Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

      Figure 1.6. Taínoan palm-thatched house. Note the “esta hecha” along the left-hand margin, indicating that this image was already “made” and incorporated into the published version. Gonzalez Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, “Montserrat Manuscript” of Historia general y natural de las Indias, vol. 1, fol. 4r. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

      Nathaniel Butler’s Historye of the Bermudaes extolled the “great aboundance” of introduced plants such as plantains, tobacco, manioc tubers, and watermelon, which “providence and paines have since the plantation offred divers other seedes and plants which the soyle hath greedily embrased and cherished.” The “paines” Butler described were Europeans’ effort in getting the seeds and plants to the island, where, in his account, the soil did the rest. But in addition to “providence,” the soil’s embrace of these new plants required knowledgeable human intervention. Butler obliquely noted that the only knowledge about the “name and vertue” of “divers . . . namelesse” plants came from people unwillingly brought to the island as slaves. To them, Butler’s nameless plants with unknown usages were known quantities, a relationship that Butler acknowledged. He wrote that “already certaine of [the plants], since the comeinge in of the newe guests, have gotten them appellations from their apparent effects.”⁵⁵ Butler knew of the contribution made by enslaved Indians and Africans, but his euphemistic reference to them as “newe guests” omitted any direct reference either to their familiarity with the subtropical plants or to the forced nature of their arrival.

      The discursive erasure of the bodies and knowledge of non-Europeans made it easier for colonizers to maintain a mental map of a colonized landscape in which success resulted only from “God’s goodness” and their own superior skill and intelligence. Like “God’s goodness” in Lewis Hughes’s description of cassava in Bermuda, Butler’s circumlocutory use of “newe guests” to refer to enslaved Africans and Indians did more than obscure the knowledge transfer from Africans and Indians to the English. It removed from English view the coerced nature of the work performed by slaves in Bermuda, as well as framing their bodies as nothing more than empty vessels that—when filled with cassava bread—proved that the unfamiliar food was a solid foundation for the colonial enterprise. This elision inverted the structure of expertise and confirmed rather than challenged English belief in their own intellectual and cultural superiority, thus supporting the development of a racialized contempt.

      One English colonist’s praise of an African man’s skill at curing tobacco, a rare acknowledgment of the desirability of Africans’ knowledge, underlines the gender and status components of these formulations rather than undermining their overall strength. When Robert Rich acknowledged Francisco’s “judgement in the cureing of tobackoe,” he did so because he was trying to convince his relatives that a great increase in the amount of merchantable tobacco would give them substantial returns on the £100 investment necessary to secure the man’s abilities. Indeed, his descriptions of Francisco’s skills seem to have been accurate, judging by the following seasons’ outputs.⁵⁶ But neither Rich nor other Anglo-Bermudians made mention of women’s skill and labor in turning a poisonous tuber into a staple food. Even as women’s work in processing cassava was a daily necessity in the early years of the colony as well as in the broader development and continuation of the transatlantic slave trade, that essential economic contribution escaped the notice of men like Robert Rich, accustomed as they were to being served by women who had also processed the food.⁵⁷ Labor like the processing of manioc has rarely entered the historical record in definitive, individualized form and yet would have irrevocably shaped the muscles, ligaments, and bones of the women who were not countless as bodies in the service of an imperial venture—for that purpose they were very specifically counted—but too often have remained uncounted as persons.

      “A tree Called the Palmeto”

      Indian and African knowledge transformed the intimate spaces of English life on Bermuda. Their knowledge about the complex manipulation of plant fibers to create sleeping surfaces, roofs, vessels, wall decorations, and clothing influenced the construction of houses, housewares, and sleeping arrangements. The forced immigrants were probably responsible for the most widely used roof construction in early Bermuda, a thatch made with leaves from the local palmetto. The English were familiar with thatching, but they tended to use rushes or marsh reeds. Palmetto thatching continued to be widespread even once that colony was well established. In 1688, Governor Robert Robinson reported that for 84 percent of households, the palmetto “leafe [was] the only thatch of their houses.”⁵⁸

      Palm thatch was common throughout the Caribbean as well as in West Central and West Africa. Houses in the Taínoan Caribbean, whether the larger dwellings found on Hispaniola and Cuba or the smaller ones common in Borikén (Puerto Rico), were thatched with palm leaves. The sixteenth-century Spanish bureaucrat Gonzalez Fernández de Oviedo’s early accounts of Taínoan life included both rectangular and round palm-thatched houses (figure 1.6). Unlike many early and quite fantastic images of the Americas that circulated in Europe, these illustrations had some foundation in reality and were based on drawings done by Oviedo himself.⁵⁹ Pieter van den Broecke noted approvingly that in Loango, in Angola, people used palm leaves to “cover their houses, which works very nicely,” whereas Richard Jobson described walls “of Reede, platted and made up together, some sixe foote in height, circling and going round their Towne,” which he noted in his travels along the River Gambia.⁶⁰

      Nor was the relatively rough work of thatch the only