Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [149]
She never asked why she focused all her energy and sorrow on the fate and fortunes of Hacienda los Gemelos. She only knew that from the moment she saw it, the land and everything and everyone within its borders were essential to her existence. It couldn’t be questioned, challenged, or explained. It just was. But over the past three weeks, she’d found it impossible to talk herself into the optimism that drove her over the past eleven years. Grueling years … No, I can’t think this way. She shook her head to clear the morbid thoughts that simmered like bubbles over boiling oil. I’ve been alone too long, she said to herself, and went down the stairs to the batey.
Even though Severo forbade it, she had to look in on the sick. There was nothing more she could do for them, but she had to see them, to let them know that she hadn’t forgotten them, that even though she didn’t own a single human being—they were all owned by don Eugenio and Severo—they were hers, su gente, and she couldn’t in all conscience abandon them.
Fela and Pabla were sitting in the shade by the door, each with a baby in her arms. The women were old, but they looked ancient now, their faces ashen, their eyes veiled with grief and hopelessness. Even though she was standing right in front of them, they didn’t look at her, as if the only people they could see were the ones about to die. Ana could go no further. They, too, will die, she realized. We could all die.
She turned around and sprinted up the stairs to the casona. Severo was right. They were in danger. After years of struggle, her life could end in a few hours, just as it had for her long-ago ancestor, in an ignoble death. In filth and failure.
Leaving the casona now, while su gente died in the ramshackle barracks was not a defeat. It was a temporary surrender. To fulfill her responsibility to nuestra gente, she must live.
———
Early the next morning, Ana closeted herself in her study while men moved the furniture onto carts. She packed her books and pamphlets, catalogs and gazettes, Ramón’s and Inocente’s letters to and from their parents, her correspondence with Jesusa and Gustavo, Elena, and Miguel. In another crate, she placed communications to and from Mr. Worthy, the deeds, titles, reports, and transactions, dated and stamped.
Conciencia brought her lunch when the bell rang in the canebrakes. Ana sent it back without touching it. She ordered that her labeled crates be moved and was left alone, in the hottest part of the day, with her ledgers.
She kept the human inventory in a brown leather book, the pages divided into columns. The left column showed the date acquired, followed by the purchase/rental price or a check for babies born on the premises. In the next column she entered the name, then h for hombre, m for mujer, n for niño or niña. Within parentheses she entered their ages. The next column indicated particular skills. The last was another date and a note marking changes: vendido, and if sold, a price; escapado, and whether the runaway was captured; and muerto, dead.
On January 1, 1845, Severo set up the ledgers, entering twenty-five names, followed by de Argoso. Three of them were debits—the runaways. On January 9 he added sixteen names followed by de Fuentes, the ones he brought to the hacienda. On the same date he entered ten more de Argoso names, men purchased with her dowry in clandestine sales. On October 17 he recorded ten more de Argosos from the finca Ramón and Inocente bought during Ana’s cuarentena. On January 13, 1846, he entered ten more de Argoso men. On August 8, 1847, he added ten de Argoso names, and on April 3, 1852, another five. In between there were births and deaths, so at the bottom of Ana’s log, on July 29, 1856, at the height of the cholera epidemic, there were seventy-eight slaves on the premises, thirty belonging to Severo.
Ana dipped her silver pen into her crystal inkwell, both gifts from Abuelo Cubillas when she first learned to write cursive. The first entry she marked was next to December