by Rachel May
The rum that was made in Rhode Island was distilled from “West Indian molasses.” Rhode Island was thus built upon the slave trade and the Atlantic mercantile system that interwove the West Indies with Africa and the new colonies. South Carolina planters could be supplied enslaved people from West Indian plantations, some of whom were owned by Rhode Islanders like the DeWolf family. The livelihoods of the San Isidro master sitting in his bathtub in Cuba, Winthrop and Susan in South Carolina, and their parents and grandparents in Rhode Island, were all tied up in this system that was built upon the exchange of goods from New England that supported the plantations in the West Indies—cod and meat and cheese to feed the enslaved in the West Indies, rum to trade for the enslaved people in Africa, and sugar to bring back home to make more rum. A tidy triangle, a messy tangle—a web of profits.
Susan’s father and grandfather made their livelihoods, for a time, shipping to Havana, Barbados, South Carolina, and then Jason, Susan’s father, lost it all in 1808. Until then, on their shipping manifests and accounting books, there are the words that span the globe, zigzagging with dollar signs trailing behind them like slug trails in the sea: Sugar, molasses, coffee, chocolate. Goods from the West Indies. Silks and tea and spices from China, traded for in the islands. And to trade with, from New England: Rum. Rum. Rum. Their currency. The currency of the slave trade. When I searched for diaries written by Providence women in the nineteenth century, many were written by women like Susan and her friend Sarah Hamlin, northern daughters of merchants who traded down the coast and in the West Indies. It was the course of trade then, an easy hop from the southern coast to the islands where enslaved people tended coffee and sugar, where plantation conditions were notoriously harsh and so many people were worked to death.
Before I get to Trinidad and the sugar plantations, I’m in Havana, and the music is just as they said it would be—boisterous, and on every street corner. Salsa, rumba, beats I’m learning only here. People in costumes dancing on stilts. Red and yellow and green fabric in strips that sway from their arms and legs when they groove and spin. They step forward and back, shift their hips, staying atop those six-foot stilts, I don’t know how. A woman on the ground with big red circles painted onto her cheeks invites a tourist from the circle around them to dance. He tries to salsa with her, but he’s awkward and brazen and gets too close. She plays the crowd, waves him dramatically away, fans her face.
The coffee here is better than it is back home. Café con leche and iced chocolate coffee with frothy milk and chocolate sprinkled on top. The rum is even better than they said it would be. Mojitos with handfuls of mint smashed in the bottom of the glass, frozen daiquiris, Cuba libres with sweet dark syrup that goes by the name Coke but isn’t fizzy, white rum or dark rum in double shots at the club where the Buena Vista Social Club played.
It’s three o’clock and raining, and I’ve retreated under the arches of a grand colonial building in the San Francisco plaza, part of the old city that’s just a block from the famous Malecón where old cars wind along the shore. Four men play for the crowd—one man holds a set of cowbells lined up in front of him on a bar that hangs across his body, one plays trumpet, one plays a metal drum, and another man play the congas, a drum that, I learn, originated in Cuba. The men wear long white shirts and white pants. When it’s time to go, the trumpet player leads the band out into the street and the crowd follows, a conga line. It’s raining in the square, but the crowd moves into it, following the band across the cobblestone square and down a narrow street. In Havana, I come to love the sound of the trumpet. It fades down the wet street with the crowd that follows its blare.
I hold a list of enslaved people owned by James DeWolf for one of his three Cuban plantations; this one, Mary Ann, grew coffee. The handwritten list says: “103 negroes of both sexes, 96. from Affrica, 7. born on the [Journey].” There’s a map of the plantation, with two large sections for plantains, two smaller for sugarcane, and the rest for coffee, coffee, coffee. I can read about these plantations in history books, can learn the story of these places, but it’s still an awful abstraction—an idea of a world, an idea of torture and murder—until I see the maps and read the handwritten lists of tools, crops, and enslaved people, all of these “objects” side by side, property for the owner. I’m looking at copies of the originals, but still, I can see the stains on the paper, the tears and long straight marks of the long-folded sections, the slight variation of the capital C’s and S’s and P’s. Once it’s material, it’s real. Like the quilt tops and the papers they hold and the letters of the family.
