Backland

Las Alesitas and Potosí

Las Alesitas is a street fair/market that stretches for about half a mile on Sucre’s Avenida Manuel Molina. On Monday we go there with Carlos, the young man from the campo who lived with us four years ago, and a Colombian friend of his. Most of the vendors sell miniatures: houses, pets, food, drinks, cars, trucks, people, money—almost anything you desire can be bought. The idea is to buy something that you desire, place it in your home, and it will grow into the real, full-size equivalent within a year. The origins of the custom derive from an ancient Andean tradition in which miniature animal figures were buried with the expectation that they would grow into real animals.

Downhill from the market fortune tellers sit in a row. Besides cards, they use two other methods. One fills a glass half full of beer, tears a hole in the top of an egg, pours the egg white in the beer, and reads the shapes that emerge among the bubbles. Another pours molten tin from a hot pan into a bucket of cold water, then takes out the resulting mass, which looks a bit like a gondola, and reads the bumps and forms on the strange, glistening sculpture.

On Tuesday, Ryan, Paola, Karen, and I visit Cayara, a 16th-century hacienda not far from Potosí. (Ryan and Paola are close friends: Ryan is an American potter, bodybuilder, and former Peace Corps administrator who has been in Bolivia for twenty-eight years and lives alone in an extraordinary house he has built overlooking Sucre, and Paola is a young Bolivian who was born in Potosí, works as a tour guide, and loves to travel.) Two relatives of the owner, Arturo and Yvette, whom we had met in Sucre on Monday night, serve us a lunch made mostly of food grown on the grounds or nearby and spend a few hours showing us the rooms, books, paintings, furniture, and implements there. The most outstanding for me were the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books bound in vellum, the pre-Columbian pottery and artifacts, and the ornate furniture and paintings. It’s astonishing to consider that all this work, all museum-worthy, is still in private hands—and in good ones.

Potosí is a puzzle. It was once the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, with two-and-a-half times the population of Paris; now it has only about three hundred thousand residents. It is the most labyrinthine city I’ve ever been in, with narrow and winding streets and few thoroughfares. Overlooking it is a mountain, Cerro Rico, which was once the world’s primary source of silver; now there are so many mines in the mountain—some six thousand, with over twenty thousand miners working there—that the mountain has begun to collapse. The highest major city in the world, it is the historical site of almost unbelievable misery, with countless miners losing their health and their lives. This history lends it a kind of tension and excitement similar to that of Rome, Jerusalem, and Berlin.

Of the several foods that are characteristic of Potosí, perhaps the two best known are salteñas and k’allapurka. Salteñas are a lot like empanadas: round pieces of dough filled with meat, vegetables, potatoes, and eggs, folded and crimped on top, then baked in a wood-fired oven. They’re common in Sucre and La Paz too, but the most traditional ones in Potosí have thinner, unsweetened dough, slightly burnt, while the ones I’ve had elsewhere are too sweet for my taste. In the salteñeria we go to in Potosí, they bring them out of outdoor ovens on huge trays and customers take from one to a half-dozen. K’allapurka is a porridge-like soup made of corn meal, meat, potatoes, and spices; a black rock that has been heated in a fire is put in the middle so that the soup bubbles like a volcano. You have to use special igneous rocks, since river rocks, for example, will explode when heated.

On Wednesday we visit the sixteenth-century church of San Francisco, home to the oldest sculpture in Bolivia (a striking 1550 Christ on the cross made of cactus wood and human hair) and an extensive crypt; the tour takes us to the roof, with its dozens of tile-shingled domes. And we climb up the Torre de la Compañía, an eighteenth-century tower in the characteristic mestizo style, with spiral columns and sculptured arches.

Here are a few photos; I will post more soon.

Manhattan, as seen from Bushwick

Jacky in Brooklyn Heights

Thalia in Brooklyn Heights

Ryan's house in Sucre

The roof of the church of San Francisco in Potosí (Paola's photo)

A street in Potosí, as seen from the roof of the church

The Torre de Compañía and surrounding buildings, Potosí

The church of Santo Domingo in Potosí

A house in Potosí

 

Dream Facts

I dreamed I was walking on a grassy bluff in Mobile Bay and saw three stone houses occupied by African American families. I learned that these were the oldest houses in the Mississippi Valley, the Stone Houses, built in 1615.

This is what comes of reading and writing about Barracoon and fondly remembering my exploration of the Mobile area three summers ago. Of course, in my dream I didn’t realize that Mobile is not in the Mississippi Valley; nor that the oldest house in the Mississippi Valley was made of wood in 1757 in Pascagoula; nor that the oldest house in Mobile was made of brick in 1827.

Sometimes I want to live in a world of dream facts. I want to be able to Google them and put them in my books.

But then I remember how happy my waking is when my nightmares get everything wrong.

"A thudding, shapeless text"

After a four-year hiatus, during which I only blogged about investing, I have decided to commence blogging again about literature, music, food, drink, race, religion, philosophy, and my life . . .

The New Yorker writes of Jeffrey Stewart’s new biography of Alain Locke, The New Negro: “At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances.”

This goes too far. Stewart’s is by no means an excellent biography. But I like it better than the previous one, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth’s Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Stewart digs up some great material, delves deeply into questions of sex, forthrightly calls Locke out on his condescension and misogyny, and fills his book with terrific portraits of those with whom Locke parried. My favorite part of the book is Stewart’s multilayered attack on the art collector Albert Barnes. Stewart not only really understands Locke in a way that I think Harris and Molesworth failed to, but understands Locke’s peculiar milieu. I found very interesting, for example, Stewart’s argument that Jessie Fauset, editor of the Crisis and sometime lover of W. E. B. Du Bois, had a crush on Langston Hughes despite the twenty-year difference in their ages.

But remarkably, despite the length of the book, there are important things missing. Zora Neale Hurston studied with Locke at Howard, where he encouraged her literary ambitions, but this gets only a brief mention. And utterly inexplicably (unless I missed it), Stewart leaves out altogether Locke’s voyage to Germany in 1932, when he traveled with Ralph Bunche on the same boat as Hughes and a large contingent of African Americans bound for Russia to make a Communist Party–backed movie about racism in the US. On board, Locke disparaged Hughes and his friends viciously in letters he sent to his patron, Charlotte Mason, and when he bumped into Langston, the latter refused to shake hands.

Stewart also gets a number of things wrong. For instance, Hurston did not attend the 1924 Civic Club dinner that was more or less the “coming out party” for the Harlem Renaissance; the anecdote Stewart tells of Zora’s behavior that night happened more than a year later, after the May 1925 Opportunity awards dinner.

But with all its flaws, the book offers many riches, and creditably makes a fascinating figure more fascinating than he has ever been before.

And beyond that, is there a real point to The New Yorker's disparagement? Even if it were entirely just, I fail to see what such an extraordinary dismissal of a book accomplishes besides making its writer look mean-spirited.

My Bolivian diary, entry #42

May 10, 2014

The Chiquitania, a vast area, stretches from Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s biggest city, to the Brazilian border four hundred miles east. Its biggest town is probably San Ignacio, with about thirty thousand people; there are only about a half-dozen other towns with over a thousand. In short, this huge expanse is largely uninhabited. Only one road across it is paved, and that only since five years ago; another paved road links Santa Cruz with San Xavier and Concepción, but it’s in awful shape. The rest of the few roads are dirt. Mainly flat, low, hot, lush, and wooded, it does feature some lovely rolling hills with palms and even a few spectacular mountains; to the east and north are tropical wetlands and jungles that are almost impossible to access. But what makes this region so interesting is its history and culture.

In the early eighteenth century, Jesuits, mostly highly cultured and ascetic Germans, established a dozen or so missions there. In each, two priests worked hand-in-hand with hundreds of indigenous people to build wooden churches (one, in San José, is of stone) full of wooden sculptures, with elaborately frescoed walls; in the baroque style, everything was decorated to the hilt. They also collaborated on music that followed the baroque examples the priests brought from Europe, incorporating indigenous elements.

