Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

including branches and cane stalks. Some functioned more as weirs to trap fish as they swam in or as the tide went out, whereas others kept alive fish caught through other means, such as cast nets.³⁸ The word crawl itself has West African roots, via the sixteenth-century Dutch approximation kraal.³⁹

      The presence and actions of Indians and Africans fishing from Bermuda populated the realms of the other-than-human as well as the tables of their English masters. Fishing went beyond feeding the physical body. In the Taínoan cultures, it had associations with the origins of the universe and was as much about maintaining the spiritual vitality of the community as it was about satisfying fleshly hunger.⁴⁰ Fishing was thus an occasion to interact with the forces of the water, of the weather, and in the fish themselves through rituals designed to coax those other-than-human persons and ancestors into providing abundance. Fish motifs figured prominently on stone collars worn by Taínoan caciques during ritual performances of their leadership such as areíto dances and feasts. Lucayans made effigy vessels in the shape of the poisonous porcupinefish, denoting their interest in the fish as more than just food to feed the physical body. One such vessel was recovered in a location where the main activity was to make ritually significant beads from a shell that displayed the highly sought-after quality of brilliance, or guanín, which indicated a concentration of power and energy. This thorny jewelbox shell, Chana sarda, retained its bright scarlet color for centuries, making it particularly valued.⁴¹ Small offshore islands, or cays, in the Bahamas were often located in the middle of productive fishing grounds. Nearly every cay in that archipelago contains an archaeological site with evidence of ritual activities. Other Taínoans besides Lucayans also saw places with a rich fish supply as containing spiritual power because of that abundance. Ile à Rat, a cay off western Hispaniola, has a similar mixture of a high concentration of fish bones and ritual objects, indicating the multiple ways its former inhabitants worked to ensure the health of all.⁴²

      Figure 1.3. Manioc processing with a black woman (“Negresse”) performing most steps. This engraving is based on one that appeared in Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Francois (Paris, 1667), 2:419. Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’America, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1724), plate before p. 127. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

      Fishing held an important place among coastal peoples in West Central and West Africa. In West Central Africa, ritual fishing expeditions were part of the accession of a new ruler, in part because of the association with water and the connotation of beginnings and rebirth. The first fish was sent to the leader’s wife, who prepared it with her own hands and then gave of her labor back to the community, to the fishermen, who ate the fish. Dancing and ritual chants marked this ceremonial meal and harnessed the power inherent in water, directing it in ways to benefit the community. Some Kongo initiation rites also included ritual fishing after the rebirth of the initiates into their new roles. The Italian mathematician Filippo Pigafetta reported the Portuguese explorer Duarte Lopes’s descriptions of proscriptions around types of fish, so that some “Fishes Royall” were reserved for leaders. In Guinea, fishermen honored their ancestors by decorating their canoes with spiritually powerful grains and colors of paint.⁴³ Even though Indian and African fishermen in Bermuda were no longer fishing entirely for themselves, perhaps they persisted in approaching the other-than-human persons associated with water and others essential to a good catch—more than ever, they were in need of an abundance of fish, since they were not able to control the disposition of the fruits of their labor. And in the place shaped like a fishhook, hundreds of miles from any other land, the resident forces seemed to have been appeased enough to continue to provide the creatures that filled the belly and connected to the beginning of time.

      “Sundrye things . . . for the Plantacion, as Cattle Cassadoe Sugar Canes”

      The same instructions that directed Governor Daniel Tucker to procure pearl divers also specified a search for “cassadoe,” or cassava, a tuber already recognized as essential to the success of European colonizing ventures in the Americas and tied to the growth of the transatlantic slave trade.⁴⁴ Also called bitter manioc, cassava contains high levels of a poisonous alkaloid that, when ingested, turns into cyanide. Leaching out the toxin was a time-consuming process, and it would have taken up a significant proportion of bonded laborers’—especially women’s—time. The tuber had to be peeled before grating or shredding it. The resulting pulp was pressed in some way, either in a tube basket or through a cloth, to remove as much of the poisonous juice as possible. The paste was then dried, further ground as necessary to break up the larger pieces, and toasted or baked over a fire. The juice was boiled to neutralize the poison and then used as the basis for pepper pot, a dish with chili peppers and other vegetables, as well as animal protein of meat or fish. Jean-Baptiste Labat’s account of his time in the French Caribbean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century includes a detailed engraving of the stages of manioc processing; its caption specifically notes a black woman (“Negresse”) performing most of them (figure 1.3).⁴⁵

      Figure 1.4. “Method of making bread.” The indigenous women shown were likely making bread from maize, but the steps for making cassava bread were very similar. Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del mondo nuovo (Venice, 1565), 56v. (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

      Although Labat’s depiction is of a place under the control of a different European power and from a later time period, the gendered division of labor accords with earlier descriptions of task distribution related to manioc. The French Jesuit Jean Baptiste Du Tertre used an engraving with very similar figures set in the yard of a large plantation in his 1667 Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Francois. Among Taínoan peoples, both men and women cultivated and collected manioc tubers, but women were responsible for processing them.⁴⁶ Because of its placement in the text, a woodcut from Girolamo Benzoni’s 1565 History of the New World probably depicts women making bread from maize, but his accompanying text also details the steps for making bread from manioc, preparations that would have looked quite similar (figure 1.4).⁴⁷ The tuber was an import to Africa, but there, too, women were largely responsible for processing raw plant materials into edible food. Antonio Cavazzi’s impression of the division of agricultural labor in West Central Africa was that “all the work is left to the women, they alone hoe the ground.” The English traveler Richard Jobson opined that no women could be “under more servitude” than those he observed along the River Gambia, where the “very painefull” work of separating edible grain from the husk was “onely womens worke.”⁴⁸

      The actions required to make manioc safe to eat would have carried divergent meanings for Indians and Africans. For Taínoans, the starchy substance was food from the gods. Their cultural hero Deminán had wrested the life-giving root from the primary god, Yaya, by theft, an action that was a key part of bringing culture to humans. One of the aspects of fertility held the title “Yucahuguamá,” or “Lord of the Yuca,” yuca being the Taínoan word for manioc.⁴⁹ Another indigenous people so identified themselves with this original food that they described themselves as Kalina or Karina, “manioc eaters.”⁵⁰ The tuber carried entirely different meanings of commodification in the context of Africa and the transatlantic slave trade, in which traders used it to victual soldiers and slave ships. Its flour, which was less susceptible to spoilage or infestation than were European grain flours, became a staple of human trafficking in the sixteenth century. For many Native peoples in Portuguese-controlled areas of Brazil in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, manioc became yet another example of the labor their masters extracted from them, rather than being a means of self-identification. Over the next century, slave traders switched to cultivating the crop in Angola, where they assigned the work to children and the elderly. Despite missionary Antonio Cavazzi’s review of the widespread manioc as “optimal sustenance,” enslaved Africans made to raise the crop were reminded daily that others strove to control their bodies, that the slave trade had made the very act of subsistence into a performance of cultural alienation rather than affirmation.