to undermine the Spanish by promoting freedom in America.
Drake put this idea to practical effect in Panama. He wanted to seize the Spanish gold shipment, up from Peru, at a town on the Atlantic coast where the gold was loaded for its final transshipment to Spain, a place called Nombre de Dios, or Name of God — a heist so big as to pass from theft into statecraft. At first Drake attempted it on his own, but, not knowing the timing of the overland pack- train delivery, he failed. Then he thought to enlist the aid of a sizable community living south of Nombre de Dios — the Cimarrons, escaped slaves some three thousand strong. The Spaniards were terrified of the Cimarrons, who did not fear them and regularly raided Spanish settlements to free the slaves there. Probably a mix of Africans and Indians, though an English source described them as "valiant Negroes fled from their cruel masters the Spaniards," the Cimarrons endangered Spanish rule at a sensitive point. Drake, a masterful opportunist, approached the Cimarrons, who took him and his lieutenant, John Oxenham, to a peak from which the Englishmen first saw the Pacific Ocean. (They vowed to sail it one day, and did.) The Cimarrons infiltrated Panama City and discovered when the gold was to be moved. A combined English-Cimarron force — aided by French Huguenots, who had been working with Cimarrons for nearly a decade — succeeded in seizing the gold, and Drake left for England with a fortune. "This league between the English and the Negroes," a Panama official warned, "is very detrimental to this kingdom, because, being so thoroughly acquainted with the region and so expert in the bush, the Negroes will show them methods and means to accomplish any evil design they may wish to carry out."
Three years later, in 1575, Oxenham returned with fifty men and supplies for the Cimarrons. Oxenham's men took all the rigging from their ship, burned it to extract the hardware, then carried everything overland to the Pacific and built a new ship. The English-Cimarron crew proceeded to raid Spanish shipping and settlements and to free slaves, who then joined the Cimarrons. They also destroyed Catholic churches. The Spanish reported that the Cimarrons had all become "Lutherans," a Spanish catchall term for Protestants. The sources contain no evidence of racial friction in the black- English coalition; everyone seems to have marauded happily together. In the end, a substantial black-English threat to Spain was avoided by the capture and execution of Oxenham and his English comrades (and, presumably, many Cimarrons). The Spanish kept their peculiar racial system intact and choked back their fear that, if the English had been able to flee, "they would have returned in such strength that, aided by the negroes, they would have become masters of the Pacific, which God forbid, for this is the key to all Peru." And Peru was the key to Spanish power in the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Drop of Blood by Scott L. Malcomson. Copyright © 2000 Scott L. Malcomson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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