Faces and Masks Read online

  The loss of the merchandise hurts the honor of Captain Clarke, old-time shepherd of these flocks, and damages the prestige of the Rhode Island slave traders. North American shipyards take pride in building the most secure ships for the Guinea traffic. Their floating prisons are so effectively constructed that only one slave rebellion occurs in four and a half years, an average four times smaller than the French, and half as much as England’s specialized enterprises can boast.

  The thirteen colonies that will soon be the United States of America have much to thank their slave traders for. Rum, good medicine for the soul and for the body, is turned into slaves on the African coast. Then those blacks become molasses in the Antillean islands of Jamaica and Barbados. From there, the molasses heads north and becomes rum in the distilleries of Massachusetts, and then the rum crosses the ocean again to Africa. Each voyage is rounded off with sales of tobacco, lumber, ironware, flour, and salted meat, and with purchases of spices in the islands. The blacks left over go to the plantations of South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

  Thus the slave trade produces profits for seamen, merchants, moneylenders, and owners of shipyards, distilleries, sawmills, meat salting plants, flour mills, plantations, and insurance companies.

  (77 and 193)

  1776: Pennsylvania

  Paine

  Its title is Common Sense. The pamphlet was published early this year and has circulated through the North American colonies like water or bread. The author, Tom Paine, an Englishman who came to these lands a couple of years ago, pleads for declaring independence without further ado: A government of our own is our natural right. Why do we hesitate?

  There is something exceedingly ridiculous, says Paine, in the composition of a monarchy. In the best of cases, Paine considers government a necessary evil; in the worst, an intolerable evil. And monarchy is the worst of cases. One honest man, he says, is of more worth than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived, and he calls George III the Royal Brute of Great Britain.

  Throughout the world, he says, liberty is fiercely hunted down. In Europe it is regarded as a foreigner; Asia and Africa long since expelled it; and the English have warned it to get out. Paine exhorts American colonists to turn this soil into a refuge for free men: O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

  (243)

  1776: Philadelphia

  The United States

  England has never paid too much attention to her thirteen colonies on North America’s Atlantic coast. They have no gold, silver, or sugar. They were never indispensable to her; she never prevented them from growing. They have walked alone, so it has been since that remote time when the Pilgrims first trod the stony lands they called New England—and the soil was so hard that they had to plant seeds with bullets, or so it was said. Now well developed, the thirteen English colonies have to run away.

  The thirteen colonies are hungry for the West. Many pioneers dream of taking off over the mountains, with rifle, ax, and a handful of corn as baggage; but the British crown has drawn the frontier on the crests of the Appalachians and reserved the lands beyond for Indians. The thirteen colonies are hungry for a world. Already their ships ride all the oceans; but the British crown forces them to buy what it wants them to buy and sell where it says they should sell.

  With one jerk they break the ties. The thirteen colonies refuse to continue paying obedience and money to the king of such a remote island. They hoist their own flag, decide to call themselves the United States of America, reject tea, and proclaim that rum, a national product, is the patriotic drink.

  All men are created equal, says the Declaration of Independence. The slaves, half a million black slaves, don’t even hear about it.

  (130 and 224)

  1776: Monticello

  Jefferson

  The writer of the Declaration of Independence, the United States’ birth certificate, is a man of a thousand talents and concerns.

  Tireless reader of thermometers, barometers, and books, Thomas Jefferson seeks and finds, pursuing the revelations of nature and wanting to embrace all dimensions of human thought. He is assembling a fabulous library and a universe of stones, fossils, and plants; and he knows all that can be known about neoplatonic philosophy, Latin grammar, the structure of the Greek language, and the organization of society throughout history. He knows everything about his land of Virginia, every son and grandfather of every family, every blade of grass; and he is up-to-date on all the technical novelties in the world. He enjoys trying out steam engines, new types of plows, and original methods of producing butter and cheese. He imagined his mansion of Monticello and designed and built it faultlessly.

