They were enslaved. They invited the governor to the funeral.

A day they chose themselves

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September 1654 AD — The enslaved people of Cartagena held a funeral service of their own for St. Peter Claver this week. They chose the day. Then they invited the governor of the city, the Spanish nobles and the officers of the fleet. They asked them to come and sit in it.

The people who arranged the service are owned by other men. The men they invited govern the port. They govern the sea lane the slave ships come in by.

Inside the church they stood in groups by nation, each group under its own chief. Every person in the building was handed a lighted torch. A choir sang the Mass. Then the treasurer of the church of Popayán preached for a long time. He spoke about the dead priest’s goodness, his holiness and the wonders worked in him. God had given St. Peter Claver work among the Africans of this port. That work, he told everyone there, was the main cause of the wonders.

St. Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest of the college in Cartagena. He died in the small hours of September 8. He was buried the next morning in a niche cut into the wall of the chapel of the Christ. The governor, Don Pedro de Zapata, and some navy officers carried his body to the grave.

Ten thousand people a year

Cartagena is the chief slave market of Spanish America. Ten or twelve thousand Africans are landed on these wharves in a year. They are bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo for about four crowns a head. They are sold here for two hundred crowns or more.

They come ashore speaking languages that have nothing to do with one another. That was the problem St. Peter Claver spent his whole working life on.

St. Peter Claver landed here in 1610 AD, a Jesuit from Catalonia. For forty-four years he worked among the Africans brought into this port. In 1622 AD his superiors ordered him to make his solemn profession. He agreed on one condition. He wanted to add a promise of his own: to serve the Africans of the port for ever. He signed it in Latin: “Peter, for ever the slave of the negroes.”

Eleven languages, and a man called Calepino

He learned the Angola language. That was not enough for a port that trades in so many. So he got his superiors’ permission and went from door to door through the city asking for alms. The money paid his interpreters. It also paid the men hired to do the interpreters’ work for their owners for as long as he had them.

With the money he obtained seven Africans for the college, each from a different nation. They were not held in strict slavery. They lived with certain freedoms as teachers and interpreters. One of them took him several days to teach to make the sign of the cross.

More than thirty men and women have worked for him as interpreters over the years. One of them, nicknamed Calepino, knows eleven languages. It was they who made each person off the ships hear the preaching in his own tongue.

The priest on the floor

When he taught, St. Peter Claver put the interpreters in the chairs and sat on the floor. A priest who walked in on that once lost his temper. He went at the interpreter to knock him out of the seat and put the Father in it. St. Peter Claver stopped him gently and told him to leave the interpreter where he sat. In that work, St. Peter Claver said, the Black man was the priest and the preacher. St. Peter Claver was the interpreter’s servant.

Outside the walls, on the estates around the city, the enslaved have been mourning him since the news of the death got out. For several days together nobody could quiet them. Inside the walls, people of every rank are calling him a saint outright and asking for relics of him. Cartagena is raising a tomb over the grave at its own cost. The arms of the city are stamped on it.