Then, in 1767, the Catholic church terminated the Jesuit order, in part so that the Portuguese could enslave the indigenous people whom the Jesuits were protecting. The Jesuits left; many of the indigenous were taken to the mines in Potosí. But the few who were left maintained the missions, later with the help of Franciscans. The grander stone missions of Paraguay and Brazil fell into ruin. But in Bolivia, the mission towns—and six of the original churches—still survive.

Between the 1960s and 1980s all six, plus one in San Ignacio that had collapsed in 1948, were restored and rebuilt by the Chiquitano people under the leadership of a German Jesuit named Hans Roth. In one, Santa Ana, a huge treasure trove of original music scores was discovered. All of a sudden this remote region became a center for eighteenth-century art and music comparable to some of the towns of Europe. Astonishingly, the Chiquitano people had maintained baroque traditions—of making and playing European instruments, of carving religious figures—through the centuries.

In 1996 a biannual international baroque music festival was inaugurated in the Chiquitania. 2014 is its tenth iteration. More than a hundred concerts are given over a ten-day period in over twenty locations, including in all the original missions, attracting performers and audience members from all over the world. Including us.

Rather than a day-by-day account, I’ll treat our trip topic-by-topic.

The indigenous culture is not as pronounced in the Chiquitania as it is here in Chuquisaca. The only traditional clothes we saw were worn by dancers, who dressed in white cotton, embroidered in pastel colors, with straw hats and no shoes; the dances themselves were nondescript, and the music was fife and drum with a strong beat. Their masks are either wooden, painted with angry faces in black, white, and red; or cloth, painted with landscape scenes, with holes for eyes and feathers on top. The roofs of the village houses are mostly made of grass; the walls of wood and/or adobe. They make wooden sculptures, primarily of musicians and angels, and embroidered clothes.

Our chief difficulty is getting from place to place. I want to rent a car in Santa Cruz, but the cost exceeds $100 a day, so we decide to take buses. To get to Roboré takes six hours in eighty-five degree weather on a barely air-conditioned bus with windows that won’t open. The next morning it takes us an hour to even find transportation to Santiago de Chiquitos, twenty minutes away. There, a guide or hotel owner drives us around, which is pricey. The latter takes us off-road to see some prehistoric wall paintings, then to Chochís to see Hans Roth’s astonishing sanctuary there (we climb to a cleft between two rocks and a rainbow appears), then back to Roboré, where the former meets us and drives us to San José, since the only other way to get there would have been to go early in the morning or late at night: that day’s trip totals one hundred dollars. We want to stay in San José longer, but the hotel owner tells us that the only bus to San Ignacio leaves at six a.m.; it actually leaves at seven, but not knowing that we lug our suitcases for about eight blocks in the dark. That six-hour ride, on a dirt road, is much better because the bus windows are all open and we make plenty of interesting stops to drop off or pick up packages—the transport doubles as a mail service. The next day we want to visit the three mission towns near San Ignacio, so we spend another three hours in a minivan on rough roads—in vain, as it turns out, since it’s a dia feriada, May 1, and two of the three missions are closed. Then getting from San Ignacio to Concepción (a four-hour trip) the next day at first appears impossible—the road is so bad that buses can’t travel it. We hire a taxi for another $80 or so, and indeed, when we get close to Concepción, the road begins to be paved, but the rain has washed out the pavement and left a huge muddy ditch which no heavy vehicle can possibly cross without getting stuck (we all get out of the minivan and it makes it, but a small truck gets seriously mired). Then from Concepción to Santa Cruz is another six-hour, seventy-dollar haul over very rough roads.

We (the four of us and Philly) attend ten concerts featuring a huge variety of music. Every concert is required to include at least one piece written in Bolivia, either from the Chiquitania missions or the astonishing collection of music formerly housed in the cathedral in Sucre. The least satisfying concerts, for me, are either boring (non-choral music by anonymous or little-known composers without the imagination of Bach or Purcell) or hokey (an Argentian group that uses modern instruments and jazzed-up arrangements); a few of the masses too are of the when-is-this-finally-going-to-end flavor. The best are undeniably authentic, featuring truly flavorful music, whether by great European composers or anonymous indigenous ones. And of course there is plenty in-between. A large Polish boys’ choir is one of the major hits of the festival, and their renditions of Renaissance songs are inspiring. A small Chiquitano youth choir sings slightly out of tune but with much spirit and verve. A Cruceño group plays a huge variety of wooden flutes and recorders with a beautiful foresty sound. We hear wonderful groups from London, Belgium, and Uruguay; and in Santa Ana, where a small organ from 1750 is still in the church loft, a young Cruceño organist demonstrates its power and tells us its history. The settings of the concerts are breathtaking, adding to the music’s power. Hearing it has inspired Thalia to once more play violin every day.

The three birds we see most of are toucans, which smoothly fly overhead; roadrunners, which, indeed, love to run across or down the road, zigzagging; and caracaras, mostly black-and-white falcons that seem to be everywhere. Well, actually, we see plenty of chickens and turkeys too. But the most astonishing creature we see is a toad the size of a large turtle, at least a foot long, sitting in the middle of the road after a concert in Santiago; when I point it out to folks, everyone gets out of their little shuttle bus to look at it, and we eventually succeeded in prodding it out of the road so it won’t get squashed. The cattle in this area are mostly brahmin, white with bony humped backs; we don’t see many sheep or goats. And here, unlike in Sucre, the cats seem to outnumber the dogs.

Roboré is the least interesting town we visit, and also the first. Santiago is tiny, with only a thousand inhabitants, and its church is twentieth-century, though a few baroque things are inside. San José is far bigger, but we don’t get to see it much because we arrive after dark and leave before dawn. We only get to spend a small amount of time in San Miguel and San Rafael. But the other four towns—Santa Ana, with about three hundred people, San Ignacio, with about thirty thousand, and Concepción and San Xavier, which are in-between—make a strong impression. Each features a large flat square plaza with the mission church and its complex on one side; in the center of the plaza is often a wooden cross with palm trees at each corner of a small square around it; the roads are mostly dirt and the houses are all one-story with long arcades shading the sidewalks; the rest of the town is laid out in a grid. Practically nobody drives a car here—even the taxis are motorcycles. Santa Ana feels the most unchanged, bucolic; but even busy San Ignacio has many charms.

The churches, except for San José’s, are large, simple wooden structures with peaked roofs. In many practically every surface is painted, sometimes with pictures, sometimes with patterns. Some have mica embedded in the walls, making them shine; many of the altars are replete with gold leaf. The statues of saints and Jesus and Mary are simple but beautiful. Combining baroque and ascetic aesthetics seems impossible since one emphasizes extravagance and ornament and the other extreme simplicity, yet these churches accomplish it. One has a brilliant yet dark painted sun over the altar, both glorious and threatening; another’s massive wooden columns are painted to look like huge snakes. Our favorites of the wooden churches are those in San Miguel, San Rafael, and Santa Ana, but we only have five minutes in the first two, brief stops on the bus from San José to San Ignacio. Santa Ana’s is the simplest yet somehow holiest, the least restored, the most intact, built by Chiquitanos after the Jesuits had been expelled, but following their model. The cathedral in San Ignacio collapsed in 1948 and was completely rebuilt, but faithfully and gloriously; the churches in Concepción and San Xavier were restored and painted in a rather fanciful and much wilder style than the others, and feel less sacred as a result; in addition, the altars and paintings are clearly contemporary, setting the lives of Jesus and the saints in the context of the story of the Chiquitano people. And then there's San José, a massive stone complex whose facade is utterly unlike the others—a great stone wall with a belltower, a chapel, a church, and a parsonage, each completely different, all mestizo baroque.

The hotels/hostals range from filthy, crumbling, and moldy to exceptional, with beautiful gardens, hammocks, a pool, and wonderful breakfasts featuring a dozen different baked goods (cuñapes, cheese puffs made with yucca flour, are ominpresent). We often sleep all five in one room, but sometimes in two or even three. In Santiago we stay in a small house we have to ourselves; unfortunately we leave the windows open during a storm and two of the mattresses and Karen’s suitcase get soaked. The prices are all about $15 a person per night.

