by Rachel May
Gonzalo works for Trinidad’s historic commission, which conserves all the buildings in town, and his mother is a professor of historic architecture at the university. He and she usually bring people out to the San Isidro plantation together, so he’s gathered all the information she has about the place, along with what his boss, the engineer of the excavation, has taught him.
“How did the restaurant owner come by it?” I asked.
“He’s a collector. His family had all this stuff from their plantation, and they were going to get rid of it all, but he saved it.”
“So he’s part of the family who enslaved people?”
“Yes.”
At the end of the day, when I talked to my friend about this back at the casa particular where we were staying, I was still incredulous that the man would display the tools of torture in his restaurant, for tourists to enjoy. Was this about colonialism? His family’s success? What was it supposed to say?
“It’s interesting,” said my friend, “that the collector also displayed the letter that frees one of the enslaved people.”
Is that an attempt to redeem his family, I wonder? To illustrate that they eventually did the right thing?
I ask people I meet if there is racism here in Cuba, tensions between whites and blacks. I tell a man, a man who’s educated, that I’ve noticed that people seem to intermingle more than they do back in the States, that neighborhoods are mixed rather than segregated as they are in Boston or New York, for example.
“Do you have segregation, racism?”
“No,” he says. “We don’t have any of that. Everyone likes each other.”
There’s a pause.
Then he says, “The blacks are more aggressive, you know? You can see the blacks in the streets, you know, those black men who try to give you taxi rides? They’re more aggressive, and lazy, too. They don’t want to make just twenty-five CUPs more a month; they want to make twenty-five CUPs a day. They stand around talking about baseball all day. They don’t want to work hard. The blacks, people who come from the slaves, they rise up with a bad feeling. I don’t know why that is.”
The view from the tower at a plantation near San Isidro; from here, overseers would watch for enslaved people attempting to escape.
James DeWolf was the renowned slave trader from Bristol, Rhode Island, whose story the average New Englander still doesn’t seem to know. DeWolf was not the only one; he was just the one to do it most frequently and successfully, the “preeminent merchant family.” There were also: Briggs and Gardner, Clarke and Clarke, Cyprian Sterry, Vernon and Vernon, Jeremiah Ingraham, Bourn and Wardell. Often, because slavers were such costly and risky ventures (the journey was long, the crew and then the enslaved people needed food for the long crossing, there was the risk of contracting malaria and other diseases while traveling the West African coast to buy enslaved people, the crew might be overtaken by the people they’d captured, and the enslaved people might get sick and perish before they could be sold for profit), multiple investors went in on a single ship; thus, the names listed together in ventures. The story of the DeWolfs is known widely among historians and those interested in Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade, but perhaps because it hasn’t been commemorated anywhere publicly, it hasn’t spread to those who don’t seek it out. A tourist wouldn’t just stumble upon the plaque that tells the story of his grand white mansion in the center of town; there’s no mention of the slave trade at the port in Bristol, nor in Newport. The plaque in front of the DeWolf mansion reads, in part, “James and William De Wolf, of among the most prominent families in the town, constructed in 1797 what was to become DeWolf’s Wharf . . . The brothers completed this wharf . . . to accommodate their thriving maritime business. It became a center for finance, foreign trade, and merchandizing, all activities which contributed to the wealth and architectural legacy of Bristol . . .” There is no mention, here, of their trade in human lives, and how that trade helped to build the family’s and the town’s wealth, but the descendants of the family are doing work today to make this history known. A plaque commemorating Bristol and Newport’s part in the slave trade is now under way thanks to the work of Annie Chin’s Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project.
