Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [181]
“Unlike in the United States, the troublemakers here don’t have enough support within the government and can’t organize the slaves. They’re isolated on the haciendas.”
“They don’t need to be organized to make trouble,” she said.
“That’s true. Anything can happen.” He finished his drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s why we have to remind them that we don’t tolerate disorder here.”
In the barracks, in the fields, in the bohíos and shacks in La Palanca, in the elegant homes of the newest streets in Guares, and in the offices of notaries and bankers, in don Tibó’s cantina, in the colmados and cafetines, on the steps to the new church, around the shaded plaza, on the anchored ships docked in Guares and on the ones circling the island, in the most recondite corners of Puerto Rico, slaves, jornaleros, hacendados, merchants, soldiers, farmers, sailors, and captains were paying attention to the war in el norte. Everyone knew that with emancipation in the United States, centuries of government-sanctioned exploitation of Africans and their descendants had ended everywhere in the Americas—everywhere that is, except for Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. No one was more aware of this than the men and women toiling under the sun of endless cane fields in those three countries.
A man is a man, even when forced to work like a beast, made to live like a beast, expected to become one. Jacobo de Argoso, born Idowe, Yoruba, was captured as a child; thrown into the dark, filthy hold of a ship; starved, chained, whipped, sold, pushed, prodded, and cursed into the canebrakes; locked inside airless barracks; chased by dogs when he ran into the woods; whipped again; sold again; sent into other fields; locked inside again. He stole a machete to use against Severo Fuentes, who’d keep him from running, but Jacobo was caught, received twenty-five lashes, and when the wounds were not quite healed, was dragged back into the waving cane. Jacobo stopped running and bent into the cane while he had a wife and children who needed him. He worked like a beast, because a man did what he must to survive and provide for his wife, his children. But when the plague killed his wife, his children, he began to think again about escape.
Jacobo still remembered his village along a broad and fast-flowing river and knew he’d never see it again, or the long-legged women walking to their plots, or the knobby-kneed boys leading goats to the hills, or the sinewy men prowling the forest to hunt. In his mind, they continued to walk, lead, and prowl because if they didn’t, he’d never existed, had never been but a slave with a machete in a foreign land. He had not forgotten his name, Idowe, had not forgotten the other four boys captured with him, none of whom made it alive across the big water from freedom to slavery. By 1863 he’d lived and worked through thirty-six harvests, his spine curved over the moist earth, the towering stalks rustling and cackling overhead and around him, his right arm rising, falling, slicing, the left arm throwing the stalks behind for someone else to pick up and carry. Thirty-six harvests of dark to dark days and, in between, implacable sun, thirst, hunger, snakes, the long, sharp cane leaves slicing into his skin, and insects, always insects, pricking and biting his punished flesh. The whip, too, engraved more scars upon his legs when a blanco accused him of touching him, something he’d never do even if he could. White skin like the belly of a lizard’s was repulsive to Jacobo.
So much had been taken from Jacobo de Argoso, born Idowe, by his thirtieth zafra, during the cholera, that for six more years he bent ever closer to the ground, as if he might find some of his life again between the endless rows of the cañaveral.
One day, as Jacobo was helping Efraín de Fuentes carry a load of lumber to the workshop, he heard the news.
“The slaves are free in el norte,” Efraín said. “Maybe el libertador