African Slaves and the Witchcraft Trials in Cartagena De Indies
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History (ISSN: 1094-902X ) Volume 8, Number 2 (Spring 2005) Between the Devil and the Inquisition: African Slaves and the Witchcraft Trials in Cartagena de Indies Heather Rachelle White, Princeton University ©2005 Heather Rachelle White. Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author. In 1620, five black slaves were brought to the to confess, with a sense of dramatic Inquisition Tribunal in Cartagena de Indies, a confrontation: port city of New Granada, from the mining town of Zaragoza.1 These four women and one man Standing on her feet, she testified that were all “bozales,” first generation Africans, one hundred blacks of different nations, and all were charged with participating in a witches, men and women, alive and dead, diabolical sect of witches. Of the five, the four the same ones this criminal saw female defendants, Leonor, Giomar, Polonía, performing the rituals and ceremonies… and María Linda, eventually testified to and leaving the junta carried by the devil practicing diabolical witchcraft. The one man, in [groups of] twenty and twenty, divided Cosme Negro, persistently refused to testify, in troupes according to different even through physical torture. Deciding he was plantations, where [the devil] ordered innocent, the inquisitors dismissed the charges them to do all the harm they could. And against him.2 The trial proceedings recorded the this [witness] and the rest of them killed confession by Leonor, the first of the defendants the little children, sucking the blood through the naval[;] and when they were adults, [they sucked the blood] through the nostrils.3 1AUTHOR’S NOTE: Acknowledgements to Andrea Valenzuela for her assistance translating the tangled language of some parts of the trial transcripts. New Granada was the Spanish colonial name for the region that is presently the country of Columbia. 2 The transcript from the trial of Cosme Negro is very 3 “...testifica al pie, de cien negros y negras de brief, and contains little information outside of his diferentes naciones, brujos y brujas, vivos y muertos, refusal to confess and his acquittal. Because of this, los cuales vio esta rea hacer los ritos y ceremonias... y my analysis centers on the longer testimonies of the salir de las juntas llevados del demonio de veinte en four women. Anna María Splendianni and others, veinte, divididos en tropas por diferentes rancherías, eds. Cincuenta Años de Inquisición en el Tribunal de donde se les mandaba hiciesen todo el dañó que Cartagena de Indias, 1610-1660. Tomo II (Santafé pudiesen y que a los niños chiquitos los mataban, ésta de Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1997), y los demás, chupándoles la sangre por los ombligos y 232-233. a los grandecitos por las narices.” Ibid, 215. 1 The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History (ISSN: 1094-902X ) Volume 8, Number 2 (Spring 2005) The words of Leonor’s confession appeared and mining of gold.6 reappeared in reports from the Inquisitor Juan Mañozca, who presided over the trial, and in In the reports of these officials, the outcome of letters from the bishops of Cuba and Panama, as these trials demonstrated the existence of a vast they repeated the outcome of this trial and threat to the land and labor of the colony, voiced their alarm over the dangerous threat of stemming from the unholy alliance between witchcraft conspiracy among the slaves in the communities black slaves and the Enemy of the region. The bishop of Cuba wrote about the Faith. “…the dangers of witches in the district of Cartagena,” and the bishop of Panama echoed This paper examines the transcripts from the the concerns over “the great numbers of witches trials of Leonor, Guiomar, Polonía and María and people who have made pacts with the Linda, and it explicates these texts as products of devil.”4 Inquisitor Mañozca’s lengthy letter a circumscribed and power-laced encounter claimed, “these lands are widely infested with between Inquisition officials and African slaves. male and female witches and especially the In these documents, the defendants confessed to mines of Zaragoza and its surroundings... where defiantly renouncing the Christian faith, making some two thousand slaves are living... among ritual pacts with the devil, and violently whom this diabolical sect has spread.”5 He assaulting the land and slave labor of their paraphrased Leonor’s testimony as evidence of masters. These testimonies appear to give these the numbers of these witches and their acts of women voice to a ferocious resistance; however, destructive violence: that voice emanated nearly entirely from the perceptions and the pens of Spanish officials of [There are] more than one hundred the court, who interrogated, translated, blacks of all nations, each one that interpreted and transcribed the statements of knows of the juntas and the these women. Through the long processes of the congregations that do these evils on top witchcraft trials, scripts from European