For a while, I thought that this was something I could do to make this story more public—I could help to install a plaque. When I asked at the Newport Historical Society if anyone had tried, they said no, that since the enslaved people were sold from private homes, there wasn’t any public market to mark as the site of the trade. That sounded like a feeble excuse. I talked with Jennifer Rae Taylor, a lawyer who works for the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson’s organization; they had offered to help me navigate the town bureaucracy and laws in order to erect a marker, as they had done in Alabama. I spoke with a prominent African American businessman in Providence who had erected a marker by the Providence bay; he said I should work to rehabilitate that Providence marker before creating a new one in Newport. I spoke to Keith and Theresa Guzmán-Stokes in Newport, who said that we shouldn’t mark the trade but the important African Americans in town, that those were the stories young black men and women needed to hear, not that their ancestors were simply objects in the trade. I got overwhelmed, lost track of what was the right thing to do, fearing that this wasn’t my story to determine; I gave up the idea of the project.
The story of the Bristol and Newport slave trade is one that tourists don’t necessarily want to hear. They come here on sailboats in the summertime; they race on the bay, they stay in fine hotels on the water, historic colonial or Gilded Age homes transformed into hotels and restaurants. Rooms in these hotels go for hundreds to a thousand dollars a night. Many people return to old “family homes” where they’ve summered for generations. The weekly farmer’s market, frequented by hipsters and yuppies and organic-leaning locals, abuts the low-income housing apartments, occupied predominantly by people of color. No one at the market notices the apartment complexes just behind the trees. People who summer in Bristol and Newport are, as they were in the Gilded Age decades before, wealthy and predominantly white. They don’t want to hear about the dirty work that made these places opulent, beautiful, and ultimately, comfortable for them today. When I ask tourists, even longtime New Englanders, if they know how central Bristol was in the slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century, they say no. When I ask if they know who was the DeWolf family, of today’s popular DeWolf Tavern in Bristol, they say no. I didn’t know any of this history, either, before I stumbled upon this quilt. And the more I learn about the past, the more I notice about the present.
There’s a spate of rum distilleries opening in Newport now, billing themselves as new iterations of those distilleries that were so important to the town—to the new nation that was still finding its capitalist legs in the eighteenth century. But do these new distilleries explain why rum was so important back then? Do they explain that New England rum was a critical element in the slave trade? That it was used to trade for enslaved people all along the western coast of Africa? That the sugar and molasses required to make rum came from the West Indies, where it was grown by enslaved people taken from Africa, or that, in the seventeenth century, the enslaved people in the West Indies included some from New England itself—that when Wampanoags and Narragansetts were defeated and captured in battle, they were sent there, to work as enslaved people for the rest of their lives? No. This isn’t in their marketing scheme. They romanticize Rhode Island’s rum distilleries and tell stories of the area’s infamous pirates who lived off of goods they stole from boats that ran in and out of the ports. They perpetuate myths of the past that we like to hear—pretty pictures of pirates, without the stories of the captains and crews they murdered, the slave ships of which they took command, or the stories of who made the goods of which they took control, what it took to make those goods, whose lives were given to make the sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, silk, tea, chocolate, coffee.
Rum barrels at a facto
ry outside Havana.
Infants shoes
Women’s lee slips
Calf shoes for Winthrop
Shoes
Shoes
Shoes for wife
Cloth slipps
. . . Goat skin slipps (Eliza [Williams])
Beef, calf’s head, sugar, lamb, molasses, cotton, cambrics, calicos. These were the goods Jason Williams bought and sold for his store in the 1830s, when he was shipping items back and forth from his home in Providence to his daughter and son-in-law in South Carolina. Jason bought shoes for his wife and daughters, and goat-skin slippers for Eliza Williams, Susan’s older sister who remained at home with her parents. These slippers were finer than her everyday shoes; they were probably long, dainty, and square-toed, suitable for parties and dinners and other occasions. Jason bought infants’ shoes and an assortment of others that he likely resold at the store, along with dry goods, a variety of meats, tools, cloth, pots and pans and dishes—and anything else local residents required.
