The Moor's Account

“When I fell into slavery, I was forced to give up not just my freedom, but also the name that my mother and father had chosen for me. A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.”

Mustafa reflects upon what he lost when he sold himself into slavery. When Rodriguez buys Mustafa, he loses his Muslim name when he’s christened with the Spanish name Esteban. When Rodriguez sells Mustafa to Dorantes, his name is changed again to Estebanico, which he describes as a “string of sounds that still grates on my ears” (7).

Losing his name represents all the losses he has suffered: the loss of his family, his hometown, his religion, and his freedom. The conquistadors, who have a habit of giving Spanish names to everything and everyone they encounter in the new world, inflict similar losses on the native people they enslave.

“I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.”

Mustafa recalls his surprise when the Castilians immediately claimed La Florida for Spain upon landing on its shores. They warn of the dire consequences of not submitting to their authority even though there are no natives to hear their proclamation. An older and wiser Mustafa realizes that the Castilians made this announcement to justify dominating the native people and plundering the new world’s riches. As with their “official” account of the expedition, the Castilians are telling a story to create the truth.

“I watched fortune-tellers, faith healers, herbalists, apothecaries, and beggars. They promised a healthy child, a painless life, a pliant husband, a dutiful wife, or a path to heaven, perhaps different versions of the same things, but the stories they told or foretold comforted people, inspired them, allowed them to imagine a future they had denied themselves.”

Mustafa describes his childhood fascination with the souq in Azemmur. It’s in the souq where he first notices storytelling’s power to entertain crowds and comfort the afflicted. These experiences lead him to decide to become a merchant instead of a “simple recorder” like his father. This passage also foreshadows Mustafa’s life in the new world as a shaman.

“I fell for the magic of numbers and the allure of profit. I was preoccupied only with the price of things and neglected to consider their value.”

Mustafa reflects on the greed that led him to sell slaves. Instead of making Mustafa an innocent victim of slavery, the author depicts him as benefitting from the slave trade. Like his European masters Rodriguez and Dorantes, his ambitious younger self was motivated by greed and undervalued human life.

“I traded what should never be traded.”

Mustafa reflects both on his decision to sell himself into slavery and his earlier participation in the slave trade. He since has learned that human life and freedom should never be traded.

“I thought about that night, long ago in Azemmur, when I had agreed to sell my life for a bit of gold. […] Now, years later, I had convinced myself that, because I had been the first to find gold in La Florida, my life would be returned to me. But life should not be traded for gold—a simple lesson, which I had to learn twice.”

Mustafa thinks back to when he sold himself into slavery. He regrets that he didn’t value his life enough not to trade his freedom. When he’s the first to find gold in the new world, he believes that his discovery will win him his freedom. But his older self knows that human life cannot be traded for money and that there’s no limit to human greed or man’s desire to exploit other men for profit.

“To go from freedom to slavery was a fate worse than death; it was a rebirth into an alien world, with its strange customs and unbearable rules.”

Mustafa remembers his first days as Rodriguez’s slave in Seville. His enslavement separates him from everything he knows and loves. This experience causes him to realize how wrong he was to trade slaves. His experience in Seville and with Dorantes in the new world gives him empathy for the natives enslaved by conquistadors.

“I had put my life in the hands of others and now here I was, at the edge of the known world, lost and afraid. All along, I had told myself that I did not have a choice, that I had been the one to put myself into bondage and I had to accept this fate. Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me—that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe.”

Mustafa realizes that he has thought of himself as a victim with no choice but to accept his fate. He now rejects his belief that if he is helpful, he’ll be set free. He decides to seize control of his narrative to save himself.

“My master registered me in that book under the name he used with me ever since. I had entered the Casa de Contratación as Esteban, but I left it as Estebanico. Just Estebanico—converted, orphaned, and now dismissed with a boy’s nickname.”

Mustafa reflects on the arrogance that causes men like Dorantes to rename another human being. He feels dismissed by the nickname that Dorantes gives him because it suggests that he is a mere boy instead of a man.

“The shame of my theft settled upon me all at once. How low I had sunk as a man. But once again I told myself that I had no other choice […] It was necessity, rather than greed, that had driven me to this.

Mustafa recounts the hungry explorers raiding a native village. He feels terrible guilt for his actions, but he blames it on circumstances instead of greed. His older self sees all his actions as motivated by greed and rejects the idea that he had no choice but to exploit the natives.

“I could not escape the thought that I had brought all this upon myself, first by engaging in greedy trade, later by selling myself into bondage, and later yet by stealing from the Indians.”

While drifting on the raft with little hope of survival, Mustafa reflects upon the choices that brought him to this moment. As he observes the friar absolve a dying man of his sins, Mustafa thinks of his Muslim upbringing, which taught him that there will be a judgment for a man’s actions. He feels terrible guilt for the choices he has made, and unlike the Catholic religion, his faith teaches him that there is no escape from consequences.

“When we came upon a river, none of the Castilians thought to give it as name, I noticed; they had stopped thinking of themselves as unchallenged lords of this world, whose duty was to put it into words.”

Mustafa notices that the Castilians no longer feel the need to dominate the landscape of the new world by giving everything names. This change represents the extent to which the Castilians have been humbled by their experience in the new world.

“I am no more slave than you.”

By saying this to León, who has accused him of stealing from the Carancahuas, Mustafa publicly declares himself an equal of the other explorers. He refuses to passively accept the blame for the theft and speaks up to defend himself. This is a shift in Mustafa’s behavior. In the past, he has been obedient and deferential to the Castilians.