  The Puritans counted the population by “souls.” Jefferson counts it by “individuals of the human species.” Within the species, blacks are almost equal. Black have fair memories and no imagination, and their poor intelligence could never understand Euclid. Aristocrat of Virginia, Jefferson preaches democracy, a democracy of proprietors, and freedom of thought and religion; but he defends the hierarchies of sex and color. His educational plans do not include women, or Indians, or blacks. Jefferson condemns slavery and is, and will continue to be, a slave owner. Mulattas attract him more than white women, but loss of racial purity panics him and he thinks the mixture of bloods is the worst of the temptations besetting the white colonist.

  (41 and 161)

  1777: Paris

  Franklin

  The most famous of North Americans arrives in France on a desperate mission. Benjamin Franklin comes to ask help against the English colonial troops, who have occupied Philadelphia and other patriot redoubts. Using all the weight of his personal prestige, the ambassador proposes to kindle fires of glory and revenge in French breasts.

  There is no king or commoner on earth who hasn’t heard of Franklin, since he sent up a kite and and discovered that heavenly fires and thunders express not the wrath of God but electricity in the atmosphere. His scientific discoveries emanate from daily life. The most complicated resides in the most commonplace: dawn and its never-repeated patterns, oil that is thrown on water and calms its waves, the fly drowned in wine that revives in the sun. Observing that sweat keeps the body fresh on days of stifling heat, Franklin conceives a system for producing cold by evaporation. He also invents and produces stoves and watches and a musical instrument, the glass harmonica, which inspires Mozart; and since the constant changing of spectacles for reading or distant vision bores him, he cuts lenses and fits them in a single frame and thus gives birth to bifocals.

  But Franklin makes himself most popular when he notices that electricity seeks out sharp points, and defeats lightning by placing a pointed iron rod on top of a tower. Franklin being the spokeman for the American rebels, the king of England has decreed that British lightning rods should have rounded tips.

  (79)

  If He Had Been Born a Woman

  Of Benjamin Franklin’s sixteen brothers and sisters, Jane is the one most resembling him in talent and strength of will.

  But at the age when Benjamin leaves home to make his own way, Jane marries a poor saddler, who accepts her without dowry, and ten months later bears her first child. From then on, for a quarter of a century, Jane has a child every two years. Some of them die, and each death opens a wound in her breast. Those that live demand food, shelter, instruction, and consolation. Jane spends whole nights cradling those that cry, washes mountains of clothing, bathes stacks of children, rushes from market to kitchen, washes piles of dishes, teaches ABC’s and chores, toils elbow to elbow with her husband in his workshop, and attends to the guests whose rent helps to fill the stewpot. Jane is a devoted wife and exemplary widow; and when the children are grown up, she takes charge of her own ailing parents and of her unmarried daughters and her orphaned grandchildren.

  Jane never knows the pleasure of letting herself float in a lake, drifting over the surface hitched to the string of a kite, as Benjamin enjoys doing despite his years. Jane never has time to t
hink, nor allows herself to doubt. Benjamin continues to be a fervent lover, but Jane doesn’t know that sex can produce anything except children.

  Benjamin, founder of a nation of inventors, is a great man of all the ages. Jane is a woman of her age, like almost all women of all the ages, who has done her duty on this earth and expiated her share of blame in the Biblical curse. She has done all she could to keep from going mad and sought, in vain, a little silence.

  Her case will awaken no interest in historians.

  (313)

  1778: Philadelphia

  Washington

  The first among the soldiers is also the most prestigious among the farmers, the swiftest among the horsemen, the best marksman among the hunters. He gives no one his hand, nor lets anyone look him in the eye. No one calls him George. From his mouth come no eulogies, nor any complaints either; and he always sets an example of composure and bravery, no matter his sufferings from ulcers, toothaches, and fevers.

  With the help of men and weapons from France, George Washington’s army seizes the city of Philadelphia from British hands. The war for the independence of the United States, blackcoats against redcoats, becomes long and painful.

