by Jason Porath
And it’s here that we get some of our only clues as to who Malinche actually was. The reality is, none of her words survived to the current day (it’s doubtful she was literate), and we don’t even know her real name. Spaniards called her Dona Marina, and Malinche (or Malin-tzin) was probably an adaptation of that name. Funnily enough, the people of Tenochtitlan referred to Cortés only by Malinche’s name, due to her being the one to speak for him. Yes, Mexico’s famous conqueror did his fell work under a woman’s pseudonym. Malinche’s history prior to meeting Cortés is largely a mystery (the Spaniards apparently didn’t care enough to ask her, or to write down her answer if they did), but the fact that she spoke the royal dialect of Nahuatl indicates she was no layperson—it is likely that she was of the royal lineage of one of the indigenous kingdoms and that she was sold (rather than abducted) into slavery.
The rest of the story plays out in predictably horrible fashion, with the Spaniards laying waste to Tenochtitlan. After the conquest, Malinche is married off to another conquistador and has several children, adding to a prior one by Cortés—all of whom are some of the first mestizos. To Cortés’s credit, he awards her a substantial encomienda (labor grant—a highly desired reward). Malinche dies young, likely of disease, and in relative obscurity.
As time went on Malinche’s name became a deep insult. In the 1800s, a Mexican politician agitating for independence from Spain began mythologizing her as Mexico’s greatest traitor. (Ironically, said politician was full-blood Spanish.) In the years thereafter, artists began portraying her as a lusty temptress. Authors inserted her into lurid stories as a villainous contrast to an invented “good girl”—similar to the later stories of the soldaderas (see the entry on Petra Herrera).
And that was hugely unfair. First, to label her a traitor to “her people” is like saying Genghis Khan was a traitor to Asia. She was part of one nation (we don’t even know which one) and would likely not have recognized the people of Tenochtitlan as hers. Many other tribes (notably the Tlaxacans, who were similarly stigmatized) allied with Cortés to wage war on their common enemies, but history does not give them nearly the same vicious treatment.
Furthermore, “her people” sold her into sexual slavery. She owed them little and had every reason to hate them. And yet, the evidence indicates she didn’t even do that. When reunited with her mother late in life in a frustratingly poorly documented meeting, she embraced her and gave her jewels.
Bottom line: Who has the moral authority to judge her? Fate gave her the worst circumstances it could, and she still carved a place for herself with nothing but her force of will. She looked kings in the eye and told them to kneel. She saw the sacrificial altars of Tenochtitlan and lived. She bore the name that felled empires. She is one of the only native people of the period whose name survives to the present day.
Malinche survived. Sometimes that’s all you can do.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
All outfits are accurate, save that of Moctezuma. Normally he wore a headdress so neck-crushingly huge that it would have obscured all his people from view, so it got downsized.
Cortés has a scar on his chin (which he got, according to legend, when fleeing from a married woman’s husband).
Malinche is here walking a fine line between the two sides. The divider wall upon which she’s standing (and the canal itself) is inaccurate—they would not have existed in the middle of one of the main roads—but they’re necessary to communicate the idea of her straddling the line between the two cultures.
The looming storm clouds and sunset are meant to communicate the impending horrors to be visited upon Tenochtitlan.
Ida B. Wells
(1862–1931, UNITED STATES)
Princess of the Press
You may know that Rosa Parks was far from the first black person in the United States to refuse to vacate a bus seat for a white person. But did you know that 71 years before Rosa Parks, there was a black woman who refused to give up her seat . . . on the train? This was a woman who put her life on the line for decades to end lynching in the United States. This was a woman who helped found the NAACP. This was Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, better known as Ida B. Wells.
Ida was a tough cookie from the get-go. When, at age 16, she lost her parents in a yellow fever epidemic, she rolled up her sleeves, got a job, and worked to keep her siblings out of foster care. When she was 21, the conductor on a train on which she was a passenger ordered her to vacate her seat so that a white woman could use it. Ida refused. When the conductor tried forcibly removing her, she hooked her feet into the chair and refused to budge. When he tore her sleeve in the attempt, she scratched at him and bit him.
When a gang of men finally removed her from the car, she sued the train company—and won. (Although the ruling was later overturned via legal shenanigans.)
But, by far, Ida’s most significant achievements were in her anti-lynching journalism.
So let’s talk about lynching. Likely the word conjures up images of someone being hanged from a tree. The reality was far, far worse than that. We’re talking torture that would make Elisabeth Báthory or Wu Zetian shudder. If you have a weak stomach, you’re forewarned—but try to stick with it. It’s important that you understand the horror that this woman devoted her life to stopping. During most people’s childhoods, these descriptions were constantly censored. This book is not going to do that.
Here are summaries of just a few lynchings that Ida reported on:
• 1892: Tommie Moss, Henry Stewart, and Calvin McDowell were shot to pieces. (McDowell had fist-sized holes in him.) Moss died pleading for them to spare him for the sake of his pregnant wife. The thing that started this all off was a kids’ game of marbles. More on this in a bit.
