In the late 15th century, the
Portuguese decided to populate their island claim of São Tomé off the
coast of Africa with Jewish children stolen from their parents, all
between the ages of two and ten.
Salt
filled the air. Children walked in single file lines, heads twisting in
desperation. The Portuguese soldiers flanked them, their uniforms with
the rigidity of walls, impervious. They carted off the babies, tiny
children torn from mothers. Their spindly legs marched the length up to
the boats, salty tears outdoing the sea.
Take their children,
ordered the King. If the Jews have no money to pay my tribute, take
everyone between two and ten. We will whiten the island of São Tomé, we
will breed the blacks out with our blood. I will make their young souls
Catholic. I will take them where no Jew can spoil them. No one else will
go, there with the crocodiles and disease, the mass of insects and the
heat. It’ll eat you alive.
The Catholic monarchs of
Spain had given the Jews no choice: convert, or be banished. Stripped of
their land in the holy days of Passover, they were fed to the wolves
who came from all sides, all shores, to feast on what was left of them; a
baby at a mother’s breast, the last gold coin sewn into a coat.
The
Portuguese king opened his gates with trickery and deceit, he said:
give me more money than you could ever have or I will take your
children. He took their children. They will be my little Christians and
they will brighten my empire with the whiteness of their skin. They will
be my slaves and they will expand my wealth with their tiny backs.
The
little children, two thousand at least, sailed south on the caravels
and were beaten and starved. The Portuguese tried to throw over the dead
before the stink overcame the whole ship. Before they started with the
crying again. The little ones couldn’t stop crying and so the soldiers
told them they would throw them overboard and slapped their cheeks,
turning them pink to red. The big kids held the babies and tried to act
like men.
A fetid and beastly island braced the
Equator. The soldiers took the children ashore in boats: here you are.
The crocodiles were happy and ate the little children. The air choked
all their lungs with water and heat. They couldn’t make tears anymore.
Cry as they might, their bodies had no more water to spare. The
mosquitoes bit their skin until they looked diseased, until they were
diseased.
A year later more than one thousand, two
hundred children haunted the island. Tiny bodies filled the ground,
laying pipes for the future. The six hundred who still clung to life
worked alongside the prisoners banished from Portugal and the enslaved
bought from the African coast. Together they milled the sugar into
money.
Forty years passing found fifty of the Jewish
children remaining, their hair now turning gray. Fifty from two
thousand, between two and ten. They had labored long days in the sun.
They had married their brothers and their sisters. They had been prey to
any hunter, be it bug, beast or man.
In 1621, one
hundred and twenty-five years after the caravels dispatched the orphans,
the Catholic bishop finally threw up his hands in dismay and said there
is nothing I can do. The Jews marched down the street, celebrating a
holy day for the Torah, booing the Bishop there in the street as he ran
out in his bedclothes, arms waving in disaster.
2009