I study the ink blots, those great misshapen stains that mark the imperfect hand and writing tools—the splash of ink with a long narrow tail and a smaller circle on the end, a word obliterated mid-sentence, the smear of a hand across the ink, a broken wax seal and the drops of red wax across the backside of the paper, or the way someone wrote in triangles across the folds of the sealed letter the way we did in third grade when we passed notes behind the teacher’s back.
I think of the white cotton thread stitches in the quilt. I love the way these stitches look regular, small, precise—and then tilt slightly left or right. Almost perfect, but never quite. Marks of the hand, of the body, evidence of themselves that people leave behind.
What does it mean to know that 103 so-called “Negroes” were bought for the coffee plantation, most from Africa? To know that seven babies were born, delivered by seven laboring mothers, on the awful journey to Cuba? Can you picture 103 people in a group, looking up at once from the field? They’re singular but nameless faces, a foggy crowd framed like one of those old black-and-white photos that blurs at the edges. I have a sense of collective grief and triumph over oppression that can’t be made more particular because people are untraceable in the records. Then, I see the note about their sale handwritten in loopy cursive, and I see their names, and the story becomes more real, the fog burns off in ugly Technicolor magic: Augustin, Hilarie, Crispin, Henrique, Sebastian, Frederico, Juliana, Lorenza, Beatriz, Margarita, Maria, Carolina. Like the list I read in Charleston, the names of these people enslaved in Cuba are listed in that steady loopy hand that we’d call calligraphy today with wider lengths on the capital letters and dots at the ends of the J’s and M’s and A’s. As I read each name, each person becomes singular, each with a distinctive voice, eyes, dreams, soul. Their bodies come into focus on the field and in the house; they walk down the dirt road that runs between the fields and make dinner for their families at night with a great cast-iron pot over a fire—a few beans, some plantains boiled in water. There’s talk of the day, a brief chuckle and then a sigh; there’s a boy playing, and a younger boy singing to himself as he nestles beside his mother. It’s a hot night, and the older boy wails when he sees a great wasp fly through the open window. The boy was stung by one of these wasps weeks ago and was sick for a week, fevered and dizzy. His father jumps to kill it with the wooden spoon but only succeeds in shooing it out the window, its retreat a swift buzz. The father curses, knowing that one will be back. He curses because he can’t protect his son’s life.
From Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the flight is forty-five minutes long. When we land, it feels like we’re a world away from that town, which looked antiseptic in comparison with Havana. Here, the streets are made of dusty cobblestone, the buildings are hundreds of years old with chipping paint in tropical colors—bright blue, candy pink, canary yellow—layered with dirt that’s kicked up from the cars and bikes and mopeds and horses, like once-flamboyant young birds now showing their age.
The embargo has made Havana a sort of time warp, with bike taxis and 1950s cars for hire. People here are poor, having suffered for years under a ruler who keeps their grocery store shelves nearly bare, who educates every citizen but provides little in the way of job opportunities and bountiful food. At least, that’s the story we heard from those we talked to in private, away from the public ear.
With the legend of Cuba’s more recent history in our ears
, it’s hard to remember that Havana was once—a hundred years before Castro—just another stop on the merchant route, as interwoven in the capitalist path as any other city along the eastern seaboard. Havana was a stopping point for the Spanish trader who brought the fifty-three people from Sierra Leone and then boarded them onto the Amistad. Follow the U.S. coastline north for three weeks by sailboat and you’ll reach Bristol, Rhode Island, not so far along the shoreline from Long Island, where the Amistad was captured. Bristol harbor is nestled north of the mouth of the ocean, a fifteen-minute drive and another bridge from Newport. This is where James DeWolf’s grand white-pillared mansion still stands testament to the profits he built in part from these Cuban plantations, in combination, of course, with his trade of enslaved people who worked his land as well as acres and acres that belonged to others.