The temperature usually reaches the mid-80s at midday except in Santiago, which is a little cooler, and San Jose, which is a little warmer; it’s humid, but not unbearably so. The northern towns—San Ignacio, Concepción, San Xavier—are surrounded by lush, rolling hills, mostly wooded; where cattle graze, the forest has been burned, leaving emerald curving meadows with black tree trunks poking from them, littered with foot-high ant mounds. Santiago, in the Southeast, is in a vast preserve called La Valle Tucavaca; we hike up one mountain there littered with sheer 200-foot-high rocks; it’s unearthly. The forests are “dry forests”: deciduous and flowering, green in the wet season, multicolored in the dry (the wet should have ended by now but it rains some almost every day this week). Swamps and savannahs alternate with the forest; rolling hills stand beside canyons and cliffs. The hotel owner tells us that we could spend two weeks in Santiago, taking a different hike every day, and always see something new and breathtaking. We visit nearby Aguas Calientes, a shallow lake fed by underground hot springs, like geysers, rather than an outside source. When we walk on the sandy bottom we suddenly sink into deep holes of almost scalding water bubbling up with such force that it keeps us from going down too far. The swimming in the deeper parts is the most pleasant I’ve done in ages.

In Santiago we visit an American Quaker who has been living there for forty years—he’s seventy now. He has an American wife, four children, and 130 head of cattle. Warm and wise with a gigantic bushy beard, he and his family give us slightly fermented sugar cane to chew on and fresh raw milk to drink; we delight in talking with his daughter, who is finishing high school and coming to the States to go to college (we hope she visits us!). His place is filthy and smells of a dead chicken he hasn’t yet disposed of; Jack, as usual, delights in the kittens. The Chiquitania, especially the eastern part, is heavily populated by Mennonite communities, some of whom have been there for a century or longer; Bolivia allows them to govern themselves, so it’s a haven for them. The Mennonites, with whom he feels some kinship, are the reason this American first came here; the beauty of the place is why he stays. We, of course, want to stay longer too . . .

My Bolivian diary, entry #40

April 11, 2014

On Sunday, March 30 we go with Biblioworks to Tomoroco, a small town about three hours away, to build a playground. There are fifteen of us: three Biblioworks staffers and twelve volunteers—three from Bolivia (including Carlos), four from the US (including Jacky, Thalia, and me), one from Germany, one from France (but who now lives here), and two from Argentina. The road is paved through Tarabuco, but at some point before it gets to Morada K’asa it turns cobblestoned; after Presto, it’s just dirt. Tomoroco is quite small, but big enough to have a central plaza (unlike Candelaria) and a large school, in which is the future playground. We’re a little distressed to see that two large molles (peppertrees) in that space have been sawn down—Zannah’s original plan for the playground was to have them provide shade. But we are told that this was necessary because the roots were undermining the nearby buildings.

Maritza, who runs Biblioworks, introduces us to fifteen high school senior boys, who are to help us, and splits us into teams to build each project. Thalia, Jacky, Carlos, and I are all on different teams. My team’s job is to build a climbing tree out of three truck tires and four seven- or eight-foot poles. It’s a lot harder than it looks. First we have to wash the truck tires and cut out the middle part on one side, which is done with a knife while the tire is wetted (it’s much easier to cut a tire when wet than when dry). Then we sand the poles. We drill holes in the tires and in the poles and fasten them together, which is not easy at all: the bolts to fasten them are usually a bit too narrow to accommodate the nuts inside the tire and go all the way through the poles, which means narrowing the poles with an ax. We use two bolts to join each tire to each pole, for a total of twenty-four bolts, and twenty-four holes to be drilled all the way through each pole, and twenty-four holes to be drilled through the tires too. Sometimes the latter are too big and the nut goes right through, so we cut pieces of tire to put behind the nuts. After we’ve joined the first pole to all three tires, we then have to put the six bolts through the next pole and lift the tires on top of it to maneuver the bolts into the holes and attach the nuts. The whole thing is awkward and time-consuming—it takes all day the first day and part of the second for our four-man team to assemble the tree, roll it onto the playground, dig holes for it, and set it into cement. Meanwhile, the other teams are building, out of tires and wood, various animals for the kids to climb on, an alphabet game, a tunnel, a car, and a little house. And a sixty-something-year-old man is chopping tree trunks, laying down rocks for a path, digging, and doing other intensely physical work with more energy and efficiency than anyone else there.

The seniors we work with amaze me. They’re all good-natured, never complaining; at mealtimes they take off their hats and sit in silence and eat with good manners; they joke around a bit but mostly work hard, contributing ideas to getting things done. I often find myself just watching them, since it’s hard for four of us to work on these things at once, and since they have so much more energy and strength than I have. If I had to work with senior boys in the States, they would complain, mouth off, take lots of breaks, tell dirty jokes, and even jump ship on occasion.

A few high school girls prepare our meals, which are very good—traditional Bolivian food, with soups and plenty of starches. We all sleep in one school room on thin, shabby mattresses on the floor, but nobody complains. Monday morning, Carlos and Mattias (the German) get up at 4:15 to go back to Sucre. Then, before we start work, Jacky and I explore the river next to the town and the opposite bank, which goes up a small hill and is quite wild.

The second day of work is less organized around teams; everyone pitches in to complete the various projects. After the tree has been set up, I mostly work around and in the small house, building walls out of (and sawing) logs and removing debris. Jacky and Thalia have everyone in stitches at the end of the day ribbing each other (in Spanish). Getting a ticket for the early-morning bus home isn’t easy; Caroline, the American volunteer coordinator, and I go to the bus office (unmarked), about four blocks from the school, but nobody’s there; we go back a second time with the son of the bus driver, who is one of the seniors, and he registers us; and a third time to actually purchase the tickets. We then get up at 4:15 Tuesday morning to meet the bus there. So many people get on that everyone is absolutely squished and then we all have to get off so that the bus can climb the hill that leads out of town; enough people disembark in Presto, though, so that we’re comfortable. Halfway back the bus stops for twenty minutes at the top of a hill to add brake fluid; we get out and wander around. It’s unutterably beautiful up there, with views in every direction, tiny ponds, a small wheat field, a path along a ridge, with the hills green and curved like the limbs of a sleeper.

Last Friday, a week ago, we attend a screening, on video, of an important 1969 Bolivian film called Blood of the Condor. A Marxist, anti-imperialist, and pro-indigenous movie, it caused quite a stir when it was released; in one part of the movie, Peace Corps members are caught sterilizing indigenous women. The movie is pure propaganda, with clear good people (indigenous) and bad (rich Bolivians and Americans), and because people believed it, the Corps was expelled in 1971 (it left Bolivia a second time in 2008). A discussion follows the movie, but nobody points out that the Peace Corps did not sterilize anyone and that instead it was promoting contraception. A few older audience members indulge in strong anti-American rhetoric, accusing America of continuing to try to keep the Bolivian population small. What bothers me most is that the large number of students there are going to believe that the Peace Corps actually did do those things.

Early Saturday morning Jacky, Philly, and I take a bus with a Turkish tourist and a Bolivian guide to an Inca trail about 90 minutes from Sucre. We hike downhill for two-and-a-half hours, then walk along a road towards Maragua. The scenery on the Inca trail is rocky and magnificent; we see cactuses called gardenias that will burst into flames when it gets too hot. But the walk that follows is even better, with Shangri-La-like valleys, blue-and-brown striped cliffs, and a river that runs through it. We eat lunch under eucalyptus trees with some wandering cattle, then cross the river and climb steeply to the top of a mountain. From there we follow a ridge overlooking a dramatic waterfall. At one point the trail narrows to about six inches around a curve with a steep drop on one side; the walls and trail are made entirely of purple pebbles. It’s the scariest moment of the trek. We arrive at Maragua at dusk. To the east, opposite the sunset, distinct white rays emanate from the horizon.
Maragua is in a “crater,” though it’s more like a giant depression; all around it are hills with arched rock formations, as if Maragua were the center of an enormous flower. The town itself is tiny—only about eighty or ninety families live there—and gullies run all through it, so that the houses are quite far apart. To get there we walk through corn and wheat fields and say hello to a family plowing with two oxen. Joaquin, our guide, offers coca leaves to everyone he meets, which is the common, friendly thing to do here. The community runs a beautiful set of cabañas, where we spend the night. Our legs and shoulders are terribly sore from hiking eight hours and carrying all our clothes and food. Unfortunately, Joaquin can’t find the key to the cabin at first, and then the propane tank for cooking is empty and he has to hunt down another one; in the end, all we have for dinner is some soup from a package.

