Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [40]
It was 1837, and while two years earlier the Spanish Crown had signed a treaty with Great Britain forbidding the trafficking of slaves from Africa, officials looked the other way if chattel first arrived on Martinique, for instance, or Guadeloupe, and were then shipped to Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the United States, where they were necessary for the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, cotton, and sugar. To avoid legal complexities, Rodrigo made sure that human cargo in vessels owned by Marítima Argoso Marín arrived in inconspicuous shallow harbors. He needed someone to transport the Africans from wherever he managed to land them near their destinations in sugarcane plantations, the main markets for the trade on the island. The right man for the job must be able to read and write so that he could handle the necessary paperwork. He must be fearless, because the slaves’ efforts to escape usually involved killing the boss. In addition, he must be ruthless, because slaves who attempted escape could be punished by death. The most important requirements, Rodrigo thought, were the man’s ability to instill fear and respect in another human being and his willingness to kill, if necessary, without thinking too much about it. Severo got the job.
BRAZOS FOR THE FIELDS
Ana’s days were long and arduous. She was responsible for the slaves’ clothing, health, and weekly food allotment. She oversaw the casona’s cleaning and cooking, designed the kitchen gardens, and organized the care of the animals raised for food. With all brazos—“arms” as Severo referred to the workers—needed in the fields, she wasn’t above collecting eggs in the henhouse, picking a chayote for dinner or a grapefruit for dessert. Their clothes and linen were washed in a nearby river and soon showed the stress of being beaten against rocks and draped over bushes under the sun. Her mending basket was always full and she spent hours sewing, her mother’s complaints about her uneven stitches and careless seams a constant echo over three thousand miles of ocean from Sevilla.
After a week at Hacienda los Gemelos, Ana wrote to her parents admitting that her life was more austere than she’d expected, but that she was getting used to the privations.
“Cubillas and Larragoity blood course through my veins. I feel the spirit of our ancestors in this land and am mindful that they met their challenges with courage and curiosity. I’m fulfilled by the rewards of hard work. At the end of each day, I’m proud of how much I have accomplished.”
Ramón and Inocente weren’t good correspondents, so Ana wrote cheery reports to their parents. She let doña Leonor know that her sons were well and described the hacienda in sufficient detail to give her a sense of how they lived, without undue particulars about the hardships. Don Eugenio, Ana knew, was more interested in whether the inflated numbers of hogsheads of sugar and puncheons of molasses and rum that his sons promised before they left Spain were being realized. Since they were short of workers and less than half the potential fields were cultivated, she explained, their first harvest would yield less than they’d hoped. However, from her cash dowry, she wrote, they’d purchased ten more strong men, each costing three hundred pesos each. Two more fields would be cleared and planted, expected to mature within twelve to eighteen months, to increase their harvest from thirty to forty cuerdas of cane cut and processed.
It was harder to write to Elena because there was much Ana wished she could say but couldn’t. Over the six months since her marriage, lovemaking had become the least satisfying of her chores. Other than being scrupulous about whose turn it was to have her, Ramón and Inocente had no interest in improving