Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend
Author:Camilla Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190673086
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-09-05T16:00:00+00:00
8
The Grandchildren
1570s–1620s
A grandmother speaks to her grandchildren. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, Codex Mendoza, MS. Arch. Selden. A.1,folio 71r.
The bells were chiming six o’clock in the evening of Thursday, May 3, 1612, as people began to gather at the Royal Accounting Office.1 The doors were unlocked. Inside the great stone chamber of the first floor, twenty-nine decapitated black bodies were piled. Relatives of the dead had been allowed to spread cloths over them earlier in the day, after they were cut down from the gallows from which they had been hanged and their heads placed on spikes, but the flies still swarmed around them. The people who had come now, at the hour spread about by word of mouth—black men and women and Spanish friars and a number of Indians, all of whom wanted to help—at first found themselves in shock. They said little. Don Domingo, or Chimalpahin, an Indian who worked at a nearby church, saw that they had no proper biers for so many, but the families had brought straw mats, taken from beds, floors, and walls, to help carry the bodies.2 They began to walk towards the Hospital of Our Lady of Mercy, where they had been told they would be allowed to bury the dead. Perhaps to give expression to their feelings, perhaps to prevent any hostile Spaniards from stopping them, the friars in the procession began to sing. The Christian hymns carried in the evening air.
***
Chimalpahin was a reserved and self-contained man, but he was nonetheless an astute observer. He descended from a line of observers and social critics—it was a relative of one of his ancestors, Quecholcohuatzin, or Flamingo Snake, who had come from Chalco to this very spot more than a century earlier to protest the treatment that the Mexica were meting out to the Chalca people.3 The Chalca, despite being inhabitants of the central valley, had been treated like the most ordinary prisoners of war and sacrificed with little honor; his ancestors hadn’t liked it and had come to sing a protest song. Now the Spaniards were behaving comparably: they were abusing the power fate had given them, apparently without any sense of shame. Once again, a song, a hymn, that said implicitly, “We know that this is wrong, and you do, too,” was the only weapon available.
This was far from the first time that Chimalpahin, the Nahua, had walked side by side with a black man. As early as the 1570s, the decade in which he was born, the African slave trade to Mexico had emerged as a major phenomenon. Over the years, more and more enslaved people had been brought from the faraway continent. (The bookish Chimalpahin went to read about Africa in a popular almanac.)4 In fact, until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the New World.5 They were auctioned off in the port of Veracruz. Most were sent to work in the silver mines or on sugar plantations, but a
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