The next morning we hike up out of the crater, a very difficult slog that takes about two hours. We continue going uphill over more fairy-tale countryside, green and rocky, with houses that look like they were built by Incas, with the walls made of unmortared rocks and the roofs of grass. Eventually we reach a huge rock slope on which are dozens of dinosaur footprints—petrified mud that looks like it just dried up yesterday. It is at this point that I finally completely run out of energy—my breathing is so labored that I feel like I can’t take another step. But I do, of course, and well up the hill from the footprints we finally relax and have a large lunch. I eat enough to get all my energy back, and then some.
The people in the area are Jalq’a, not Tarabuqueño, and their dress is somewhat different: their helmet-like hats are white rather than black, with colored borders; their white pants are longer and embroidered at the bottom. Little girls stop us and try to sell us homemade woolen, woven bracelets and spiral fossils that they’ve found.

Most of the time Jacky and Joaquin are in front, chatting easily in Spanish, while I bring up the rear (Philly a little ahead of me). I don’t mind. We hike the rest of the afternoon and arrive in Potolo at nightfall—another eight hours of hiking behind us. Three times larger than Maragua, Potolo is in a deep valley, with a plaza, a church, and a museum. The cabañas here are as nice as those in Maragua, and we all sleep soundly again.

In the morning we take a three-hour bus ride back to Sucre. The road at first follows a canyon as impressive as any I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some amazing canyons (especially in Utah). I get the impression that Bolivia has as many and as various natural wonders as any other country, if not more; we are continually stunned.

My Bolivian diary, entry #38

March 21, 2014

Last Sunday Tarabuco celebrated Pujllay, a harvest festival that also commemorates the battle of Cumbache in 1816, in which the Tarabuqueños defeated the Spanish and then cut their hearts out and ate them (in fact, there’s a huge full-color statue in the main plaza portraying the deed: the Tarabuqueño warrior holds a bitten heart in one hand, a bloody knife in the other, with blood flowing from his mouth; he’s shouting with joy; his foot is on a Spanish soldier lying on the ground, a hole in his chest, and blood flowing from it).

When we arrive the parade has already started: from a parking lot outside of town, where the minivan lets us off (the roads in town are all closed), over a bridge, past a few grazing horses, and into the colonial streets. Most of the groups are traditional. The men wear round black helmets of a similar shape to what the Spanish once wore; on the backs of their thick wood-soled sandals are huge spurs that jangle when they stomp; on their wide leather ceintures dangle brass bells. The women wear brimmed hats that curl up at the sides into points; their sandals don’t have spurs. The dancers each wear several Tarabuqueño weavings similar to those Santusa makes, with tiny, intricate images of animals. As a whole, the costumes are elaborate, multilayered, and otherworldly. At the center of each group are musicians, who play four- to six-foot-long pipes in harmony; another musician plays a pipe with a cow’s horn on the end, blasting it from time to time out of sync with the rest. The women usually circle around the musicians, and the men around the women, but not always in the same direction; the dance involves reversals. In more modern, younger groups, less elaborately dressed dancers dance to charanga- or accordion-based K’antus music with very high-pitched vocals.

We follow the parade route through the town. In the plaza is a fortune teller with a bird cage. If you pay him a few Bolivianos, he takes a parrakeet from the cage, puts it on his hand, and opens a little drawer; the parakeet picks out a piece of folded paper, and on it is your fortune. Damian, Carlos’s father, is also on the plaza, selling weavings; today, he says, is not a good day for sales, because even though there are more tourists there than any other day of the year, they’re not interested in buying.

We follow the parade to the other side of town, where a large flat area is bordered by a small river that runs through a gorge. There, in the middle, a giant pukhara stands, held up by thick ropes stretching from its corners to metal stakes. A pukhara is a rectangular structure made of three logs, one on each side and one on the top, from which are hung food and drink. This one stands about fifty feet high and fifteen feet wide. At the bottom are large squashes, surmounted by other fruits and vegetables, breads in plastic bags, canned food, wine bottles, Coke and other soft-drink bottles, beer cans, singani bottles, and, near the top, an entire cow carcass, cut in half and hung on either side, and half a pig carcass; all along the sides are hung bags of coca leaves. The dancers circle the pukhara, with the musicians playing close to it, each group taking its turn; in the meantime, other groups of dancers do their own circle dances farther away. Because the whole area is just dirt and because it’s sunny and quite warm, a tremendous amount of dust is kicked up. The dancers fuel themselves with chicha (fresh corn beer) and coca leaves; if they need to use the bathroom they climb down to the river gorges. Each group has a slightly different costume, and prizes are awarded. Of course there are bleachers erected on one side for the officials, judges, and other dignitaries. The place is so crowded it’s very hard to move.

Traditions here are not frozen in time. There’s no re-creation, no tourist pandering; Pujllay is a living tradition, celebrated on different dates in different Tarabuqueño towns, with different sized pukharas, all culminating in the Tarabuco celebration. I’m sure the costumes today are different in many ways from the costumes twenty years ago—after all, the Tarabuqueño weavings have significantly changed. The music of the traditional groups, though, does sound, to my ears, pre-Columbian. The money these people spend on their pukharas and costumes, the energy they put into their dances, are not to attract tourists (though they certainly do), but for religious reasons and to express pride in their heritage. The seriousness of purpose with which the dancers approach Pujllay leaves me awestruck.

My Bolivian diary, entries #33 and #34

December 26, 2013

Evopolio is a bootleg version of Monopoly, Bolivian style, in which you might draw a card making you a narcotraficante (you collect double the money for passing Go but also risk losing all your property) or another letting you create bloqueos (blockades) with actual rocks on the board. It’s my favorite Christmas present, and it wasn’t easy to find.

Today we flew to Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s biggest city, and took a taxi to Samaipata. The Santa Cruz area is hot, humid, and flat, but the weather improved as we climbed west through fairy-tale mountains of cliffs and lush forests, idyllic valleys and deep gorges. Now we’re staying in a quiet Hobbit-like house in a farm called La Vispera, with dogs and cats and horses and gardens . . . 

December 29, 2013

Samaipata is a village of six thousand in a warm valley, perhaps the most European place in Bolivia—simply because of the number of Europeans who have made it their home. It is also the favorite vacation spot of Cruceñas (residents of Santa Cruz), especially the rich ones, some of whom have built vast mansions surrounded by trimmed lawns (the first lawns we’ve seen in six months). It is still recognizably Bolivian, though, with dirt roads, crumbling eighteenth-century houses, an outdoor market, no bank.

The Bolivians here drop most of their s’s (except at the beginning of a word) so that “un mosca” (a fly) becomes “un moca” and “mas” (more) is simply “ma.” It’s quite hard to understand them.

On Friday, one, a wiry sixty-eight-year-old named Don Gilberto with a forty-year-old four-by-four, takes us on winding, cliff-edge dirt roads for an hour into the Parque Nacional Amboró, which has the greatest variety of birds and perhaps of plants on earth, and leads us on a three- or four-hour hike up mountains and through rainforests. The giant tree ferns, over a millennium old, lend the woods an air of prehistory, like in cheesy dinosaur movies; they appear only after we reach a certain altitude, suddenly, like a vision. The view from the highest peak we ascend is of miles of untouched forest under cloud-shrouded peaks. A thunderstorm passes around and over us on the way back down, adding an extra touch of drama.

