Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [43]
In spite of efforts to Hispanicize them, however, bozales retained the practices and prejudices of their native cultures. Some were natural enemies, their antipathies surviving beyond the grueling transport across the ocean. Liberal use of the whip forced them to work together, but in at least one case, a bozal murdered another within a month of arriving in Los Gemelos, because in Africa their clans were enemies. Severo Fuentes whipped him to within a breath of his life, but slaves were so expensive and difficult to train that he was allowed to recover and was put to work in the cane as soon as he could stand.
The Creole slaves were both afraid of and in awe of the bozales, who brought traditions with them that the native-born had either forgotten or never knew. Efforts to make them accept Catholicism as the one true faith were only partly successful. Neither bozales nor criollos saw any reason why they shouldn’t worship their ancestral orishas alongside Papá Dios, la Purísima Virgen, and Jesucristo. The españoles renamed everything into their language anyway, so Africans called their orishas by Spanish names: Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the seas and fertility, was the Virgin de Regla; Babalú Ayé, the god of healing, functioned the same as Saint Lazarus; Obatalá, who created human beings from clay and was the protector of the physically deformed, was the same as Our Lady of Mercy.
Three of the bozales were followers of Islam. They refused to eat pork, the principal meat for their sustenance. They traded their ration of fatback to others for vegetables and corn flour. They wanted to pray five times a day, but when they tried, they were lashed and made to return to their labors.
Whether bozales, criollos, or slaves from one of the nearby islands, the majority of blacks in Puerto Rico were Yoruba, Igbo, and Mandinka people from sub-Saharan and central Africa.
Flora was a Pygmy from the Congo, captured as a girl along with her mother, who died before they reached the Indies. She’d worked as the personal maid of a merchant’s wife.
“She liked I am so small,” said Flora, who stood just over four feet tall. Her former mistress wanted a maid below her sight line.
Flora had scars along her shoulders and down her arms, put there she said, “before my first blood.” Many of the bozales had elaborate designs on their faces and arms created by scarring and mortifying the skin with charcoal and hot-pepper juice. Others were tattooed. Teo had different-size dots around his eyes and across his forehead and cheeks. Paula, his wife, had faint vertical lines across her jaw, and intricate circles on the backs of her hands and arms. A couple of the older men and women had oddly shaped earlobes and lips where they once wore disks, bones, and other decorations. At first, their scars and markings repelled Ana, but the longer she lived at Los Gemelos, the more she looked past what she’d rather not see.
Severo told Ana, Ramón, and Inocente that most sugar plantations in Puerto Rico averaged seventy-five cuerdas. That meant that Hacienda los Gemelos, with two hundred cuerdas, was huge, although most of the land was woods, pasture, and forest.
“We have thirty cuerdas ready for harvest and four trained macheteros. Each cutter is expected to harvest a minimum of a cuerda of sugarcane per day,” Severo told them, “but due to weather, injuries, broken tools, and any number of other disruptions, they don’t always achieve their daily goal.”
“How about some of the others?” Ana asked.
“Half of them are too young, too old, or too maimed to work in the cañaveral,” Severo explained. “When I found the ledgers that the previous mayordomo kept, I discovered that three men listed in the account books had run away and were never captured.”
Ana computed mentally. There were now forty-eight slaves on the hacienda: thirty-two owned by Ramón and Inocente and the sixteen Severo leased to them. According to him, only twenty were capable of the backbreaking work of cutting, stacking, transporting, and processing cane. They