His life echoed, on a much smaller scale, a man who preceded him by a century, James Brown, a member of the prominent Brown family whom Christy Clark-Pujara describes in Dark Work. James’s first journey to the West Indies on a ship he co-owned with his brothers “allowed him to open a shop in Providence. . . . His store provided Rhode Islanders with an array of everyday goods, such as salt, fish, beef, turnips, sugar, butter, lamb, mutton, iron pots, wood, cotton, linen, leather, looking glass, hoops for barrels, rum, wine, and brandy. Most of these goods were purchased from surrounding colonies with rum; however, cheese, pork, tobacco, and hoops for barrels were bartered for locally . . . Together, [he and his brother] supplied plantation owners in the West Indies with corn, cheese, tar, horses, shingles, and tobacco.” Clark-Pujara explains that Rhode Island plantations, as they were called, in South County, supplied meat and crops to the West Indies plantations, and that Rhode Island merchants, in turn, had “direct access to large populations of enslaved people as slave traders in West Africa and commodity traders in the West Indies.” Between 1798 and 1809, Jason and his father Elijah invested in seven sloops, schooners, or brigantines that sailed from Providence to ports south, including Charleston, and beyond to the West Indies. There’s no evidence that they ever bought or sold enslaved people from the West Indies. But they were a part of that mercantile exchange, running ships up and down the coast, trading goods from around the world in exchange for Rhode Island’s produce, meat, and rum.
Molasses
Codfish
Nutmeg
Cloves
Molasses
Whiskey
Molasses
Apples
SC Sugar
Flour
Meal
Vinegar & Molasses
S.C. Sugar
W. Sugar
There is codfish. And molasses. White sugar. Refined. First grown in the West Indies or South Carolina, then harvested when it reached seven or eight feet tall. At the plantation outside Trinidad, I ask Gonzalo to stand next to the field of sugarcane planted at the old sugar plantation, San Isidro de los Destiladeros; he says they’ve planted it for effect, to illustrate how the land might have looked back then. As Gonzalo moves toward the stalks, I see how tall the stalks are. They loom far above his head. Their white feathered tips blow in the wind, thick stalks arching just slightly.
“They’re much thicker than I expected,” I say.
He nods. He says he’ll show me the sugar mill at the next stop, so I can see how the grinding was done. At that mill, I see how many men it would take to press a great wheel around, crushing the juice from the cane. Sugarcane is not soft like grass, as I’d always imagined, but hard like bamboo. In December, when I visit, it’s ten feet high.
Here, at San Isidro de los Destiladeros, whose name means roughly farmers of the distillery, founded in 1828 when Jason was buying and selling goods at his store and Susan was on the brink of a new life in Charleston with her husband, hundreds of enslaved people came to work at the hot fires of the Jamaican train, in the sweltering hundred-degree sugarcane fields, and in the master’s house. In 1828, John C. Calhoun, that dastardly South Carolinian whose name would be uttered in the years preceding the Civil War, whose statue still looms over Marion Square, was protesting the tariff that, he believed, favored the industrial (northern) over the agrarian (southern) interests of the union. He threatened secession.
In 1835, Winthrop wrote to his sister back home that “people at the North were making trouble for the Southerners,” by sending abolitionist pamphlets, and Franklin notes that this is the first intimation of Winthrop’s becoming a “fire-breathing southerner,” as he sides with Calhoun regarding slavery and secession, and wishes his sister could have such good “help,” meaning slaves, of course, as they have in South Carolina. Ten years earlier, in 1825, Matanzas, north of San Isidro, experienced one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people, and thirty years before that, the rebellion in Haiti shifted the sugar plantations to Cuba. French planters got scared, and they moved away. Every rebellion altered the course of the story, intimidated the master class, disrupted the status quo.
beef
beef
tripe
beef
beef
Gallon whiskey
W. Sugar
Y.H. Tea
W. Sugar
Heyson Tea
Surrounded by sugarcane, I think about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. And the way people posed for photos in front of her body, recorded, unbeknown to them, as part of the project. Walker installed the piece in the old Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, where sugarcane from the Caribbean was turned into the fine white stuff that Americans could consume, the stuff that, my friend insists, is killing us the way tobacco did before we knew it was rotting away our insides and causing cancer. The Brooklyn factory was built in the late 1800s, after San Isidro had shut down. The story Gonzalo tells me is that all the sugar plantations in the Valle de los Ingenios closed down as a result of the revolution that was under way. He says that all the people in the valley fled and sugar production ended here (when it picked up again, it was farther west). As a result, the plantations and all they contained were preserved. They became overgrown with trees and shrubs and weeds, wasps’ nests and guinea hen grazing grounds.