of heresy and apostasy. There are a demonological texts were inscribed upon the great many of them, and some of them bodies and testimonies of the defendants. Thus, kill, maim, and dismember the adult this paper analyzes the witchcraft trials and the men and women, and drown the processes of accusation, interrogation, and children. [They] fell and destroy the response, as a site for the production of these fruits of the earth and impede the witchcraft practices. Nevertheless, these trials also required the cooperation, albeit forced, of the defendants, and I also analyze these texts for the tactics used by these women to construct 4 Carta del Obispo de Cuba, 26 Septiembre, 1623. testimonies that both minimized their culpability Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, Libro 1009, and satisfied the expectations of their folio 288; Carta del Obispo de Panamá. 16 Abril, interrogators. Ultimately, all four women 1619, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, Libro admitted to their willful complicity in a sect of 1009, folio 23. witches led by the devil. Their compliance 5 “Apéndice 2,” in Fermina Álvarez Alonso, La Inquisición en Cartagena de Indias durante el Siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1999), 315. 6 “Ibid,” 315. 2 The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History (ISSN: 1094-902X ) Volume 8, Number 2 (Spring 2005) secured an alleviated sentence of “perpetual widespread, he did report that the rituals of jail” rather than death, which was inflicted only various African peoples were demonic in origin. upon the unrepentant. Ironically, their coerced He named several nations who purportedly submission also secured their bodies and voices practiced demonic sacrifices, including some that as evidence of the threatening power of black sacrificed humans and had the custom of eating diabolical witches, a specter that has long human flesh. He also noted one nation where haunted Africanist discourses about the cultural women performed “acts” with the devil, and he practices of African peoples and their also described another region where “in these descendants.7 parts the devil has many ministers, who with spells and portents destroy whatever they Early modern Europe already had long-standing want.”10 discourses that associated Africans peoples and the devil, and many Spanish traditions, both Fears of African witchcraft also widely circulated elite and popular, linked dark skin with the outside the writings by educated elites and had devil. Witches tried in Logroño, Spain, testified particular resonance with popular Spanish that the devil appeared as “a dark-skinned man understandings of witches as practitioners of with wide, glaring horrible eyes.”8 The tradition mallificium. Incidents of illness and death of representing evil with the color black kindled fears of supernatural dealings, and developed with the frequent portrayal of the Spanish colonists often suspected the enmity of devil as a black man in Spanish medieval art.9 non-European populations around them as the Contemporaneous colonial literature also cause of these misfortunes. The travel narratives queried possible demonic origins for African- of Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa observed the originated cultural practices. Father Alonso de regions around Zaragoza to be peculiarly Sandoval, a Jesuit priest in Cartagena, wrote a inflicted with poor health, and he attributed it to lengthy work, De instauranda Aethiopum salute, on the “nature, religion, customs, rites, and superstitions of the blacks.” Though Sandoval 10 “en estas partes tiene el demonio muchos ministros did not claim that the influence of the devil was que con hechizos y brebajes acaban cuanto quieren...” Alonso de Sandoval, De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute: El Mundo de la Esclavitud Negra 7 I use “Africanist” here according to the meaning that en America. (Bogota: Biblioteca de la Presidencia de Toni Morrison suggests, “…as a term for the Columbia, 1956) 30, 67, 70-73, 101. Sandoval at denotative and connotative blackness that African times adopts the format used by Jose de Acosta, who peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire writes about the religions of the indigenous peoples of range of views, assumptions, readings and New Spain, equating indigenous paganism with misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning idolatry and an inversion of Christian faith. See Jose about these people.” Toni Morrison, Playing in the de Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum Salute (Cologne, Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1596); See Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 6-7. World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New 8 Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 25-27 for Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition. Acosta’s work on diabolism, and Tulio Aristizabal Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980, 92. Giraldo, S.J., Retazos de Historia: Los Jesuitas en 9 Eileen E.