The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  The documentary series of The African Americans is dedicated in memory of Henry Hampton. And so it is fitting that this book be dedicated in his memory as well, along with the dedication to William S. McFeely. Henry was born in 1940 and died all too soon, in 1998. He made 17 documentaries by my count, including the magnificent 14-episode series Eyes on the Prize, which was broadcast in two parts, the first covering the crucial years 1954 to 1965 of the civil rights movement, the second exploring its post-1965 afterlife. Eyes on the Prize is the gold standard of the historical documentary. Henry won seven Emmys, among a legion of other justly deserved awards and honors.

  When I moved to Harvard in 1991, Henry invited me to his offices at Blackside, his film company, in Boston’s South End. We hardly knew one another. Patiently, as if he had all the time in the world, he walked me through his stunningly efficient and elegant building, introducing me to his associates and partners, but more important, introducing me to the way in which documentary films are put together, from concept to filming, editing, and broadcast. He also talked to me about how to fund a film, as well as how to use academic consultants to produce the richest and most nuanced (and most historically accurate) documentaries possible. I’m not sure why he invited me to his studios or took so much of his time walking me through the production process. But by the time I left Blackside at the end of the day, I was hooked. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do so, but I was determined that one day, if at all humanly possible, I would become a documentary filmmaker myself. I owe my commitment to making documentaries about the African American experience to the inspiration of Henry Hampton.

  HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  January 28, 2013

  1

  AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS 1500–1540

  FOR GENERATIONS, WE UNDERSTOOD THE HISTORY OF NEW WORLD EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION PRIMARILY AS A SET OF EXPERIENCES OF CONQUEST AND PROGRESS, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT WITH the most dire consequences for the “primitive” native populations that the first European explorers and settlers encountered, and “justifiably” conquered or absorbed. And, the standard story continued, these ostensibly one-sided encounters, inevitable acts of human progress and “elevation,” laid the foundation for the creation of the modern Western world, the great civilization to which we in the West are heirs.

  How can one measure all that was lost in the systematic destruction or dislocation of the civilizations of the peoples whom we know today as the Native Americans?

  How can one fully take the toll in human suffering and the irrecoverable losses to world civilization resulting from the four centuries of obliteration of the Native American peoples, beginning with the conquest of the Taino on the island of Hispaniola and the Arawak and the Caribs of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, beginning in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, extending to the domination and subjection of the great Inca and Aztec civilizations in the 16th century, and culminating in the dreadful Trail of Tears in the decade of the 1830s?

  But as Aristotle reports Agathon, the Athenian tragic poet, as saying, “Not even God can change the past.” And while we certainly cannot change what has already happened, we as scholars, however, are duty bound to preserve the past by recording it in all of its complexity. Part of that process is restoring to the historical record the actions and words of the human beings who, collectively, made that past. Restoring the role that persons of African descent have played in the creation of the saga of Western civilization has been the motivation for our creation of The African Americans documentary series, and the writing of this book.

  The re-peopling of the Western Hemisphere, through a series of voluntary and involuntary migrations over the past 500 years, was never a one-sided process, and it was never solely a European experience. It may come as a surprise to many Americans to learn that African people played an essential part in this process from the very beginning. According to one source, Alonso Pietro, the pilot of Columbus’s ship the Niña in 1492, was a mulatto (a person of mixed black and white ancestry), and in 1502 the great Italian explorer was accompanied by a black cabin boy named Diego.

  The year after Columbus returned from his final voyage to the Americas in 1504, groups of Africans began arriving in the Caribbean, and several Africans had arrived in 1502, brought to Hispaniola (the island composed of modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by the Spanish governor of the island. In 1508, Ponce de León, usually remembered for his explorations of Florida in search of the legendary king of Ethiopia, Prester John, and his fabled fountain of youth, took armed black men with him to conquer Puerto Rico. Diego Velázquez from 1511 to 1512 employed other Africans to help seize Cuba. In fact, Velázquez advised King Ferdinand that “many black slaves” had assisted him in his conquest of the island.

  Ultimately, by 1867, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, approximately 12.5 million Africans had been sold into New World slavery. Of the 11 million or so Africans who survived the Middle Passage, only about 388,000 were shipped directly to what became the United States.1 The African slave trade to the New World, the largest forced migration in human history, shaped the course of colonization and spawned unique Afro-European societies and cultures stretching from North America to Tierra del Fuego. Without the African presence, the history of the hemisphere—and that of the rest of the modern world—would have been vastly different.

  IF NOT ALL OF THE FIRST EXPLORERS AND CONQUERORS OF NEW SPAIN WERE EUROPEAN, IT IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT—and surprising to many of us—to note that not all of the first Africans who assisted the Spanish and Portuguese came as slaves. An untold number of free people of African descent—black conquistadors born in Africa or on the Iberian Peninsula—also accompanied Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés and Ponce de León, two of the famed explorers of the vast region that would become modern Mexico and the western and southern regions of the United States. And, as we might expect, their exploits were just as heroic and just as problematic as those of their fellow conquistadors. But far more Africans came with the Spanish and the Portuguese as slaves, servants with varying degrees of freedom, attendants, or armed adventurers.

