Date: 1556, February.  Santo Domingo, La Española
Theme: Deposition by a Black African enslaved man named Antonio
Source: Archivo General de Indias, Justicia 103A, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Dominican Colonial Documents Collection.

Occasionally in La Española in the sixteenth-century, enslaved Blacks would be called to testify in judicial inquiries conducted by the local colonial authorities, which seems to imply that their voices would have been given at least some legitimacy and at least within this kind of context.

In the case of the judicial inquiry this document was part of , a “Ladino” Black African man named Antonio, described as “creole from Santo Tome, ” was called to testify.  He described himself as 23 years of age.  Among other things he testified about a young Black boy named Antono (“un negrillo que se llamava Antono”) who apparently arrived in the same slave ship captured in Santo Domingo about 1555,  was delivered to a local resident named Lope Amado, and just a few days later was accompanying that adult publicly as a servant.  The  adult slave Antonio mentioned also another female Black slave from the same shipment that he had seen serving Amado as well, arguing he did not know whether these slaves had been sold or given to Amado.

Elsewhere in his deposition, Antonio also added that his namesake enslaved boy was at the time “very skinny and scabious and was worth very little money.” Another witness named Iñigo López, possibly a free resident of  Santo Domingo City,  testified apparently about the same boy, saying  that “a young  bozal Black boy he saw walking behind the said Lope Amado after the caravela with the Blacks  arrived.”

At one point in the transcript of the inquiry, when asked further about what he knew about how these two slaves ended up in the hands of  Lope Amado, Antonio is quoted as explaining that he did not witness the transaction and referring the interrogator to the rest of the proceedings of the investigation for an answer, in passing reportedly saying “because this witness is Black and does not know so much account as to know it, and does not know anything else.”

If the indirect quote by the notary of the proceedings above  is accurate, the statement may indicate that when Antonio seemed to be justifying his ignorance on being “Black,” he may have been himself using in his favor a racialized notion of slavery already employed in the overall colonial social environment, alluding to the fact that as a slave he did not have access to much information pertaining to the operations of the slave traders that were his masters.