San Isidro is being excavated by a group of archaeologists, and now the fear, says Gonzalo, is that too many tourists will flood the place and destroy all that it holds; buses will unload dozens of tourists all day long, as they do at Manaca Iznaga, another plantation down the road. They’ll ruin it. He echoes the fear I’ve heard from several Cubans—that a flood of new tourism means both opportunity and the potential for destruction of Cuba—of the culture, the landscape, the values. Opening is a gift and, some people seem to fear, the beginning of the end, Starbucks and McDonald’s where now the salsa bands play at the local cafés in the square and schoolchildren run their races around a row of cones and bottles.
The Jamaican train is a series of pots over a fire. It’s an ingenious—ingenios—system for extracting molasses from sugarcane juice. Sugarcane stalks are brought to the mill area by two oxen hauling a cart; they’re pulled into a bay area, where the cane is unloaded, then pressed at the mill. Once the sugarcane has been ground by two men pushing a wide rod around and around (all day long, pushing as they walk in a circle, on a machine whose metal parts were made in upstate New York), pressing the cane flat and extruding its juice into waiting pipes below, then the juice is siphoned into great iron vats over a fire. There are five brick pits built into an oven, a fire burning to heat the vats in the center. The fire gets weaker the farther to the left and right one moves. So that by the time the vats are moved to either end of the train, the sugar has burned into a thick paste that will be covered with ash and allowed to settle for a month. The puntero, says Gonzalo, was the enslaved man in charge of tending the fire and controlling the temperature.
Nothing is w
asted. The animals are fed the mashed cane stalks, and whatever the animals can’t eat is used as fuel for the fires.
As we move to the next phase of the rum production, Gonzalo points out the great Ceiba tree in front of us. It’s taller than the tower that stands in the center of the field. The tower was used to survey the land, for the owner to keep the enslaved people under control, the all-seeing eye like Foucault’s panopticon that reinforces institutional power. The tower had a bell that rang for breaks and mealtimes. The story of the Ceiba tree is that when enslaved people ran for escape, they asked the Royal Palm to hide them, and the palm tree said no. Next, they asked the Ceiba tree, and the tree said yes. So, this is a holy tree. In lightning storms, other trees might get struck, but not the Ceiba tree. Now, it stands dozens of feet higher than the tower, in triumph, I think.
He says this is the same sort of tree as in The Little Prince; do I know that story?
Yes, I say, and smile. The Baobab tree. That’s where I recognize this trees’ smooth bulging roots, strong trunk, cartoon-like branches that look like they’re miles above us against the blue sky. The Baobab was Saint-Exupéry’s symbol of Nazism taking hold of the earth; pull it up when it’s young to prevent it from taking deep root. It’s in the same family as the Ceiba tree, but in this culture, the Ceiba tree symbolizes good.
The top layer of the paste made in the fires is clear; that’s pure liquor, tasteless—like pure tequila, Gonzalo tries to explain to me—aguardiente, fire water. That top layer would be exported and sold to others to store in drums, infusing flavor, and then bottling it into rum. The middle layer of the pot’s paste is what will be made into rum here. It’s dumped into a concrete bath poured into the earth thirty or forty feet from the Jamaican train. In the bath, the paste is combined with water that’s diverted from the pond above via a dam and canals. Then the now-sweetened water is siphoned into a pipette and boiled. It will need to be stored in barrels to gain its flavor.