About five miles from Samaipata is El Fuerte (the fort), misnamed by the Spanish—it’s an enormous sandstone rock carved by pre-Inca peoples into what Erich von Däniken thought was a launch platform for spaceships. Jaguars carved into perfect circles, a puma, a pair of long straight snakes, a circular court with ceremonial seats, multiple terraces, and odd geometrical figures are arranged harmoniously to create a temple for sacrifices. These are not simply relief sculptures or surface carvings—the rock was completely reshaped into an architectural whole. The Incas added their characteristic trapezoidal niches for the burial of mummies, straight stone walls, and dozens of buildings around the rock. To get there you take another one-lane dirt road in even worse shape than the one leading to Amboró, then walk a long steep trail that offers views and meanders through the rainforest; one can’t get too close to the rock itself, and its central court is hard to see, but one can wander around the Inca structures. It’s nothing like Tiwanaku—far older and even more mysterious.

La Vispera isn’t as idyllic as Sol y Luna in Coroico—the vegetation isn’t as lush and our house smells of insecticide (we bought some chocolate incense to mask that). Still, it’s nice to sit outside, listen to the birdsong, and see the horses, dogs, cats, and hummingbirds, the flowers, vegetables, and herbs. Tomorrow we go back to Sucre for cooler, wetter weather and a New Year’s Eve celebration . . .

My Bolivian diary, entry #28

December 2, 2013

Wednesday the library in Yamparaez celebrates the end of the school year with a charming and chaotic show featuring three songs with dances: “Pienso en tí,” featuring the teenage girls (and a couple little boys) dancing and singing along with the Las Culisueltas video;“What Does the Fox Say?,” which Karen and our kids taught the Yamparaez crew; and a chicha song (chicha is the genre of those Andean songs with an uneven triple meter and childish vocals) I don’t recognize, which the little boys perform. There is also a skit, a reading, four cakes, jello, and lots of little boys being mischievous and cute. The ones who capture everyone’s fancy are Rider, a seven-year-old showman, and Anahi, a beautiful ten-year-old cholita (she wears the traditional dress, unlike most of the kids) who’s the best reader in the library; Anahi did a traditional dance and recited a poem she wrote; Rider sang, danced, and was, in Karen’s words, “just everywhere.”

In the evening we celebrate Chanukah with the Messianic Jews. Carla’s dad, the preacher, points out that the numeric value of the letters on the dreidel—nun, gimel, hey, and shin—add up to the same number as the letters of the Hebrew word for messiah, and concludes that the virgin conceived on Chanukah; I’d hate to point out to him that in Israel those letters are nun, gimel, hey, and pey, which comes up a hundred shy, and moreover that the modern Hebrew dreidel was only invented about a hundred years ago and is based on a German game called trundl. Sour cream (for the latkes) is unknown in Bolivia, so we bring some homemade applesauce.

Thursday we celebrate Thanksgiving at Ryan’s. There’s about three times as much food as the fifteen of us can eat—the celebrants include four Americans besides us, quite a few Bolivians, a Brit, and an Australian. Ryan has painted his kiva a warm shade of taupe; he places a makeshift altar featuring a wildly feathered headpiece and an Andean drum against the wall. We go up to the roof of the kiva after the meal and play a card game called Llama llama; a blue space between the dark clouds and the mountains turns orange when the sun sets. We arrive at 2:30 and have to leave at 7:30 to pick up the laundry, but the celebration continues afterwards; Philly and Randall stay up drinking until 3:00 a.m. What with Matt’s Carolina sweet-potato casserole and the excellent company, it’s one of the best Thanksgivings of my life.

Friday morning we fly into La Paz. The airline called on Wednesday to tell me our connecting flight out of Cochabamba would be three hours late, so I make plans to lunch with Che in Cochabamba; but when we get to Cochabamba, despite having the delay confirmed at the Sucre airport, there’s no delay at all, so we end up eating at a decent Indian restaurant in La Paz. We visit an alley lined with shops selling artisanal crafts and musical instruments; at the end is a series selling items used in witchcraft, ranging from llama fetuses to tiny bottles filled with brightly colored objects. We then visit the huge eighteenth-century church next to our hotel, San Francisco, and are given a tour which allows us to climb to a curved roof of red semicylindrical tiles, and up the belltower; I can’t think of a more stunning architectural view in Bolivia. We then go to Socopachi, a very different neighborhood, to visit a friend who works for Oxfam, Alex; he makes us tasty pisco sours.

La Paz’s buildings are mostly ugly, but its setting is spectacular: it climbs the steepest hills and is overlooked by snow-capped Illimani. Saturday morning we visit its prettiest street, Calle Jaen; on it, the tiny Museum of Precious Metals occupies the eighteenth-century house of the revolutionary Apolinar Jaén. The courtyard floor is made of black and white stones and llama spine bones and the rooms feature exquisite pre-Columbian gold and silver objects. The exhibits—of textiles, masks, feather art, pottery, and much more—in the nearby Museum  of Ethnography and Folklore are so extensive yet varied that one could spend a whole day there.

At about 11:30 Saturday night, Alex and I go to Gota de Agua, a peña downtown (peñas are nightspots for traditional music). The place is reasonably dark and cavernous; a few patrons have had too much chicha and are asleep at their tables; we’re the only tourists there. A band of about ten Aymara musicians, most between thirty and sixty years old, all with huge drums and panpipes, emerges. They wear the traditional costumes: brightly colored woolen hats with earflaps and big black brimmed hats over those; bright mantas. The rhythm of the music is incomprehensible to me; it seems to shift with every few measures, and the beats are decidedly uneven, yet everyone plays exactly together. The panpipe melody shifts from player to player with each note; there’s no harmony, but the monophony is doubled in octaves by those with bigger and smaller panpipes. As they pound the drums and blow, they march in a huge circle and bow and dip. Cholitas (Aymara women in puffy skirts, colorful mantas, and tiny bowler hats) and their husbands (in suits) come and dance in the middle; by watching their feet I get a better sense of the underlying rhythm.

Pampalarama is a tiny lake about twelve miles from La Paz, and above it, on a peak called Wilimankilisani, sits a glacier—perhaps the first I’ve been close to. Alex drives us there on a gravel road; a bit above the lake, at about 14,500 feet above sea level, is a tiny inn. We start climbing Wilimankilisani, but after about two-and-a-half hours, when we get to about 16,000 feet—about three-quarters of the way to the glacier—it just gets too hard to breathe (though not for Alex, who has been living in La Paz for three years—he makes it almost all the way to the glacier). The hike is mostly over shale, with plenty of quartz rocks; the streams coming down from the glacier are interlaced with soft, tufty mounds of moss, called bofedales. About a hundred llamas and alpacas graze on these and on the stiff and spiky grasses. Even though it’s Sunday and we’re so close to two huge cities, we only see three other groups of hikers. We finish the expedition with an excellent lunch of white corn soup, grilled llama steaks, and quinoa at the inn.

Today we visit Tiahuanaco, an ancient city over an hour from La Paz. To get there we take a taxi to the cemetery and hire a minivan, who drives through El Alto, certainly the craziest city I’ve seen—with a million people, almost all Aymara, and bigger than La Paz, it sits on a plateau above it, and it’s pure anarchy. Everything is under construction here, made out of hollow bricks, with the second, third, and fourth stories occasionally finished in garish colors and designs. The traffic is insane, with minivans pushing their way through oncoming traffic in streets without lane markings. Finally we get through and cross flat lands with a few cattle alongside the road, the cordillera real—a series of snow-covered peaks—on our right.

In Tiahuanaco are a group of temples which used to be the ceremonial center of a city of 60,000 people, the capital of an enormous empire that collapsed about 1200 years ago. I expected the place to be swarming with tourists, but we only see about a dozen others. The subterranean temple features hundreds of stone faces in its walls; another vast temple, Pumapunku, once was the entrance to the complex if you were coming from Lake Titicaca, replacing the sight of Illimani, the highest mountain in the region (and the second highest in Bolivia). The most thrilling artifacts are the stelas, huge statues of anthropomorphic gods with carvings of snakes, foxes, pumas, suns, condors, and human faces all over them. 

