Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [60]
“I’d like to have a conversation that doesn’t include complaints about what we don’t have,” Ramón shouted. “Take a moment to notice what we have accomplished.”
“I don’t believe you’re speaking to me this way.”
Ramón’s anger vanished. “Things are different in the middle of nowhere,” he said, as if he’d just discovered something about himself. He was going to say more but changed his mind. Without another word, he ran down the stairs.
Ana was confused and hurt. It was unlike Ramón to be rude or to raise his voice in anger, but it was obvious that he was disappointed in her. Yes, she’d disregarded her wifely roles of hostess and social consort to focus on the needs of the hacienda. In the process, she might have wounded Ramón’s (and Inocente’s) male pride by being a more capable manager than they were. They’d used her confinement and cuarentena to exclude her from the everyday operations of the hacienda. Now that she had a child, they wanted her to turn her attention to female pursuits, as if being a mother reduced her ambition and drive. No, Ramón, she said to herself, what we’re building here is not for our amusement; it is for him, and for future generations.
EL TIEMPO MUERTO
The end of the sugarcane harvest was the beginning of el tiempo muerto, the dead time, roughly June to December. With no cane to cut, load, transport, process, and ship, free campesinos had to find other work to keep themselves busy and to provide for their families. Those with friends or relatives on coffee or tobacco plantations migrated there for the season, but long distances, poor roads, and cost made travel impractical for most. The peasants waited until the harvest came around again, buying on credit whatever they couldn’t grow, trade, or barter, so by the time the zafra came with its promise of work, they were already deep in debt.
To feed themselves and their families, jíbaros tended meager plots and coaxed plantains and yuca, malangas and ñames from the soil. They fished oceans and rivers. They kept hens until they laid no more eggs, then sacrificed them into asopaos de gallina or fricassees. They raised goats for milk and herded them to brambled hillsides, where the animals’ omnivorous appetites soon reduced the slopes to stubble in preparation for tilling. When they outlived their usefulness, or when the dead time seemed to stretch longer than in other years, the goats, too, became fricassee or stews that fed a neighborhood.
For slaves, however, there was no dead time. They were too expensive an investment to be idle during the months when no cane was cut. Their days during el tiempo muerto began as they always did, at dawn, with the mournful clang of the watchtower bell. Their barracks were locked overnight and were opened by the foremen at the first strike. The slaves hopped from their pallets or hammocks and lined up, men on one side, women on the other, and after a quick cup of water and a chunk of boiled batata, they were given their tools and led to their labors until the bell clanged the return home.
During the dead time, slaves cleared land, prepared soil, planted cane shoots for the crop that took between a year and eighteen months to mature. The long-horned bulls that pulled carts loaded with four-foot stalks during the harvest now hauled trees felled in the forests and dragged to the workshop to be cut into lumber or to the ingenio for the fires under the calderas. Slaves cleaned and improved the buildings where the cane was processed, repaired machinery, maintained the tracks from the canebrakes to the batey, raised the berms between fields, built and cleared ditches. They staked new fences and mended deteriorated ones, dug trenches for drainage, built canals for irrigation.
Between harvests, the ingenio was scrubbed and repaired. This was where the cane was crushed, its juice boiled, purified, and filtered, where the resulting crystals were pressed and formed