“Cabeza de Vaca listened with great attention, neither interrupting nor hurrying me to reach the end of my tale. Here was a man, I felt, who knew how to tell stories and how to listen to them, who appreciated their purpose and value. A kindred spirit, a fellow storyteller.”

After explaining how he ended up living among the natives, Cabeza de Vaca asks Mustafa to tell the story of his travels. Mustafa is delighted to share his tale and impressed at how carefully Cabeza de Vaca listens to him. Mustafa realizes that Cabeza de Vaca is a born storyteller, a talent that serves him well when he is asked to provide the official account of the Narváez expedition.

“I do not know why I fell in love with Oyomasot. Who can explain such things? Perhaps it is because I saw in her someone who, like me, chafed under the rules that were imposed upon her. Perhaps it was because, though she lived at home, she did not seem fully at home—an outsider of a sort, another interloper.”

Mustafa describes falling in love with his native wife Oyomasot. Like Mustafa, who is neither a Spanish conquistador nor a native, Oyomasot is an outsider, who doesn’t quite fit in with the other members of her tribe. Mustafa notes that her oddities are “tolerated the way one tolerates the peculiarities of misfits, mystics, and madmen” (235).

“It had not troubled me that I was offering hope to the people. But now it came to me that I was wrong. It was one thing to console a dying man or a barren woman, but another to offer them hope against things that could not be healed.”

Mustafa has become a renowned itinerant healer with hundreds of followers. He is now very much like the healer he saw treating his father in the souq as a child. Although his work as a healer has given him status and freedom, he worries that is wrong to give people hope where none exists and fears it will not end well.

“In this account, he was no longer a conqueror who had fallen for lies about a kingdom of gold; instead he was the second-in-command of a fierce but unlucky expedition to La Florida […] now the villain was Narváez only.”

Mustafa describes Cabeza de Vaca’s tale of the Narváez expedition to the Castilian soldiers they encounter after eight years in the wilderness. Cabeza de Vaca is a talented storyteller, but he is also an unreliable one. Although he supported Narváez’s disastrous decision to leave the ships behind, he changes the facts to make himself the hero of the story.

“No bondsman would have been given a room in the sergeant’s own home, I knew, and yet no free man would have been separated from other free men, either. So who was I in New Spain?”

Mustafa reflects on his shifting and undefined identity. Early in his travels in the new world, he’s an outsider, not fitting in with either the Europeans or the native people. Over time, he gains acceptance from both the Europeans and the native tribes. But once he returns to “civilization,” he becomes an outsider again.

“I came to see how limiting the notion of one true faith really was. Was the diversity in our beliefs, not their unity, the lesson God wanted to impart? Surely it would have been in His power to make us of one faith if that had been His wish. Now the idea that there was only one set of stories for all mankind seemed strange to me.”

While listening to the bishop use his experience among the natives to illustrate how “savages” can be peacefully converted to the “one true of faith” of Christianity, Mustafa reflects on all the belief systems he’s encountered in his life. He was raised in the Muslim faith and baptized against his will into the Catholic religion; he was also exposed to many different spiritual beliefs in the new world. He wonders if the idea of one true faith, whether Muslim or Christian, is a human construct or if all the stories about God are equally true.

“He had always loved to tell stories, but now his memories of the expedition were entered into the official record, invalidating all others. I realized with a start that I was once again living in a world where written records were synonymous with power.”

When Mustafa, Dorantes, and Castillo are reunited with Cabeza de Vaca in the camp of the Charrucos, Cabeza de Vaca tells the true story of his time among the natives. When he tells the story of the failed expedition to the Castilian soldiers, he doesn’t mention his native wife and child or the fact that he supported Narváez’s misguided plan to leave the ships behind. Now that they’ve returned to European society, Mustafa realizes that Cabeza de Vaca’s version of the story, despite all its inaccuracies and omissions, is becoming the official history of the expedition.

“I still had one thing. My story. […] I could right what had been made wrong. And so I began to write my account. For every lie I had heard about the imperial expedition that had brought me to the edge of the world, I would tell the truth.”

Mustafa realizes that he has lost everything except for his voice. He decides to tell the truth about the expedition. For an enslaved black man to declare his story as the truth is a radical act.

“I think there was still some small part of me that stubbornly held on to the belief that Dorantes had been changed forever by our common experience in the Land of the Indians. […] But whatever transformation had taken place within him had slowly been undone by his prolonged stay in the capital, where there was endless talk of money and power.”

Mustafa realizes that Dorantes will never set him free. While Dorantes treated him like an equal and a friend in the Land of the Indians, he returns to his old ways now that he’s back among Europeans. Just as he was tempted to leave his comfortable life in Spain by the promise of riches, he is tempted to return to European ways by the promise of improved status among his countrymen.

“It was a speech Coronado had prepared in the capital and it seemed to me that the more he told it, the more he believed in it: that the empire brought order where there was chaos, faith where there was idolatry, peace where there was savagery, and since its benefits were so indisputably clear, it could be spread through peaceful means. I waited for him to finish telling his tall tales so that we could leave, and go north.”

Coronado gives this speech the day before launching his expedition to the Seven Cities. Mustafa, who has lived an orderly, peaceful life among the native people, knows that Coronado’s assumption about the superiority of European customs is wrong. By calling his claims “tall tales,” Mustafa puts Coronado in the same category as Narváez, the bishop, and Cabeza de Vaca—all European men who tell compelling stories but not the truth.