I walk through the cemetery when we get back, a crammed, wild maze of mausoleums, then back down to the hotel. Every block the whole way is lined with market stalls and shops selling everything. I buy a block of unsweetened chocolate wrapped in a cacao leaf, but I could have bought so much more—bumpy green fruit called noni, yarns in a thousand colors, ribbons, bread, a hat—you name it, it’s somewhere on those streets. (There’s even a huge four-story building nearby—I went in it yesterday—that takes up an entire city block, entirely filled with tiny stalls selling foods.)

Tomorrow we go to Copacabana, then on to the Isla del sol . . . and I'll post some photos soon too . . .

My Bolivian diary, entry #23

October 9, 2013

Carla tells me that prior to the conquest, Churuquella and Sica Sica were worshipped as deities, Sica Sica a god and Churuquella a goddess. The practice apparently continues. Yatiris and brujos (sorcerers) make sacrifices on the hills, especially Churuquella (I think goddesses are more likely to be supplicated with offerings than gods), some using white magic, some black. One can pay a brujo to cast a spell or make one well. (She tells me there is a section of the campesino market devoted to witchcraft, where they sell llama fetuses, among other things, as sacrificial offerings to pachamama, the mother-earth goddess.) She also explains to me how the Spanish demonized the Inca gods, who inhabited the seven hills around Sucre, so that you can now see crosses on each of the hills to keep the Inca demons away. The way these ancient traditions thrive in a city as modern and placid as Sucre astonishes me.

History

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world.

—Herakleitos

Baroque

A baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonances, the melody is harsh and little natural, the intonation difficult, and the movement constrained.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Understanding Baroque architecture . . . mean[s] freeing the mind from classicist conformism, accepting daring, fantasy, variability, intolerance of formalistic canons, variety of theatrical effects, asymmetry, disorder, the symphonic collaboration of architecture, sculpture, painting, gardening, and jeux d'eaux.

—Bruno Zevi

From the 1540s to at least the 1720s composers in a preponderant share of their music strove for the expression of affective states, whether or not inspired by a text. It is this striving that led to the extravagances that were first deplored as "Baroque." Irregularity, amplification, strangeness, and grotesqueness, qualities inherent in the word, were often the very products of the search for expression.

—Claude V. Palisca

In all styles of baroque, whatever period, whatever country, improvisation was always present, integrated into both the melodic and harmonic fabric of the music. To decorate, to supplement, to vary, to embellish, to improve, as it was often called, was an accepted part of being a performing musician.

—Derek Bailey

The word "baroque" originally meant irregular or misshapen--particularly with reference to pearls.

—Anthony Blunt

The love of farming?

The new Harper's features a short essay entitled "The Necessity of Agriculture," in which Wendell Berry says that it is hard to exaggerate the importance of the love of farming. "No doubt there are people who farm without it, but without it nobody will be a good farmer or a good husbander of the land. We seem now to be coming to a time when we will have to recognize the love of farming not as a quaint souvenir of an outdated past but as an economic necessity."

But Berry fails to acknowledge the social reality of farming. Agriculture used to be fundamentally penal in nature (and prison farms still exist). When God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, he said, "Cursed be the ground because of you. In sorrow you shall eat from it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistle shall it sprout for you, and you shall eat the grasses of the field. By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread." Farming has always been the work of slaves and serfs.

Among the 6,000 people of Ur in 2000 BC, 2,500 were agricultural laborers. Of these, a number were overseers and supervisors. Only the lowest in social rank actually tilled the fields. This has remained constant for about 4,000 years now. Why did the manorial economic system, the system of serfdom, remain in place from early Roman times through the late middle ages? It is because farming ranked as one of the least pleasant of tasks.

Berry quotes a marvelous passage from Goethe's Faust in which Mephistopheles praises farming as "a natural way to make you young." That is, indeed, the devil speaking, for God certainly never said anything like that. It's a very attractive and romantic notion, hatched by eighteenth-century idealists, and quickly put into practice in farming communes throughout Europe and the United States. The Amish and the Mennonites still live by this creed; so do, to a lesser extent, the Israeli kibbutzim. Long may they prosper and increase! I buy locally grown food, I love to visit farms like these, and I certainly sympathize with Berry's points.

But why doesn't Berry praise mining instead? After all, metal has been fundamental to human life just as long as agriculture, both mining and farming have been the tasks of the lowest ranks of humans, and both were successfully industrialized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to reduce the proportion of the population employed in these degrading tasks. But do you ever hear about the love of mining?

Farming may long remain a chore which few people can love. More power to them. Perhaps they'll win in the end, as Berry and I hope. But if history has anything to say about the future, most farming will remain a task performed by slaves, serfs, peasants, and machines.

Moon-tailed orioles

And moon-tailed orioles roost wing to wing
With mocking-birds that only dream they sing . . .

—James Whaler, from Green River: A Poem for Rafinesque (1931)

I can't for the life of me figure out where I first came across these lines, but it was many years ago, and the second one stuck with me. So I obtained a copy of Green River, a justly forgotten book-length poem as unrestrained, romantic, and crazy as its hero. That hero is Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840), who was born in Constantinople and did his most valuable work in Kentucky. He apparently fancied himself not only the premier American naturalist (his work influenced Darwin's theory of natural selection), but also an expert on American Indian history, and was responsible for publishing the Walam Olum, a specious creation narrative of the Lenapes, and for finding hundreds of ancient earthworks in the Ohio Valley. He fascinates me, and I hope to learn more about him. The Wikipedia page devoted to him is quite interesting, but to get a better picture of the man and the problems that researchers face, examine amazon.com's page devoted to Leonard Warren's Constantine Samuel Rafinesque: A Voice in the American Wilderness. It includes a remarkably eloquent publisher's description of the book (and of its subject) followed by a terrifying 3,500-word review, the longest amazon.com review I've ever read, that lists every single error the author and publisher made—a truly fascinating and obsessive document. 

As for the poet, James Whaler appears to have been equally obsessive—his book Counterpoint and Symbol: An Inquiry into the Rhythm of Milton's Epic Style is apparently chock-full of mathematical diagrams and discussions of numerical progressions. Americans who strove for fame yet produced nothing but obscure and flawed works marked by mania, hubris, and a confusion between fancy and scholarship, both Rafinesque and Whaler are, in a sense, "mocking-birds that only dream they sing."

The birth of an American monarchy: a brief history of Backland in the eighteenth century

No one knows exactly why one of the original fourteen colonies was called Backland. I’ve done some research into the use of the word prior to the colony’s founding in 1716, but the closest thing I’ve found is William Penn’s description of parts of Pennsylvania: “The back lands being richer than those that lie by navigable rivers.” Perhaps that’s how Backland’s founder, Lord Simon Boon, thought of the place. He planned to settle the colony with “chroniclers, historians, portrait artists, poets, playwrights, actors, singers, and so forth.” Unfortunately, Lord Boon couldn’t find many folks like that willing to follow him to this God-forsaken land, so the colony was populated mainly by scoundrels, religious fanatics, and adventurers. It attracted more than just Brits—Welsh, Scots Highlanders, Germans, Italians, French, you name it—with one exception: settlers from other American colonies were barred.

During the Revolution, chaos reigned. Contemporary historians estimate that the American population was split in thirds between Patriots, Loyalists, and folks who didn’t know which way to turn. When the War began, most Americans had been in favor of some kind of reconciliation with Britain: they were willing to remain in the British Empire but tied only to the king, with Parliament having no authority over them at all. As late as 1776 most Americans were monarchists. But after the War began in earnest, America split apart. The Patriots elected representatives to the Continental Congress and sent soldiers to Washington’s army; the Loyalists were tarred and feathered, had their property confiscated, and often emigrated to England; and those on the fence had to choose between one and the other. For six years the Colonies were without any truly legitimate government: anarchy, mob rule, and terror reigned.

