Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson
he would still have marked that first glimpse of the spine of the island riding above the waves, perhaps comparing it to shorelines he knew.
For Taínoans, Hispaniola was their ancestral home, and it housed the sacred caves that were the place of origin for all people in the primordial time: Cacibajagua (Cave + jagua, a fruit whose black juice was used for ritual body paint) for Taínoans, and Amayaúna (the Cave without Importance) for everyone else. It was an island whose body was, in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s sixteenth-century account of Taínoan beliefs, that of a “monstrous living beast of female sex” from whose caves people had emerged. More than the origin point of human society, this beast shaped political organization and relationships in the human present even as its back was the land that supported their dwellings. The island was split into eight cacicazgos, or domains, that corresponded to eight key body parts of the beast: two eyes, a mouth, two forelegs, two hind legs, and the genitals. The power of the cacicazgos was based on their corporeal location on the astronomically oriented beast. Its head was in the east, where the world begins with sunrise—the southeast part of Hispaniola was Caicimú, cimú meaning “front, forehead, first” in Taíno—which made the southern cacicazgos equivalent to the right hand and so senior to those in the north (figure 1.1).24 Even though those political units had collapsed in the wake of Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century, that kind of body knowledge could have passed on from one generation to another, if only as spirit memories, tingling remembrances of limbs no longer present. It signaled the links between the living earth and human bodies, and between the beast body and political body.
Figure 1.2. Sir George Somers’s manuscript map of Bermuda, ca. 1609, with later place-names added. Some details of the coastline are inaccurate, but the map still conveys the fishhook layout of the islands. Bermuda Archives, Bermuda National Trust Collection.
Bermuda would never replace that most ancient of homes, but later the man may have caught sight of a hand-drawn map of the island chain, sketched in European fashion from an aerial perspective (see figure 1.2).25 Nathaniel Butler, the third governor and the author of one of the earliest histories of the “small broken islands,” described their shape as echoing the curve of a reaper’s sickle, but the modern comparison to a fishhook is a more apt simile for a marine environment and one that would have made more sense to the pearl diver.26 Perhaps in its connotation of an essential activity, the fishhook shape of the islands suggested that Bermuda, too, could be life-giving, offering the man hope that here, where once again he would have to begin anew, he would be able to make it into something familiar, something vaguely like home.
The man described simply as “African” in the account of the Edwin’s voyage was probably taken from Angola in West Central Africa, or if Caribbean-born, raised by adults taken from there.27 Whether originally from an inland or coastal people, the man would have known to respect and fear the sea. This charged relationship to water would have come not only through his work as a pearl diver, but also from his people’s understanding of the world around them. There were many different peoples and religious practices in West Central Africa, but they shared a knowledge of water as cosmologically significant: not only was it one of the three primary domains, along with earth and sky, but it also separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. Before crossing a river, people would take up white clay from its bottom and smear it on their faces to repel any evil that might approach them in such a powerful place.28 If he was one of the minority of the enslaved in Spanish America who was from the Bight of Benin in West Africa, he would have associated crossing water with a deity named Olokun and the passage from one world into the other through death or birth. The cross formed by one of the ship’s masts and the yard might have made him think about the original act, the division of the universe into the two worlds of the dead and the living.29
Having spent at least some time in the Caribbean, the man would not have thought of a passage across water as a definitive journey to the land of the dead, as some Africans initially feared when they were loaded onto oceangoing ships. Even if originally from an inland people, he had been enslaved at least long enough to acquire diving skills and perhaps for his entire life, so he would have known that this latest saltwater passage meant the death of his most recent life and a birth into something new, something unknown. And he would have known, intimately, that though Europeans did not literally chew and swallow the flesh of the Africans they bought and sold, they did indeed consume their captives through the trade that exchanged enslaved bodies for money as well as a wide range of commodities.30 With his familiarity with coastal waters and his ability to evade the marine dangers that plagued pearl divers, he could have been a healer whose powers to keep other divers safe had been made known by his spirit-guided discovery of a strikingly shaped shell. He could thus be looking forward to finding and collecting stones, plants, or shells to make powerful medicine for this new location. Or he may not have been skilled in ritual practices and have wondered who would help him cajole the appropriate water beings now.31 If he saw the shores of Bermuda before being disembarked, perhaps he wondered what his dwelling space on land was to be, and if he would be able to medicate it correctly with minkisi, power objects that conveyed access to a particular other-than-human person. Or he might have scanned what he could see of the coastline to get a first sense of the local forces that inhabited particular spaces, whom he was about to encounter and need to invoke for assistance.32
Once established in Bermuda, the pearl divers quickly discovered that the reefs surrounding the islands did not host rich oyster beds. Labor was at a premium in the young colony, and, rather than allow them to stay idle, the governor probably reassigned the men to planting sugarcane and tobacco. This land-based work was perhaps dangerous in more predictable ways than pearl diving—rollers that pressed cane stalks, boiling coppers of cane juice, or sharp-edged weeds among tobacco plants were not as agile as marine predators—but required their own sets of demanding skills.33 Some of the earliest people of color in Bermuda were familiar with the many tasks required for the successful planting, harvesting, and curing of tobacco, given that it had been cultivated for nearly a century not only in much of the Spanish Americas, but also in Angola and other parts of West Central Africa. A man named Francisco certainly was well versed in tobacco production, as the planter Robert Rich valued his “judgement in the cureing of tobackoe” highly enough to pay the extraordinarily large sum of one hundred pounds to obtain his service.34 To the two divers, however, this work would have been unfamiliar.35
Although the reefs were barren of pearls, the men did have some occasion to exercise their diving abilities when shipwrecks created other kinds of riches for them to retrieve. In 1621, the divers provided essential knowledge when Governor Nathaniel Butler directed them to recover cargo after the San Antonio ran aground on Bermuda’s treacherous reefs. Although some of the wreck lay above the water line, the most prized cargo of “Silver barrs and chest of Rialls” was not so easily located by people in the small boats that retrieved other goods, and Butler would have needed the divers’ assistance in searching for it.36 Bermuda had not yet offered much occasion to practice diving skills, in contrast to the opportunities it afforded for tobacco cultivation and curing, so there had been little reason for others to learn from the divers. The men themselves, not only their knowledge, were necessary for a successful operation.
“Make their present repayre unto the Craule Point”
One of the most easily observable contributions of the other people of color who joined the pearl divers in Bermuda can still be seen in the indentations called “crawls” that punctuate its coastlines and remain in its place-names, but this physical imprint and inherited nomenclature carried parallel influences in the world of the unseen. Crawls were natural or human-made ponds set up to hold previously caught fish, which, by the eighteenth century, existed in locations a fair distance inland. Bermudians still refer to Crawl Point and Crawl Hill, among others. Indians and Africans introduced this technique of maintaining a readily available supply of fish without having to salt it on a daily basis. By 1623 in Bermuda the practice was established enough that salt pans to facilitate the preservation and stockpiling of fish “in this tyme of scarcitye,”37 were built near the crawl for which