  (224 and 305)

  1780: Bologna

  Clavijero Defends the Accursed Lands

  One of the Jesuits expelled from America, Francisco Javier Clavijero, writes in Italy his Ancient History of Mexico. In four volumes the priest tells the life of a people of heroes, marking the dawn of national and historical consciousness in native-born people who are beginning to call New Spain “Mexico” and already speak the word “fatherland” with pride. The work assumes the defense of America, so much under attack in these years from Paris, Berlin, or Edinburgh: If America had no wheat, neither did Europe have corn … If America had no pomegranates or lemons, now she has them; but Europe never had, has not, and cannot have chirimoyas, avocados, bananas, chicozapotes …

  With innocence and passion Clavijero attacks the Encyclopedists who describe the New World as an emporium of abominations. Count Buffon says that in America the skies are miserly and the rains rot the soil; that the lions are bald, small and cowardly and the tapir is a vest-pocket elephant; that over there horses, pigs, and dogs become dwarfs and that the Indians, cold as serpents, have no soul, nor fire for females. Voltaire, too, speaks of hairless lions and men, and Baron Montesquieu explains that warm countries produce despicable peoples. Abbé Guillaume Raynal is offended because in America mountain ranges extend from north to south instead of from east to west as they should, and his Prussian colleague Corneille de Pauw portrays the American Indian as a flabby, degenerate beast. According to de Pauw, the climate over there leaves animals sickly and without tails; the women are so ugly that they are confused with men; and the sugar has no taste, the coffee no aroma.

  (73 and 134)

  1780: Sangarara

  America Burns from Mountains to Sea

  Two centuries have passed since the executioner’s blade cleaved the neck of Túpac Amaru, last of the Incas, in the Plaza Mayor of Cuzco. The myth born of his death is now fulfilled. The prophecy is coming to pass: the head rejoins the body and a reborn Túpac Amaru attacks.

  José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II, enters the village of Sangarara to the music of giant seashells, to cut off the bad government of so many thieving drones who rob the very honey from our combs. Behind his white horse, a desperate army assembles. They fight with slingshots, sticks, and knives, these naked soldiers. They are mostly Indians who spill out their lives in bloody vomit in the depths of Potosí or burn themselves out in workshops and haciendas.

  Thunder of drums, clouds of banners, fifty thousand men crowning the sierra: Túpac Amaru, liberator of Indians and blacks, scourge of those who have put us in such a lamentable state of dying, advances and destroys. Messengers at the gallop rouse whole communities to rebellion from the valley of Cuzco to the coasts of Arica and the frontiers of Tucumán, because those who fall in this war are sure of resurrection later.

  Many mestizos join the rebellion. Also some Creoles, of European blood but American birth.

  (183 and 344)

  1780: Tungasuca

  Túpac Amaru II

  Antonio Oblitas, slave of the magistrate Arriaga, hoisted a strong rope, hangman’s rope, mule’s rope, in the plaza of this town of Tungasuca, and for a whole week the wind rocked the body of Arriaga, boss of Indians, owner of blacks, owner of Antonio.

  This hand that paints is the hand that hanged. Antonio Oblitas is painting the portrait of the man who ordered the freedom of all the slaves in Peru. For lack of easel, the board rests against some sacks of corn. Creating color over the rough wood, come and go the brushes of Antonio, hangman of his master, nevermore a slave. Túpac Amaru poses on a horse, out in the open. He is not wearing his usual black velvet jacket or his three-cornered hat. The inheritor of the Incas wears the royal insignias of the son of the sun: like his forebears, on his head the feather headdress and triple crown and hanging tassel; on his breast the golden sun; and in one fist the scepter of authority bristling with barbs. Around the motionless horseman appear scenes of the recent victory against colonial troops. From Antonio’s hand spring little soldiers and puffs of smoke, Indians at war, flames devouring the church of Sangarara and prisoners escaping from the jail.