In the middle of all this, Robert Jones published his infamous pamphlet, Against Liberty, in Vickery, Backland’s largest city. Jones, who had come here in 1724 at the age of four, had lost everything: his property had been confiscated, his crops had been burned, he’d been tarred and feathered and paraded through the streets, and finally he’d left for London. Subtitled A Prophetic Warning, and drawing on the writings of such defenders of monarchy as Plato, Dante, and de Maistre, Against Liberty described Jones’s vision of America under the Patriots’ rule. It would be “a life of slavery and subjection to the iron-fisted tyranny of the majority, a life more like death than liberty.” Jones theorized that the more people in power, the more oppressive the power would be, so that a democracy, in which power was vested in the majority (“the mob”), would be inherently more oppressive than a monarchy, where all power was vested in one person. In Patriotland, Jones’s imaginary democracy, all preferment was granted according to how well a citizen fit in with the tastes of the majority, not according to his ability. These tastes—which were of the decidedly lower-class variety—ruled not only over the realm of politics, but over all culture, from what food was grown to what music was played. Under a monarchy, however, or so Jones argued, the tastes of the king and his aristocracy allowed natural excellence to flourish. Similarly, under a democracy exceptional men would be punished for being different, and in Patriotland the prisons were filled with men of genius; in monarchies, however, the prisons held precisely those rabble-rousers who would rule Patriotland. In a hundred years, Jones prophesied, Patriotland would become a nation in which every citizen would imitate his fellows, and, nobility having vanished, nothing would be left but a mass of mediocrity.

This pamphlet was immensely influential in Backland, where it was circulated widely. The colony, like Georgia, was already a hotbed of Loyalist sentiment, but Jones’s pamphlet actually made it possible to openly voice Loyalist creeds. Jones himself returned triumphantly in 1779 and organized a pro-British militia. He damned the Continental Congress, characterizing them as pawns of the French—a view which, by the way, was shared by John Adams, John Jay, and Ben Franklin—and, in a famous speech, proclaimed, “Give me monarchy or give me death!”

Meanwhile, his cause was being defeated by Washington’s army. By 1781, after Washington’s victory at Yorktown, Britain’s only remaining holdings were New York, Charleston, Vickery, and Savannah. Lord North, the British prime minister, resigned, King George III drafted a letter of abdication, and Cornwallis’s army returned to England. The Patriots had won. And by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed, Britain had ceded the entire fourteen colonies to the newly established United States of America.

While the rest of America’s Loyalists had fled, Jones’s army remained, entrenched at Fort Vickery, supported by a large majority of Backlanders. Washington didn’t take them very seriously, especially since they were entirely without British support. Backland Patriots drafted a state constitution and had it ratified by ignoring Jones’s supporters; Backland became the seventh state to join the Union. Everyone figured that sooner or later Jones and his followers would just go away.

But that never really occurred to the men in Fort Vickery. As soon as the peace treaty had been signed—ceding Vickery to the USA, to the great surprise of Backlanders—Jones—who considered himself a prophet, not a leader—sent his right-hand man, Caleb Turner, on a special mission to King George III: he was to plead that Backland remain a British colony.

Turner, however, had other ideas. He was 35, tall, with a full head of dark hair hidden under his wig. After a backwoods upbringing and years of military service, he had a ruggedness, a manly bearing, entirely foreign to the Court at London. He was easily the most handsome man there. And, having had few if any contacts with women during the years of the Revolution, he quickly formed a huge appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. It was rumored that during his first week in London he bedded nine different ladies, including several who were married to Lords, though that appears to me extremely unlikely. Needless to say, these rumors did not endear him to the Court.

Turner reasoned, quite correctly, that if he followed Jones’s instructions and asked King George to reacquire Backland, and if the king accepted, this would put Backland at war with the other colonies, who wanted no British on their soil. On the other hand, if Backland were to become an independent nation, they could remain at peace with the United States, and he could then ask King George to make him Backland’s first king. Turner met with the king in private; there are no records of their conversation. But we gather that Turner’s first proposition met with George’s approval, while his second was refused—or at least postponed. At any rate, Turner wrote to Jones that England had rejected the proposal that Backland remain a Crown Colony, and that King George would appoint a king for Backland.

Turner lobbied hard for the position. He got himself engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Duke of Windsor; she flatly refused to consider any other suitors, no matter what their station. The duke therefore was most desirous to have a king rather than a colonial commoner as his future son-in-law. But King George wasted little time before deciding to appoint his second cousin, Francis Colchester, as Backland’s King Francis. Turner broke off the engagement and returned to Vickery empty-handed.

King George had required that Backland’s borders be secured before Francis’s arrival, so Jones’s militia, armed with additional ammunition supplied by the British, spread throughout Backland, handing out muskets to anyone willing to fight for king and country. After heated debate, the Continental Congress decided to expel Backland from the confederation, although Washington preferred to take the state by force. The expulsion, however, was more acceptable to most congressmen, who generally considered Backland an embarrassment, and not worth the expenditure of arms; in addition, Francis had taken the precaution of sending certain powerful congressmen emissaries bearing expensive gifts. So on August 3, 1783, Francis Colchester, who had arrived from England the night before, was crowned King Francis I of Backland. Years later some wag calculated that August 3 could also be called “The 34th of July,” so the date was dubbed Dependence Day.

Francis was sane, 46 years old, had been married for eight years, and was expecting his first child (who turned out to be stillborn). He had never before been to America, but he was capable and wise, and he knew that the first thing he had to do was consolidate his power. Immediately after the coronation he decreed a new tax, which he called an establishment tax, a one-time fee collected from all property holders, which he promised to prudently invest, allowing Backland to gain economic independence from the rest of the former colonies.

All economic and diplomatic ties with Backland were soon severed by the U.S. Congress. King Francis now felt he had a free hand. Backland’s leading Patriots were tried for treason and executed; other Patriots either fled or were deported. Hundreds of slaves labored for eleven years to build an immense twenty-five-foot-high wall along the U.S. border, with barbed iron spikes hammered into the mortar and sticking out from between the stones. Francis knew that he had ready customers for all Backland’s exports—rice, indigo, deerskin, lumber, beef, pork—in England. He invested wisely, spent wisely, taxed heavily. And Backland thrived.

As for Caleb Turner, he continued womanizing; he started drinking too. Subject to manic bursts of energy, he accomplished some significant things, such as establishing Backland’s first hospital, organizing a land-clearing crew for agriculture and lumber-production, and opening four racetracks. However, between these efforts, he led a life of complete dissipation. Although he never married, it is said that his progeny numbered in the dozens.

And as for Robert Jones, he was named the first Duke of Vickery and became very wealthy. Under Francis, he was almost twice as rich as he’d been under George III. And he wrote a now largely forgotten sequel to Against Liberty, a pamphlet called Republic of Infamy, in which he engaged in an imaginary dialogue with a U.S. republican rogue. During most of the dialogue, Jones enumerated the injustices he’d endured at the hands of the Patriots—a pretty tedious account; this was followed by a what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this series of questions. The only surprising thing about the pamphlet was what Jones’s imaginary Patriot answered: with unconcealed anger, he simply retold the history of the Revolutionary War, illustrating the triumph of democracy over monarchy by force—a might-makes-right argument that, considering U.S. history, actually makes perfect sense. As Jones might say, what is majority rule but the command of the strong over the weak?

"A white man acting under a black skin": a curious case of eighteenth-century racial identity

About a dozen years ago, while annotating slave narratives for an anthology I edited called I Was Born a Slave, I came across this passage in James W. C. Pennington's 1849 Fugitive Blacksmith: "He cited to me various instances of coloured persons, of whom I had not heard before, and who had distinguished themselves for learning, such as Bannicker, Wheatley, and Francis Williams." I knew who the first two were: Benjamin Banneker and Phyllis Wheatley; but who was Francis Williams?