I wonder why I need to see all these places to understand the story. Why do I need the touch of fabric, the tactility of the quilt tops, the smells and sounds and sights of each place I visit in Rhode Island, South Carolina, Cuba? Say I’m an experiential learner. Say I need the sensory to understand a place, to know a person’s story. In high school and college, I’d stare at the dates and names of battles and cities, trying to bore them into my memory without being able to see the story in my mind; without that story, history made no sense to me. I couldn’t understand those places and people because no one had made them particular, singular, specific. But maybe I need to see and touch all of this because I was indoctrinated in a culture that taught me that this history of enslavement, of the triangle trade, was so long past, and mattered so little now. I was told, back in elementary and high school and even college, that it was a blight on our history, when I had come to learn that it was our whole foundation, and that my sense of this country was shaped by the history books and stories of people who didn’t see traces of enslavement everywhere, who didn’t believe in palimpsests and legacies. Maybe it took me too long to find this story.
I latch onto DeWolf because he’s so deeply connected to New England and the West Indies, in much larger terms but in similar ways as the Williams and Crouch families were. Leonardo Marques writes, in The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867, “It is unclear when Rhode Islanders started to purchase lands in Cuba, but by the very early 1800s, James DeWolf was already using his properties on the island as a strategy to deal with eventual unfavorable circumstances in the Atlantic trade. ‘If the market [for slaves] in Havana slumped, and the Revenue Marine, as the Coast Guard was then called, made it risky to smuggle into American ports,’ George Howe argues, James DeWolf ‘could afford to wait. He owned three plantations in Cuba—the Mary Ann, the Mount Hope, and the Esperanza—where he could hold his stock until prices rose again, as they always did, sooner or later.” Marques goes on to explain that the connections between American slave traders, “French expertise,” and “Cuban plantations” were profitable as traders could, for example, buy slaves at cheaper prices in Charleston to use on their Cuban plantations, while a “very intelligent Frenchman” would “take care of & direct [their] plantation”
In Charleston, Joseph McGill leads tours that show people the fingerprints of enslaved people on the bricks that built the city’s landmarks. The bricks were made on plantations, heated in ovens by enslaved people. Here is the print of a child or a young woman on a building; place your hand here, just as that child did. For a moment, you are walking in that person’s shoes, so to speak, your body resting in the print their body left behind. Unless an enslaved person had children who survived, this fingerprint and the lasting works they created, are their signature, their legacy.
I learn from Joe to look for the fingerprints in the buildings, to find the quieted story in every master narrative; the people in that hidden story refuse to be silenced.
While Charleston feels like a community closed to outsiders, everything in Cuba seems to happen by word of mouth. “I have a friend,” each person says when we tell them what we’re seeking. The Airbnb woman knows a taxi driver who will take us to the city, the men at the bar know a guy who can give us a tour, the tour guide tells us to eat at this restaurant that his friends run; he promises we’ll get the best mojitos in all of Cuba at this place. There’s an underground market where we can buy anything we like with large American bills. We’re told that the fifties and hundreds are easiest to hide behind the cell phone battery, for example, when a Cuban travels out of the country to buy goods to resell back in Cuba. Double the price, a quick profit. Cell phones bought for $50 in the States go for $200 in Cuba. One tour guide tells me I should have brought all my old cell phones to sell here, and I’d have paid for my whole trip, he is sure of it. When we go to change money at the storefront down on Calle Maceo in Trinidad, a man next door tells us his name is Ulysses and offers us a slightly better exchange rate for our large American bills. We can trade them for CUPs, the tourist currency, he says, no problem. He tries to lure us into his apartment, but we stick with the government bank.
