Conquistadora (14 page)

Criollos
made up the rest of the workforce. Born into slavery in Puerto Rico, they had no more rights or license than those captured from other places.

Severo kept a close watch on the
bozales
because they were more likely than
criollos
to attempt escape. They were forbidden to speak their own languages. No matter where they came from, once in the Spanish colonies, they were baptized and given new names. Those from Martinique and Guadeloupe, from St. Croix or St. Thomas, spoke French, Dutch, or English. They, too, were made to learn Spanish.

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 were expected to do the work of twice that many.

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.

Every adult
bozal
at Hacienda los Gemelos had attempted escape, and a couple of the native-born, too. Generally, slave owners didn’t buy known runaways, because once they’d tried to escape, they would try again. “What can we do to prevent that?” Ramón asked Severo.

“They have to believe that there are consequences, and that we mean it when we tell them what they are.”

A few days before Ramón, Inocente, and Ana arrived, Severo said, he had lined up the slaves in the
batey
and warned them that if they tried to run away, he’d find them.

“And when I do, I told them, the law gives me the right to punish you, and believe me, I will.”

His quiet, dispassionate tone was chilling. While he gave no specific example of what punishment he’d deliver, Ana heard the threat as if it applied even to her. “No wonder they’re scared of you.”

“It’s them, or us,
señora
. They will challenge their masters at every opportunity. No one wants to be a slave. They had the bad fortune of being born in Africa.”

“You sound like you’re sorry for them,” Ramón said.

“Maybe, sometimes. But that doesn’t keep me from doing my job.”

As if to spare her that aspect of the operation, the first time Severo was going to punish a slave he suggested that Ana stay indoors the next morning. Whippings took place in a field behind the barns, and even if she wanted to, she couldn’t see from the
casona
. The screams, however, reached her, and echoed in her mind after the sentence was dispensed and the rest of the workers returned to their labors.

“Is there another way to discipline them?” she asked Ramón and Inocente over supper that night. “I couldn’t bear the screaming.”

“The whip is the only way to train and teach them,” Inocente said. “They have to be punished.…”

“Who was it? What did he do?”

“Jacobo,” Ramón said, “tried to steal a machete.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” Inocente said.

“He was planning to run away,” Ramón said.

“And who knows what else,” his brother added.

“Don’t scare her, Inocente.”

Inocente patted Ana’s hand. “Severo knows what he’s doing.”

“I know,” she said, remembering Severo’s matter-of-fact demeanor when talking about the slaves. With Severo Fuentes in charge of their workforce, Ana knew they need not worry about whether or how things would get done. He was completely in charge, and sometimes, when reviewing the complex ledgers, she wished that Ramón and Inocente would be as competent on the business side.

She soon confirmed that, as she noticed in Cádiz, Ramón and Inocente hadn’t devoted enough time in the Marítima Argoso Marín offices to have a clear understanding of income relative to expenses. They spent much time shaking their heads over the ledgers, never quite figuring out how to balance them.

Her mother and the nuns had drilled Ana on the vagaries of household economy and domestic finance. At first the brothers didn’t want Ana involved in day-to-day operations, but they agreed that Ana had a better grasp of bookkeeping than they did, and soon she was managing the accounting as efficiently as Severo Fuentes oversaw the workers. Once she demonstrated that she could maneuver around their financial predicaments, on paper at least, the twins consulted her more often.

“It makes no sense,” she said to Ramón and Inocente, “to keep slaves who can’t be put to work.”

“What are we supposed to do with them?”

“We can enlarge the vegetable gardens and orchards. Children too young for the fields and the crippled or elderly can plant and maintain them. The more food we can raise here, the less we’ll have to buy from local farms.”

“That alone could save us hundreds of pesos a year,” Inocente acknowledged.

“We can raise more animals and fowl for meat and eggs. We can have goats, sheep, and cows for milk and cheese. Whatever we don’t use, we sell.”

“We’ll have to hire another foreman,” Ramón said.

“Why?”

“Severo and the two bosses are out in the fields all day long. Ramón and I are also busy. Someone has to train and supervise them,” Inocente said.

“I’ll do that,” Ana said. There was a silence. “Why do you both look so shocked?”

“It’s inappropriate,” Ramón said. “You’d have to be out with them, organizing them—”

“—training them, giving orders,” Inocente continued.

“I don’t see how that’s different from what I do now, except that there will be more of them.”

“Right now you deal with the household slaves like Flora, Teo, and Marta. They know what to do. The field workers aren’t used to orders from a lady.”

“Are you worried that I’ll be calling for smelling salts if they say or do something vulgar?”

The brothers now talked so fast that it was hard for Ana to distinguish which one said what.

“You’re already doing enough with the household and ledgers.”

“That’s the kind of thing women do well.”

“It’s not right for you to be out in the
campo
ordering slaves.”

“What will you do if you have to punish one of them?”

She hadn’t thought about that. Would she discipline the old, the crippled, the children she was taking on as her responsibility? She remembered Jesusa slapping her servants, then being shocked that they quit their jobs. “Spain should have never abolished slavery,” she complained, and Ana hated that about her mother, that longing to dominate others. Ana cheered when the servants left, and wished she could also run from her parents’ overweening sense of entitlement. But she now wondered if it was in her blood. Subjugating the native people was the first thing the conquistadores did, always by force, always by violence.