Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [44]
As they gained experience of the operations, Ramón and Inocente realized that the work on the hacienda was more challenging than they’d imagined, or Ana had promised. One evening, Ana and the brothers were having dinner. Ana had underestimated how much food to bring from San Juan, and their meals were now only slightly better than what was given to the workers: mostly tubers and plantains, bacalao, whatever fruit was in season.
“Do you remember those reports by Colonel Flinter and others?” Ramón asked as he speared a chunk of boiled malanga on his fork.
“Yes.” Ana heard the edge in his tone.
“Well, they vastly exaggerated the potential while blatantly understating actual conditions,” Inocente completed his brother’s thought.
“Of course they would,” Ana said. “They were employed by the Crown to encourage Europeans to immigrate to Puerto Rico.”
“You didn’t say that then.”
The resentment in his voice was new.
“I didn’t know it then.”
“Do you remember, Inocente,” Ramón continued, “the accounts told of blacks and whites working side by side in the cane to collectively reap the enormous rewards?”
Inocente made much of pulling a spine from a chunk of stewed bacalao. “It’s not quite that way, is it?”
“Not exactly,” Ana said. “But we’ve just started. Severo said that by the time he arrived most of the white laborers had already been hired.”
That was true, but Ana had noticed that white men, especially, refused to work in jobs traditionally identified as slave labor. When she visited the trapiche where the stalks were crushed, and the boiling house where the juice was reduced to syrup, she was nearly overcome by the noise, the heat, the flies, the smoke and ash, the cloying smell, the frantic pace. During the harvest, the trapiche and boiling house ran twenty-four hours a day in eighteen-hour shifts with only a couple of breaks for meals. While the work required a high degree of skill and knowledge, few men with other options were willing to work under such conditions, and only slaves processed the sugar.
Like many of their contemporaries, Ana and the twins were ambivalent about the institution of slavery. But living among slaves now, they were confronted with every aspect of its reality. At the same time, what humanitarian feelings pricked at the edge of their conscience were tempered by the urgent need to realize a gain on their investment in brazos for the fields.
As their first zafra came to an end, Ramón, Inocente, and Ana pored over the ledgers, trying to make sense of the figures. They produced 110 hogsheads of sugar and 40 puncheons of molasses—less than half what they’d hoped for their first crop.
Hacienda los Gemelos belonged to Eugenio, but Ramón and Inocente would inherit the estate jointly. The two brothers wanted to impress their father, and to silence their mother’s worries. They knew that the profits from sugar could be impressive, but that it was also a costly enterprise relative to net gains. The biggest expense was the land, but they already owned two hundred cuerdas. Money, however, was needed for buying, housing, feeding, and clothing workers and keeping them healthy. As she went through the accounts, Ana prepared numerous lists of what they needed in order to keep the hacienda viable. They had to maintain horses for themselves and Ana, as well as pack mules and cattle for hauling the cane from the fields to the ingenio and transporting the hogsheads of sugar and puncheons of molasses to the nearest town, from where the product could be sent to buyers. They needed carts, harnesses, barrels, ropes, copper pans for the boiling house, trays in the purgery. They needed machetes, hoes, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, and shovels. They had to pay foremen and Severo Fuentes.
Ana, Ramón, and Inocente had left the management of the workers to Severo and didn’t interfere with his job as boss and enforcer. He found and trained them; he assigned their jobs and organized their work supervised by the foremen, both of them recent libertos. He also whipped them when necessary.