  While the number of African explorers is impossible to determine, they participated, in some way, in virtually all of the Spanish expeditions in the New World in the 16th century. These black conquistadors set an example for subsequent racial relations throughout the entire Spanish colonial experience, living their daily lives with degrees of complexity that rarely would be achieved by black men and women in the early English settlements in the Caribbean and in North America. Indeed, wherever Spain set its flag of conquest in the Americas, Africans helped hold the pennant. They participated in the exploration of the lands that would become modern-day Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, and Chile, as well as Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Men such as Juan Garrido, Esteban, Jan Rodrigues, Gaspar Yanga, Juan Bardales, Juan García, and Juan Beltrán are just a few of the better-known people of African descent who helped transform the Western Hemisphere.2

  Perhaps one of the best known and most colorful of the free black conquistadors was Juan Garrido. Born about 1480 in West Africa, Garrido either was sold to Portuguese slave traders or somehow traveled on his own to Lisbon, where about 10 percent of the city was of African descent. In about 1495, he moved to Seville. There, as a free man, perhaps in the employ of a Spaniard named Pedro Garrido, he joined the 1503 expedition of Governor Nicolás de Ovando to Hispaniola—the first of many adventures.3

  In a 1538 petition to the Spanish Crown asking for financial support for his services and loyalty, Garrido described himself as a free black resident of Mexico City, who for the last 30 years or more had volunteered his services to Spain. “I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out … all of which I did at my own expense….”4 Garrido, along with many other free and enslaved blacks, had, in fact, participated in some of the famed expeditions by Spa
in against Native American populations. For example, in 1508, he and another free black man, Juan González, joined Ponce de León’s expedition against Puerto Rico. A third black man, a mixed-race conquistador named Francisco Mejías, played a key role in establishing that island’s first ranches. At his untimely death at the hands of Carib Indians, Mejías possessed more than 200 pesos in gold.

  Juan Garrido armed with a pike and attending to the horse of Hernán Cortés, who is receiving an honorific neckband from Aztec officials. Akg-images.

  Immediately after his Puerto Rican adventure, Garrido engaged in gold mining and secured several black slaves to assist him. With native populations decimated by European-induced diseases, labor shortages plagued Spanish efforts to mine, farm, and establish sugar plantations. With a keen eye to the main chance, Garrido joined Spaniards who raided the Caribbean islands of Guadalupe, Dominica, and Santa Cruz in search of Carib slaves, Native Americans with a reputation for fierceness and cannibalism. In 1513 (and again in 1521), Garrido rejoined Ponce de León as he explored and claimed the island of Bimini and all of Florida for Spain, thereby becoming the first known African to set foot on what was to become the United States. Because we know his name and the date of his landing in Florida, in a sense we can say that Juan Garrido was the first African American, and it is somehow fitting and a bit ironic that this book is being published in the 500th anniversary year of Garrido’s arrival in what is now the continental United States.

  Later, Garrido made his way to Cuba, where he joined forces with Hernán Cortés and took part, along with other free Africans and slaves, in the 1519 invasion of Mexico and the subjugation of the Aztec empire. In a few extraordinary examples, images of Garrido survive showing him next to Cortés or holding the reins of the Spaniard’s horse. In one image published in 1581, Garrido stands in military bearing, shouldering a pike, guarding Cortés as he encounters Aztec emissaries. Older historical accounts interpreted these images as proof that Garrido was a slave, but in fact he was free. Not only was he free but, despite his pleading of impoverishment to the king of Spain in 1538, he had been handsomely rewarded for his services to Cortés with land and paid positions, especially as the doorman or guard of the Mexico City government and a caretaker of one of the city’s aqueducts.

  During his time in Mexico City, he engaged in more gold mining and additional expeditions within New Spain, and in 1533 joined again with Cortés in one final journey, which took him all the way to Baja California and the Pacific. He returned to his home in Mexico City in 1536 and died sometime after writing his famed petition, leaving behind a wife, probably a woman of native ethnicity, a family, and an extraordinary legacy.5

  GARRIDO’S STORY, THAT OF A FREE BLACK MAN AND A CONQUISTADOR, IS DIFFICULT TO MATCH. However, for sheer drama, none of the recorded experiences of the first Africans in the New World can equal that of the Moroccan-born black explorer known as Esteban. While his early years remain something of a mystery, he began his career in the Americas in 1528 with a journey to Florida in the ill-fated expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. He would not return to the Spanish colony in Mexico for another eight years, along with only three other survivors of the 300 men who originally began the expedition, and after walking through the virgin American wilderness, across the continent for a total of some 15,000 miles.6

  In April 1528, five vessels under the command of Narváez, the designated governor of the uncolonized region of Florida, left Havana, Cuba, and arrived in the region of Tampa Bay the next month. Narváez divided his force, sending about 100 or more up the coast while he kept 300 others to march inland in search of legendary cities of gold. By July, having suffered numerous losses, the party reached the area around modern-day Tallahassee. Dogged by oppressive heat and skilled Apalachee archers, the expedition fled west to the Gulf of Mexico in search of their ships. The vessels, however, had long since given up on the mission and returned to Cuba. Stranded, the men constructed rafts and set out to reach Mexico. According to Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the oddly named treasurer of the expedition:

