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his marriage having ended, he returned to the Cherokee, married a half-Cherokee woman, became the Cherokee ambassador to Washington, and took to wearing native garb. Angered by his constant drinking, the Cherokee ejected him from his job and threw him out of the group. Houston became president of Texas after it seceded from Mexico. In office, he tried to forge an alliance with local Cherokees to invade northern Mexico and create a bicultural state. Jefferson, too, helped create a mixed society. As demonstrated by DNA tests in 1998, he was the likely father of one or more children by his part-African slave, Sally Hemings, who may have been his wife’s half sister. Jefferson freed all six of Hemings’s children—the only slaves he emancipated—and three went on as adults to live as “whites.”

5 Spaniards weren’t alone in this preoccupation. The eighteenth-century French polymath Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry tried to split Haiti’s jumbled population into 128 minutely differentiated groups (“the twelve combinations of Mulatto range from 56 to 70 parts white”).

6 Not all went to Mexico. A census of Lima, Peru, in 1613 found 114 Asians living there, almost half of them women. Presumably the actual tally was bigger, because Asians would have tried to avoid the census takers. Many were “ruff openers” (abridores de cuellos), fixing the mechanisms on the stiff ruffs wealthy men then wore about their necks.

9

Forest of Fugitives

IN CALABAR

Christian de Jesus Santana could see the secret city from his window. Known as Calabar, it was at the edge of Salvador da Bahia, in northeast Brazil, on the inland side of a ridge that paralleled the coastline. On the shore side of the ridge, invisible from Calabar, was the great Bay of All Saints, the second-biggest slave harbor in the world, the first glimpse of the Americas for more than 1.5 million captive Africans. The slaves were supposed to spend the rest of their days in Brazil’s sugar plantations and mills. Most did, but countless thousands escaped their bondage, and many of these established fugitive communities—quilombos, as Brazilians called them—in the nation’s forests. Almost always they were joined by Indians, who were also targeted by European slavers. Protected by steep terrain, thickly packed trees, treacherous rivers, and lethal booby traps, these illicit hybrid settlements endured for decades, even centuries. The great majority were small, but some grew to amazing size. Calabar, where Christian grew up, swelled to as many as twenty thousand inhabitants. (The name Calabar comes from a slave port in what is now Nigeria.) A few miles away, another Salvador quilombo, Liberdade (Liberty), today has a population of 600,000 and is said to be the biggest Afro-American community in the Western Hemisphere.

Good records do not exist, but Calabar and Liberdade were certainly going concerns by 1650. In Liberdade I met a local historian who told me the city actually originated decades earlier, when slaves had escaped from Salvador down a native path in the forest. The Bay of All Saints is bordered by high, forested bluffs; escapees climbed the bluffs and took over land on the other side, creating a ring of encampments between the colonial port and the indigenous interior. Sometimes their homes were just a few hundred yards away from European farms as the crow flies, but the forest and hills were impenetrable enough to conceal their location. The Portuguese constantly hunted the runaways, but they also traded with them—Calabar’s residents, four miles from the center of Salvador, exchanged dried fish, manioc (cassava), rice, and palm oil for knives, guns, and cloth. In 1888 Brazil finally abolished slavery, yet life in its quilombos showed little improvement. They were still regarded as illegal squatters’ settlements. But the government was too weak to do much about them.

In the 1950s and 1960s Salvador grew enormously. Urban pseudopods reached over the ridges, engulfing Calabar, Liberdade, and half a dozen other quilombos. But these fugitive settlements never fully became part of