In 1527, a Spanish expedition of six hundred men sails to claim Florida for the crown. Its disastrous unraveling is narrated by Estebanico, a Moroccan man enslaved to one of the explorers—an invented memoir that gives voice to history's silenced witness.
Those who conquer give speeches not to report what is true but to create it. The official account becomes the record simply because the powerful were the ones who wrote it down, while the people they owned or overran went unheard.
A name carries a language, a history, traditions, and a way of seeing. When someone is renamed by those who own them, they lose more than a word; their ties to all of that are cut too.
Fortune can flip a person's place completely: one day selling slaves, the next being sold as one. Free choices made one at a time, even desperate ones like selling yourself so your family won't starve, can add up to a life you never imagined choosing.
Clinging to plans to get back to the old life can hook a person to one false lure after another. Freedom of a kind begins when they stop struggling toward the past and treat the present as all they have.