  The work on these was done by the only carpenter we had, and progressed so rapidly that, beginning on the fourth day of August, on the twentieth day of the month of September, five barges of twenty-two elbow lengths each were ready, caulked with palmetto oakum and tarred with pitch, which a Greek called Don Teodoro made from certain pines. Of the husk of palmettos, and of the tails and manes of the horses we made ropes and tackles, of our shirts sails, and of the junipers that grew there we made the oars….7

  For a month and a half the survivors drifted along the coast, with men dying from starvation and drowning, others killed by local Native Americans, until they reached a sandbar, near present-day Galveston, Texas. About 16 men, including Esteban, his owner Andrés Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca, survived the winter, some resorting to cannibalism, only to be enslaved by Karankawa Indians and remain in bondage until 1534. Twelve of the men died, while the remaining four—Dorantes, Esteban, Cabeza de Vaca, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado—escaped. They encountered friendlier Indians, and “Estevanico” or “the negro”—as Cabeza de Vaca alternatively referred to Esteban in his narrative—lodged with the tribe’s medicine man, where, no doubt, he learned much that proved useful to his survival and subsequent renown.

  They encountered other tribes and gained fame in the region as medicine men. While the first Indians had killed their companions and enslaved Esteban and the others, the newer tribes treated them as heroes and, according to Cabeza de Vaca, “They begged us on their knees not to go. But we went and left them in tears at our departure, as it pained them greatly.” The men learned several native languages and cultural practices, astounding the inhabitants with stories of their God’s powers, claiming themselves to be “Sons of the Sun.”8

  What they did during years of wandering in the Southwest is uncertain. Accounts are conflicting, but sources credit one of the men as laboring successfully as a merchant, brokering trade deals among the various tribes. The strongest evidence points toward Cabeza de Vaca, who claimed as much in his own account of the ordeal:

  I could no longer stand the life I was compelled to lead. Among many other troubles I had to pull the eatable roots out of the water and from among the canes where they were buried in the ground, and from this my fingers had become so tender that the mere touch of a straw caused them to bleed. The reeds would cut me in many places, because many were broken and I had to go in among them with the clothing I had on, of which I have told. This is why I went to work and joined the other Indians. Among these I improved my condition a little by becoming a trader, doing the best in it I could, and they gave me food and treated me well. They entreated me to go about from one part to another to get the things they needed, as on account of constant warfare there is neither travel nor barter in the land.9

  Other members of their party served as slaves of the Native Americans they encountered—people whom, ironically, they would have enslaved had they had the opportunity. According to one survivor, “We were forced to travel up and down that coast barefoot and without clothing, in the burning summer sun. Our business was to carry loads of wood and drinking water and anything else the Indians wanted and we dragged their canoes through the swamps for them.”10

  After three of their companions were murdered by their Indian captors, Esteban, Dorantes, and Alonso del Castillo conspired to escape—Cabeza de Vaca remained entirely isolated from the others. Esteban and his master Dorantes met up in the Texas backcountry. Esteban, however, decided that life with the Iguace Indians was preferable to his previous life under Spanish slavery. His work as a medicine man gave him a sense of security and importance that he had never known, while Dorantes, a white man, had remained largely enslaved. Although Esteban and Castillo managed to carve out a living among the Indians, in 1533 they began plotting their escape, which was only possible during prickly-pear season since it was the one food available to them on the trail. Esteban led the effort and was informed by friendl
y Indians that another of their kind was nearby—who turned out to be Cabeza de Vaca. The four, by extraordinary luck, reunited and fled. Esteban, who had great facility with several Indian languages, won the assistance of many Native American tribes as they traveled, who gave the ragged band food without which they surely would have perished. As one historian wrote, “Esteban became the agent of the survivors’ constant movement, negotiating with the Indians, choosing the roads they would take, the byways they would explore, and the nations and tribes they would meet.”11

  They were taken in by the Coahuiltecan Indians and quickly earned reputations as wondrous healers, especially the dark-skinned Esteban. Word spread among many different tribes about the powers of these men who seemed to emerge from nowhere and could cure pains and make the lame walk. After three years, in July 1536, Esteban and one of his companions stumbled upon a Spanish slaving expedition. The Spaniards stared at the two men: one black and the other with long, almost white hair, both adorned with feather headdresses, and deer pelts, carrying the rattles of Indian shamans, and accompanied by about 600 Indian followers. When the white man—Cabeza de Vaca—spoke in perfect Spanish, demanding to be taken to the group’s commander, he left them stunned, unable to comprehend the scene before them. The two other survivors soon appeared, putting an end to the eight-year ordeal that saw the men travel about 15,000 miles through modern-day Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Once back in Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca and the other Spaniards claimed much credit for their survival, but Esteban’s daring resourcefulness was mostly responsible, and his nearly coal-black appearance made him, to the northern tribes, a healer of enormous standing.