• 1893: Henry Smith had red-hot iron brands placed all over his body for 50 minutes, until his torturers finally burned out his eyes and thrust irons down his throat. He was then set on fire, and when he managed to jump out of the fire pit (he was still alive!), he was pushed back in. Someone made a watch charm from his kneecap, and the clothes torn off his body were kept as mementos by some in the 10,000-man crowd. Photographers sold postcards of the event. Gramophone recordings of his screams were sold, like the world’s most loathsome ringtone.
• 1898: Frazier Baker’s only “crime” was being appointed a postmaster in a small South Carolina town. His house was set on fire, and when he and his family fled, they were all shot—everyone was wounded, and Frazier and his one-year-old baby were killed. Their charred bodies were found near the wreckage of the house the next day.
• 1899: Local whites arranged a special train so that more people could attend the mob execution of Sam Hose. He was first tied to a tree, stripped naked, and then mutilated: the mob severed his left ear, then his right. Then his fingers were lopped off and his penis sliced off. Then he was set on fire. As his body burned, the crowd of 2,000 people cut off pieces of him as souvenirs. Bone bits were sold for 25 cents and slices of liver for 10. Even the tree to which he was tied was chopped up and sold.
• 1904: Luther Holbert and a woman (presumed to be his wife) were forced to hold out their arms as their fingers were chopped off. Their ears were cut off, their eyes poked out, and a large corkscrew was used to bore spirals of “raw, quivering flesh” out of their arms, legs, and bodies. Finally, they were burned to death.
• 1911: Will Porter was taken to an opera house, tied to the stage, and shot by people who bought tickets for the privilege.
If you need to go look at pictures of kittens for a second, it’s understandable. This book will be here.
Back? Good. Now, remember the Moss incident, the one with the marbles? That one is important for a couple reasons: it’s the first lynching that really grabbed Ida’s journalistic attention (Moss was a friend of hers); it caused a mass exodus of blacks from Memphis (Ida bought a gun and stayed); and it’s a useful microcosm through which to examine lynchings as a whole. Now, while it’s true that the inciting incident was a kids
’ game of marbles, the real story was that the three men killed were associated with a thriving black-owned grocery store that was taking away business from a nearby white-owned one. The white grocery’s owner was the ringleader behind the mob that led this horrific attack. He orchestrated the terrible murder of three people for . . . basically money.
So Ida got to work. The end result: “Southern Horrors,” a seminal pamphlet that blew the lid off lynching myths. Prior to that, the widely believed stereotype was that black men were out-of-control brutes who were constantly a hairsbreadth from assaulting white women—and somehow this was believable to a large swath of the population.
The common wisdom about lynching was that it was in response to black men raping white women. Except that was totally bogus, and “Southern Horrors” proved it. By analyzing a huge number of cases and laying them out in an academic manner, Ida showed that rape had nothing to do with a majority of lynchings, and that most of the time the reason was political, economic, or plain ol’ racism in the face of loving interracial relationships.
As you can imagine, this exposé did not win Ida a lot of admirers.
A week after she released her report, a mob broke into the offices of her newspaper, the Free Speech, and burned it to the ground while she was traveling. (Yes, they literally eradicated free speech.) The mob threatened to lynch her if she ever returned to Memphis. In response, she looked into returning to Memphis—only to be informed that a group of black men were organizing to protect her should she return. Wanting to avoid a race riot, she stayed away—but kept writing, madder than the devil and twice as eloquent.
Despite ever-present death threats, Ida continued her work for the next 40 years (!) by investigating and writing about lynchings. On more than one occasion, she passed herself off as a widow or a relative of the deceased in order to gain better journalistic access, a ploy that earned one of her contemporaries, who tried the same trick, his own lynch mob. (Thankfully, he escaped.)
And still she would not tone herself down, despite the urging of other activists and even the newspapers that printed her work.
For a good 13 years, she was practically the only journalist investigating lynching. Once others gained interest in the subject—in no small part due to her herculean efforts, which included speaking tours abroad, the establishment of a great many civil rights organizations, and endless reams of articles and pamphlets—she was relegated to a footnote. Despite her massive contributions to the cause, she was almost left off the NAACP’s founders list, due in no small part to the desire of some to distance themselves from her forceful, brutally honest language.
In the end, she married a man who supported and advocated for her. Together they had four children, with Ida bearing the first at age 34 and the last at 42. She would even bring her children with her on her speaking tours, declaring herself the only woman in US history to travel with a nursing baby to make political speeches. (She would run for Illinois state senate when she was well into her sixties.) Her entire family got into the activism—when Ida was once feeling despondent about going out to investigate yet another lynching, her son demanded that she do so. “If you don’t,” he asked, “who will?” When she came around, the entire family was waiting, their things packed, ready to join her on her travels.
And on that powerful mental image, we wrap up the entry.
Ida B. Wells died at age 68, almost done with her autobiography. The last chapter ended mid-sentence, mid-word.
• ART NOTES •
Ida is depicted here being tossed off a moving train car, although it was definitely stopped when they forced her off. The image is meant to convey her holding on, speeding toward the future, into the light—while the conductor is merely a disembodied leg in the shadows, barely even human.
