The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

In 1527, the Castilian conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez and a crew of 600 men sailed from Spain to the Gulf Coast of the United States to claim “La Florida” for the Spanish crown. Laila Lalami recounts the voyage — and its brutal aftermath — in her new novel, “The Moor’s Account,” from the perspective of Estebanico, a ­Moroccan slave of one of the explorers. It’s a fictional memoir, told in a controlled voice that feels at once historical and contemporary, that seeks to offer a truer account of the expedition than the official (and hopelessly biased) version of events provided by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the other three survivors.

It quickly becomes apparent that a strong moralistic impulse drives the story. Crossing “the Ocean of Fog and Darkness” and arriving in America, the conquistadors suffer biblical afflictions in the form of unbearable heat and hordes of mosquitoes. Disease does away with a good number of them, as do the Indians, who take the remaining men captive.

But Lalami is far more interested in what happens to the men after they escape and make their way from Florida to Mexico, bearing witness to wondrous terrain and tribal people. Here we see the previously untold history of the black man as explorer, and an explorer cut from a different cloth.

And we see Estebanico become a new, braver and better man. At one point he vows: “I could not continue to be involved with conquest. I would go to Mexico and there I would get a contract that made legal the freedom that God had bestowed on me at birth.”

Indeed, we are meant to understand that Estebanico’s enslavement is a form of moral comeuppance, for back home in Morocco he had sold men into slavery himself out of sheer greed.

Money is the root of all evil in this ­novel. As a young man, Estebanico refused to follow his father’s advice to become a notary or carpenter, choosing instead to become a merchant. His father cautioned him that “trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it. . . . But, just as a deaf man cannot heed a warning to watch out for the horse cart, I would not listen to his appeals.”

The father’s prediction comes true. “I fell for the magic of numbers and the allure of profit. I was preoccupied only with the price of things and neglected their ­value,” Estebanico tells us. “It no longer mattered to me what it was I sold, whether glass or grain, wax or weapons, or even, I am ashamed to say . . . slaves.” He sells three men into slavery, “telling myself that I had not done anything that others had not done before me.”

Little does Estebanico know that God is about to intervene, make Himself known and lead him back into the fold of humankind. God visits in the form of drought, and the Moors must struggle to survive. In his first redemptive act, Estebanico sells himself into slavery to provide ­money for his mother and siblings. “I could not know that this was just the first of many erasures,” he says.

Once in Spain, he is stripped of his name, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, and called Estebanico. And so he begins to discover how slavery will rob him of his dignity and identity: “A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too. So I had never been able to shake the feeling that this Estebanico was a man conceived by the Castilians.”

However, the erasure that Lalami is most concerned about is historical. Namely, how the official accounts have done away with the African, Arab and Islamic role in the construction of the New World, an idea brought home in a scene near the end of the novel.

One day, Estebanico is walking through the streets of Tenochtitlán, Mexico, when he chances upon a wooden charm in the shape of a hand. “It looked just like the amulets my mother used to wear,” he realizes. “Except hers were made of metal rather than wood.” What he discovers here is the literal and figurative hand of Africa that has made its way across oceans and shaped life, culture and commerce in the New World.

But the master narrative is such that Estebanico, the African, is scarcely given a voice in Cabeza de Vaca’s travelogue, while his Castilian cohorts go on record to provide the “detailed history” of the expedition: “They omitted the torture and rapes they had witnessed, they justified the thefts of food and supplies, they left out the Indian wives they married.” In its “shortened and sanitized form, the chronicle of the Narváez expedition became suitable for the royal court, the cardinals and inquisitors, the governors and officials, and the families and friends they had left behind in Castile.”

Moreover, Narváez, a man who delights in fabricating stories, authenticates the accounts of these three men: “His memories of the expedition were entered into the official record, invalidating all others.” Estebanico realizes he is “once again living in a world where written records were synonymous with power.”

For Lalami, storytelling is just that, a primal struggle over power between the strong and the weak, between good and evil, and against forgetting. As ­Estebanico’s mother says, “Every story needs a villain,” and in this novel, which can be simplistic in its construction of heroes and villains, the villain always has white skin. Europeans conquer, enslave and erase and are beyond redemption, while the Moors and Native Americans are a people apart.

Faith defines the difference. “The elders teach us: Give glory to God, who can alter all fates.” Believing this, Estebanico is able to make himself anew, unlike his Spanish companions: “The three men I had once thought of as brothers were moving on . . . forgetting everything that we had been through in the north.” The Castilians are greed-driven materialists, while the Moors and Native Americans are, at their core, spiritual beings.

Interestingly enough, Estebanico finds faith in the darkest moment in the novel when he is betrayed in Mexico and fails to become legally free. “Everything was lost,” he tells us. “But a voice inside me said no — not everything. I still had one thing. My story.”

Lalami wants us to understand that storytelling is a religious act. Estebanico begins to understand himself as a being formed by the larger narrative of racial history and religious history: “I had journeyed through the Land of the Indians and had witnessed many things that my companions had preferred to revise, embellish or silence. . . . I could right what had been made wrong. And so I began to write my account. For every lie I had heard about the imperial expedition that had brought me to the edge of the world, I would tell the truth.”

Some might argue that a good historical novel should peel back the past to ­reveal what at the deepest level we already know: that black or white, rich or poor, woman or man, Muslim or Christian, we all are capable of being monsters. But “The Moor’s Account” asks something else of fiction. Lalami sees the story as a form of moral and spiritual instruction that can lead to transcendence: “Maybe if our experiences, in all of their glorious, magnificent colors, were somehow added up, they would lead us to the blinding light of the truth.” And “the only thing at once more precious and more fragile than a true story,” she reminds us, “is a free life.”

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