When I’m looking for a tour guide to take me to the Valle de los Ingenios, where the sugar plantations were built, I go to the man who, the guidebook tells me, leads tours there on horseback. This man’s wife invites me into their high-ceilinged home with nineteenth-century divans and rocking chairs and walls painted in period styles—rows of flowers in vases, curliqued vines. Hanging on the walls are dozens of photos of brides; the man is also a photographer, and he runs their home as an Airbnb. Like every Cuban we’ve met, he hustles with four or five different occupations, trying to supplement his modest government stipend. Cubans have only been able to do this—supplement their incomes—since 2008, when Fidel’s brother Raúl took power. They’ve had Internet access for two years, thanks to a deal negotiated by the United States with significant benefits, another tour guide tells us, for the States. Of course, he says, it isn’t entirely beneficent; your country is taking a profit, too. We nod, knowing that nothing a capitalistic nation does is ever simply beneficent.
She invites us, my friend and I, to sit down and wait.
We gaze up at the bridal photos, at the thirty-foot-tall ceilings and the wooden doors and shutters that are open to let in the light. There are no screens on the windows; dust from the road wafts in. An old man walks in with a cane. He doesn’t acknowledge us but walks to the back with the wife and then returns, to sit on the windowsill. A big Dalmatian wags her tail and pants in my face while I pat her back; my friend gazes out the window. At last, a man comes up from the back, and says he’s the one, the man who leads the horseback rides. “But, no, no,” he says, “the Valle de los Ingenios is too far. The guidebook was wrong about that.”
“Do you know anyone who could take me there, who knows the history of the plantations?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head.
But then—“Oh!” he says. “Let me make a phone call. I have a friend.”
Marques writes, “New England slaveholders improved their investment opportunities in Cuba by calling on French expertise in agricultural production and French business networks. Cuban planters and merchants, for their part, took advantage of the knowledge and skills related to crop production and slave trading brought by these individuals in order to create one of the wealthiest and most violent slave societies of the nineteenth century.”
One of the wealthiest and most violent, I read. Life in Cuba as an enslaved person could be torturous and brief. New Englanders were not benign bystanders in this system, but active participants.
The day before, wandering through Trinidad, I noticed a restaurant with a wall of chains on display. I saw the chains on a glance through the doorway as I walked past and recognized them immediately as chains from the slave trade—the great loops that would encircle a person’s neck, spaced five feet apart on a long cast iron chain. Smaller loops on another chain for peoples’ ankles or wrists, or the necks of women and children. The iron balls that would weigh down a person’s ankle to keep them from running.
The whip and iron hook made for punishing, for a white man to enforce the power structure: You are beneath me, and if you disobey, this will happen to you, too. Make a display of oppression to keep the enslaved people subservient.
So that I would remember, I took pictures of this wall, and of the six-foot-wide stocks, a great wooden block with three holes for the head and arms, where a man or woman would have stood for hours.
“Were these for slaves?” I asked the waiter in broken Spanish. I know esclave in French, and he understood.
“Yes,” he answered in English. “They’re from the owner’s collection. He wanted somewhere to display them.”
Under the holes for the hands in the stocks, there were iron handcuffs hanging from chains on each side; one of them hung open, as if the person held hostage had begun to escape. To the right, a thick chain hung against the wall, its links wider than the wrists of the woman who cut her meal at the table below. Everyone ate in the midst of this display. No one seemed bothered.
The waiter walked me to another wall and pointed to a framed letter that he said was about freeing an enslaved person; it was framed alongside currency bills from the period that were lined up in neat rows, like the heavy locks and keys displayed on the wall, arranged in order of size, large to small.
Later, when I asked the guide who was found for me, Gonzalo, about this, he’d say yes, that’s true, and that first, the owner of the restaurant had displayed a gun collection, but the government came and made him take it down; it was too dangerous to have that many guns hanging on the walls, they told him. So, instead, he put up this display of slavery paraphernalia.