It took many hours of research to find out that almost all we now know of Francis Williams is contained in a repulsively racist book written by Edward Long and published in London in 1774, entitled The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. Long devotes an entire chapter in the second volume (out of three) to Francis Williams; he begins:

I have forborne till now to introduce upon the stage a personage, who made a conspicuous figure in this island, and even attracted the notice of many in England. With the impartiality that becomes me, I shall endeavour to do him all possible justice; and shall leave it to the reader’s opinion, whether what they shall discover of his genius and intellect will be sufficient to overthrow the arguments, I have before alledged, to prove an inferiority of the Negroes to the race of white men. It will by this time be discovered, that I allude to Francis Williams, a native of this island, and son to John and Dorothy Williams, free Negroes. Lewis was the youngest of three sons, and, being a boy of unusual lively parts, was pitched upon to be the subject of an experiment, which, it is said, the Duke of Montagu was curious to make, in order to discover, whether, by proper cultivation, and a regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negroe might not be found as capable of literature as a white person. In short, he was sent to England, where he underwent a regular discipline of classic instruction at a grammar school, after which he was fixed at the university of Cambridge, where he studied under the ablest preceptors, and made some progress in the mathematics. During his abode in England, after finishing his education, it is said (I know not with what truth) that he composed the well-known ballad of “Welcome, welcome, brother debtor, &c.” But I have likewise heard the same attributed to a different author. Upon his return to Jamaica, the duke would fain have tried his genius likewise in politics, and intended attaining for him a privy seal, or appointment to be one of the governor’s council; but this scheme was dropped, upon the objections offered by Mr. Trelawny, the governor at that time. Williams therefore set up a school in Spanish Town, which he continued for several years, where he taught reading, writing, Latin, and the elements of the mathematics; whilst he acted in this profession, he selected a Negroe pupil, whom he trained up with particular care, intending to make him his successor in the school; but of this youth it may be said, to use the expression of Festus to Paul, that “much learning made him mad.” The abstruse problems of mathematical institution turned his brain; and he still remains, I believe, an unfortunate example, to shew that every African head is not adapted by nature to such profound contemplations. The chief pride of this disciple consists in imitating the garb and deportment of his tutor. A tye perriwig, a sword, and ruffled shirt, seem in his opinion to comprehend the very marrow and quintessence of all erudition, and philosophic dignity. Probably he imagines it a more easy way of acquiring, among the Negroes, the reputation of a great scholar, by these superficial marks, which catch their eye, than by talking of Euclid, whom they know nothing about.

In the next paragraph Long attributes Williams’s genius to the northern climate, and quotes the philosopher David Hume, who says, “In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.” Long then continues:

In regard to the general character of the man, he was haughty, opinionated, looked down with sovereign contempt on his fellow Blacks, entertained the highest opinion of his own knowledge, treated his parents with much disdain, and behaved towards his children and his slaves with a severity bordering upon cruelty; he was fond of having great deference paid to him, and exacted it in the utmost degree from the Negroes about him; he affected a singularity of dress, and particularly grave cast of countenance, to impress an idea of his wisdom and learning; and, to second this view, he wore in common a huge wig, which made a very venerable figure. The moral part of his character may be collected from these touches, as well as the measure of his wisdom, on which, as well as some other attributes to which he laid claim, he had not the modesty to be silent, whenever he met with occasion to expatiate upon them. . . . He defined himself “a white man acting under a black skin.” He endeavoured to prove logically, that a Negroe was superior in quality to a Mulatto, or other cast. His proposition was, that “a simple white or a simple black complexion was respectively perfect: but a Mulatto, being an heterogeneous medley of both, was imperfect, ergo inferior.”

His opinion of Negroes may be inferred from a proverbial saying, that was frequently in his mouth; “Show me a Negroe, and I will show you a thief.” He died, not long since, at the age of seventy, or thereabouts.

In my subsequent research about Williams I found little that I did not already know, for Long's book was the primary source for information about his life. W. J. Gardner's History of Jamaica (1873) repeated Long’s history, then attempted to explain Williams’s character as follows:

In estimating (so far as imperfect information will permit) the character of this man, the prejudices of the times in which he lived must be taken into consideration. The race to which he belonged was then almost universally despised, and the temptation to curry favour with the whites by denouncing the negroes was too great for him to resist. He was simply tolerated, and even if he had possessed that nobility of character which constitutes the ideal, by making him willing to suffer for a proscribed people or cause, his career would soon have been cut short. His disposition, too, was soured by the contemptuous way in which his abilities were spoken of, even by men removed from the influence of colonial prejudices, as well as by those who were personally acquainted with him. Self assertion may have seemed to him the only way by which to meet the unfair depreciation of his real ability. Compared with his own race, he was unmeasurably [sic] the intellectual superior of any who then lived in Jamaica.      

I also found a portrait painted of Williams around 1735, in which, dressed to the nines and wearing a generous wig, he stands in front of a bookcase full of works by Newton, Locke, Bacon, and others; his hand rests on Newton’s Philosophy, which sits open on a table next to a celestial globe, an inkstand, and some compasses; on the floor is another globe inscribed “The Western or Atlantick Ocean.” His face, however, seems to be a caricature.

The Alumni Cantabrigiensis has no listing for Francis Williams; nor is he mentioned in any histories of eighteenth-century England. As for the Duke of Montagu, the British Dictionary of National Biography gives us the following:

MONTAGU, JOHN, second DUKE OF MONTAGU (1688?–1749), courtier. . . . In 1709 he succeeded his father as second duke. . . . The duke appears to have been a man of some talents, but with much of the buffoon about him. He was the originator of the famous hoax at the Haymarket Theatre of a man squeezing himself into a quart bottle. Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, wrote of him to Lord Stair: ‘All my son-in-law’s talents lie in the things natural to boys of fifteen, and he is about two and fifty. To get people into his gardens and wet them with squirts, to invite people to his country house and put things in their beds to make them itch, and twenty other such pretty fancies.’

What does this all add up to? It is important to recognize that Williams seems to have been the first Jamaican scholar of note, not just the first black Jamaican  of note. The racist views of Long (and Hume) are widely known; and as late as one hundred years after his death, Williams was still being cited as proof that blacks could attain to the same level of genius as whites. Indeed, Long reprints in its entirety an ode Williams wrote in Latin to welcome a new governor to Jamaica, and it displays no mean proficiency in the language. If Long’s worst claims about Williams are to be believed, one may more readily attribute his failings to his highbrow British education than to his race.

But after reading about Lord Montagu, I wondered: did he take Williams from Jamaica for solely philanthropic reasons? Did he really wish to prove the equality of the races? Or, since he was a prankster, did he do it to win a bet or as part of a more involved practical joke? In that case, had Williams perhaps learned something from Lord Montagu, and was his conceitedness part of an extended joke? Could his dress and behavior have been a parody, “signifying” on those of his British teachers? Being a genius, could he have deliberately played the fool?

Perhaps. But at least in his poetry, Williams considered himself a white man in black skin. In an attempt to show that Williams’s Latin, while impressive, conveys pretentious sentiments, Long translated Williams’s ode into English, appending it to his chapter on the man. I quote from Long’s translation below (from the context, Williams is clearly referring to himself as the black muse here; the “Caesar of the West” is the arriving governor):

Oh! Muse, of blackest tint, why shrinks thy breast,
Why fears t’ approach the Caesar of the West!
Dispel thy doubts, with confidence ascend
The regal dome, and hail him for thy friend:
Nor blush, altho’ in garb funereal drest,
Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest.

Is a black man who calls himself white praising or condemning himself? Or simply playing a part?

Complicating matters, I have now learned from this post that Williams inherited from his parents a number of black slaves, and that by the time of his death he owned fifteen of them. The post also calls into question many of Long's other assertions. It is based on an article by Vincent Carretta, a scholar whom I greatly respect.

I like to think of Williams as a kind of inscrutable clown, who masks his arrogance with pretense in order to make his genius less threatening to his oppressors. But I could be wrong. History—as usual—conceals the answer.