I read The Moor’s Account for challenge 20--a novel in which a character of color goes on a spiritual journey. It tells the story of the Narvaez expedition, a doomed Spanish expedition of soldiers and settlers who were supposed to settle the lands of “La Florida” in the sixteenth century. Three hundred men and women set out, and only four survived at the end of eight years. The journey itself went from Florida to parts of Arizona, and ended in New Mexico. Growing up in Texas, we learned about this expedition in elementary school--many of its members were killed in a shipwreck on the Island of Galveston, which is where my family actually settled in Texas a century and some change ago.
In school, we read the official account of the expedition, the Relacion of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a royal treasurer. This book is written from the point of view of the North African slave of one of the other Castilian soldiers--a man named Mustafa, who was baptized as Esteban when he was sold into slavery in Seville.
This book is magnificent. Lalami writes beautifully, and her interweaving of the tale of the expedition with the story of Mustafa’s life before and after becoming a slave is masterful. This is a crucial counter-narrative to so much of what we learn in school, done so gracefully and matter-of-factly that the reader can be left wondering why we haven’t always learned history like this.