  The painting is born between two battles, during the armed truce. Túpac and his horse have been posing for some time. They are so stony that Antonio wonders if they are breathing. Bright colors spread across the board, very slowly. The painter immerses himself in this long moment of truce. Thus the artist and his model escape from time; stave off, while the work lasts, defeat and death.

  (137, 183, and 344)

  1780: Pomacanchi

  The Workshop Is an Enormous Ship

  that sails over American lands, a galley that never stops advancing, propelled night and day by Indians who row toward a port they will never reach. Toward the coast that retreats, the Indians row and row; and the whip wakes them up when sleep overcomes them.

  Men and women, children and old people spin, weave, and elaborate cotton and wool in the workshops. The laws promise hours and wages, but the Indians, thrown into these great slave quarters or prisons, only leave them when their burial hour arrives.

  South of Cuzco, Túpac Amaru goes about freeing Indians tied to the looms. The winds of the great rebellion deprive viceroys of sleep in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá.

  (170 and 320)

  A Colonial Poem: If the Indians Triumph …

  … they will make us toil

  the way they toil now

  and to the extent we despoil now

  they will despoil us back.

  All of us can expect to lack

  house, hacienda, or splendors,

  nobody will win honors

  and all will nobodies be:

  we will belong to Indians free

  and they’ll ride herd upon us.

  (183)

  1781: Bogotá

  The Commoners

  The archbishop of Bogotá trembles with rage and the leather of his chair groans. His hands, sweetmeat hands, ornamented with rubies and emeralds, clutch his purple robe. The Most Illustrious Don Antonio Caballero y Góngora curses with his mouth full, although he is not eating, for his tongue is as fat as the rest of him.

  Outrageous news has come from the town of Socorro. The commoners, people without rank, have risen against the new taxes, and have appointed rich Creoles as captains. Both rich and poor are hit by the taxes, which punish everything from tallow candles to honey, sparing not even the wind: the tax on transient merchants is called the wind sales tax.

  In Socorro, city of rocks, the rebellion that the viceroy in Bogotá saw coming has come. It happened one market day, right in the plaza. A plebeian woman, Manuela Beltrán, pulled the decree from the doors of City Hall, tore it to pieces and stamped on it; soon after, the people hurled themselves upon the stores and burned down the jail. Now t
housands of commoners, armed with sticks and hoes, are heading for Bogotá beating drums.

  Spanish arms collapse in the first battle. The archbishop, who commands more authority than the viceroy, decides to go out and meet the insurrectionists. To deceive them with promises he will march at the head of the court commission. His mule stares at him in panic.

  (13 and 185)

  1781: Támara

  The Plainsmen

  Yelling Túpac Amaru’s name, fifteen hundred Indians come galloping from the plains east of the Andes. They seek to gain the cordillera, to join the tide of commoners marching on Bogotá. The governor of the plains flees and saves his neck.

  These rebels are Indians of the savannas of rivers that flow into the Orinoco. On the beaches of the Orinoco, where turtles deposit their eggs, they once held their markets. There they gathered, since the remotest of remote times, with the Indians of Guyana and Amazonia, exchanging salt, gold, clay pots, baskets, nets, dried fish, turtle oil, arrow poison, and red dye to protect the naked body from mosquitos. Snail conches were the currency, until Europeans arrived eager for slaves and offered axes, scissors, mirrors, and brandy in exchange for men. Then the Indians began to enslave one another, and to sell their brothers, and every hunter was also hunted; and many died of measles or smallpox.

  (121 and 185)

  1781: Zipaquirá

  Galán

  In the village of Zipaquirá the peace treaty is signed. The archbishop dictates it, swears to it by the evangels and consecrates it with a high Mass.

  The agreement justifies the rebels. Soon this piece of paper will be cinders, and the rich Creole captains well know it; but they too need to dispel as soon as possible the stunning storm, the supreme disorder of the plebeians, which grow constantly, darkening the skies of Bogotá and threatening wealthy Americans as much as the Spanish crown.