She is, of course, striking a very animated princess kind of pose. Imagine a musical number happening at that very moment.
The train cars and outfit are period-accurate.
The flying papers represent Ida’s reams of writing, with the nearest one being the cover for “Southern Horrors.”
Underneath the tree is a cut rope being slowly blanketed by her work. Since illustrating an actual lynching, or even a noose, would be extremely distasteful, this image seemed more poetically faithful to the spirit of her work, without being overly graphic.
The opossum in the tree is a callback to a Loyal League* parade float, which featured a black man against a tree with a bunch of dead opossums (possibly meant to symbolize lynchers). It does not seem that Ida was ever directly involved with the Loyal League, but they traveled in the same circles.
The title “Princess of the Press” was an actual title applied to her during her life. The name was partly a reference to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida, a comic opera about a feminist teacher.
Phoolan Devi
(1963–2001, INDIA)
The Bandit Queen Who Joined Parliament
This is not a fun story, but it is an important one. It’s the story of a woman who was put through hell, who fought tooth and nail for the right to exist, who atoned for her sins, and who became a leader for the downtrodden. This is the story of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen of India.
Phoolan Devi was born a mallah, one of the lowest of the low in the Indian caste system—so low that technically it isn’t even part of the caste system. Predestined for an untouchable life of burning dung for warmth and handling corpses, Phoolan was treated as barely human by virtually everyone outside of her immediate family. This included her cousin Mayadin, who came to be her childhood nemesis. He started by swindling Phoolan’s father out of his inheritance, then continued by trying to get rid of Phoolan in the traditional way: marrying her off.
But from her first breath, Phoolan would not be cowed, no matter how horrific the act. When Mayadin stole land from her father, she staged a sit-in on the property. She was removed only after Mayadin beat her unconscious with a brick. When, at 11, she was married off to a 33-year-old who raped and beat her, she did the unthinkable: she left him and walked a distance the width of Texas to return home.
Phoolan’s homecoming was bitter. Her parents, ashamed that she’d left her husband, told her to redeem her honor by committing suicide. When she approached the police for help with Mayadin’s crimes, they beat and gang-raped her. And to top it off, she was soon met at home by endless throngs of men coming to buy or take her services—courtesy of Mayadin and his friends spreading rumors that she was a sex worker.
With nothing else to lose, she began to fight fire with fire. She took a stick and beat the hell out of her unwanted visitors until they left. She showed up at Mayadin’s house at all hours, shrieking abuse at him in public. She made it very clear she would not be silenced—and so Mayadin had her kidnapped.
And then, surprisingly, things got better.
The kidnapping did not go as planned. Abducted by a gang of bandits with whom Mayadin was friendly, Phoolan, unexpectedly, found herself befriending the second-in-command, a man named Vikram. They became so close that when the head of the bandits tried to rape Phoolan, Vikram killed him and took control of the gang. Phoolan became his second-in-command. Despite being attracted to her, Vikram made it clear she did not have to sleep with him if she wasn’t inclined.
With Vikram by her side, Phoolan quickly established a reputation as a dacoit (bandit) to be reckoned with. She learned to handle a gun and joined the gang in robbing trains, kidnapping, ransoming, and the like. She swiftly got revenge on her rapist ex-husband by beating him and then mutilating his genitals. She then revenged herself on the police who wronged her by killing the one who had spread the word that she was a prostitute. Although she was now in charge of a small army of men from higher castes than her, many of them considered her to be a reincarnation of Durga, the goddess of feminine power. Soon enough, so did everyone else.
When word of Phoolan’s divine vengeance spread, Mayadin came begging for forgiveness, dressed in rags and offering a plate of money. Despite
wanting with every fiber of her being to kill him on the spot, Phoolan let him live. She was only talked down by the combined efforts of her parents and Vikram, the latter of whom she’d gradually come to respect, admire, and even love. They were eventually married, and in his arms she found true happiness.
It was not to last.
The end of Phoolan’s happiness came in the form of two brothers: Sri Ram and Lala Ram. The two, both former members of the gang, rejoined it after a recent release from prison. Aghast that Vikram had killed the old boss—who was a thakur, a much higher caste than mallahs like Vikram and Phoolan—the two began to plot revenge. One night as Phoolan lay in bed with Vikram, Sri Ram shot her beloved in the head. Then he took her.
The following paragraph is possibly the most difficult-to-read part of this entire book.
Sri Ram brought the blindfolded Phoolan to his home village of Behmai, where a group of men gang-raped her into unconsciousness day after day, for three weeks. At one point, Sri Ram stripped her naked and ordered her to fetch water from a nearby well, kicking her as she went. Eventually an elderly priest from a nearby village helped Phoolan flee, an act for which Sri Ram burned him alive. Phoolan, meanwhile, escaped from Behmai, disappearing into the night.
Seven months later, a small group of people dressed as police officers entered Behmai. After rounding up all the men of the town, their leader got on the megaphone and announced that they had come there for Sri Ram, and that if he was not produced instantly, everyone there would die. It was Phoolan Devi, back from the dead.
