Where was the steward? He would ask the steward for a live chicken and offer his machete as payment if necessary, but somehow, somewhere, he would procure a live chicken, even if he had to steal it. He would wring the chicken’s neck with his bare hands and pluck its feathers. Valentina would cook it, careful not to waste a speck of its nutritious blood. Vicente would spoon the life-giving broth into the boy’s mouth drop by drop. A few servings of his mother’s chicken and rice soup and Javiercito would be like the other boys. And if that wasn’t possible, if he couldn’t get a chicken, then they would make do with one of the roosters that had pecked their way around steerage until their owners realized that they might soon become soup, the food was so bad. Now they tied their legs together to keep the roosters from wandering, never letting them out of their sight. Yet every morning despite the darkness of the ship’s belly, the roosters woke them at dawn.
A hand on his shoulder. Words, English and harsh to his ear. Hands pried loose his fingers. That dreadful howling again! Why did his brother Raulito weep? He would have a talk with him. Raulito was twenty, old enough to know that men shouldn’t weep. Vicente took a deep breath. Again, that terrible sound! That hideous cry that was more animal than human! Would somebody make it stop! He bit hard on his tongue. The taste of blood in his mouth. Sailors tugged at his arms and tried to break his embrace. No! He wouldn’t let go! Never! His son was not dead, no! His compatriots occupied the gloom of the ship’s hold. Illuminated only by a few kerosene lamps, candles forbidden in steerage, they were but shadows. Someone lit a candle that revealed the father’s anguished face and those of his compatriots. A sailor barked a command and the flame went out. Later, when Vicente thought about this day and how his compañeros flickered in and out of light like apparitions, he would think that what he had glimpsed on their faces was not pity but relief, because God had seen fit to spare their own sons.
“Don Vicente.” The respectful salutation commanded his attention. It had been so long since he’d been so addressed, and only out of courtesy by his father’s peones. He hadn’t enough money or land or age to merit the title. The speaker was the plantation agent Albert E. Minvielle, who had astounded them by speaking Spanish as well as English. It was rumored that his mother was a Puerto Rican.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.” Minvielle pointed to the sailors: sunburnt, rough-looking men. “They’re here for the boy.”
His son. His boy.
Minvielle took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket. The stench of hundreds of unwashed emigrants and their normal bodily functions was so vile that the ship’s doctor held a handkerchief to his nose whenever he was obliged to descend to steerage and tend to the sick.
It wasn’t as if the Puerto Ricans couldn’t smell the terrible odor, but what could they do about it? Stick pieces of cloth in their nostrils for the duration of the voyage? They had to breathe, didn’t they? What choice did they have when nobody listened to their petitions? When they were met with silence whenever they asked for water to wash or to empty their chamber pots? The very unlucky had cots near makeshift water closets.
Strangers and acquaintances alike moved out of Vicente’s way as if Javier had died of some contagious disease. Bare feet shuffled on the wood planks as they parted for their fellow compañero and his dead son. Hushed murmurs ceased. Valentina and their daughter huddled together on their cot. Lourdes, now Vicente and his wife’s only living child, cried at her mother’s side. Valentina gathered the boy to her breast as she had when he was her newborn baby. She whispered a mother’s nonsensical murmurings as Vicente watched helpless in his grief and guilt. Minvielle reminded him that the sailors were waiting. Vicente bent to take their son.
“¡No! ¡Vicente, no!” Valentina slapped at her husband’s hands.
“Querida—” Vicente knelt down and wrapped his arms around his wife and their daughter. The plantation agent tapped his shoulder. Time to go.
Vicente followed the sailors up some steps. A gust of wind from the ocean chilled him and he braced his legs against the ship’s oscillations. He thought he might fall, but he righted himself, the boy heavy in his arms as only a sleeping child can be.
The small room was bare except for a table and a few chairs. A kerosene lamp, a cloth, a bowl of water, a swathe of heavy canvas, and a sewing box were on the table. Minvielle relayed instructions from the sailors and they left him alone to prepare the body. Vicente washed and dried his son’s face, his hands, his feet, noting, without realizing it, the crooked toe on Javier’s right foot, the same as his father’s. His fingers trembled as he moved the needle with coarse thread in and out; he sewed his son’s nostrils closed. He remembered their departure from the port of Ponce, when Javier played monster, chasing his little sister up and down the pier. Vicente had thought the boy too old to be so childish, especially in front of strangers, and had been about to reprimand him when Valentina placed her hand on his arm.
Minvielle returned with the sailors, who carried a plank and a piece of heavy chain. They wound the chain around Javier’s ankles and placed him in the sack. Vicente asked that they give him time to sew the sailcloth closed, but when Minvielle conferred with the sailors, he was told it would take too long. The sailors balanced the sack with the boy’s body on the plank. Vicente heard the sharp clack of their shoes on the wood deck; he wondered what had happened to Javiercito’s shoes, perhaps Valentina had them. He saw his brother Raulito with his arm around Valentina, his wife’s face hidden behind a black lace mantilla. A crowd of spectators, both steerage and cabin passengers, had gathered on deck for the burial at sea. The murmuring swell of excitement rushed against Vicente’s temples.
Behind the captain and a minister in clerical collar, the sun sank into the ocean like an aureole. The Puerto Ricans bowed their heads at amen. The sailors balanced one end of the plank on the railing. The sack with his son slid down into the black water and disappeared into the mouth of the sea monster.
Minvielle told him that it was a terrible thing what had happened, but soon they would be in Hawaii. It was a good place, this Hawaii, a country of aloha. Vicente would have work in the sugarcane fields. Good hard work. Steady work. What every man needed. Minvielle advised Vicente to bid adiós to the past and aloha to the future, that’s what the Hawaiians say. A strange word, aloha, it meant both hello and goodbye. He could never figure out why that was. But Vicente didn’t have to worry about that. Talking Hawaiian, he meant. Even if he ever did meet any Hawaiians, he would be too busy on the sugarcane plantation to talk to them. Hard work would do him good. Hard, steady work in the Hawaiian sugarcane fields. Hawaii would do more good for him and his compatriots than the whole island of Puerto Rico had done since before the great Hurricane San Ciriaco, since the Americans, and even all the way back to the old days of los españoles. That’s what they all needed, the Puerto Ricans. Hard, steady work in the Hawaiian sugarcane fields.
Vicente held onto the rail, unaware that he was alone on deck and had been for hours. His fellow Puerto Ricans in their steel cages dreamt of the island breeze that once swung their hammocks, and the chant of the coquís that used to lull them to sleep. Vicente didn’t hear the hum of the ship’s mechanical workings or the sailors as they went about their duties.
Well-dressed cabin passengers paused in their evening stroll for a closer look at the man whose child was now at the bottom of the ocean. The men had supposed that he’d be more of a brute; the women hadn’t expected a tragic hero. He didn’t look like a savage native. Of course they’d had very little contact with the natives, especially the negros. There were the servants, of course, but one didn’t notice servants. Porto Ricans played in the native orchestras, but one didn’t actually look at the musicians. The cabin passengers all agreed that the island of Porto Rico was very beautiful, and the parties in the Spanish-style homes of the island elites quite acceptable as far as provincial island entertainment went. So exotic to see palm trees while dancing, wouldn’t you say? Quite fascinating how travel broadens one, they al
l agreed as they returned to their spacious staterooms and comfortable beds with the bedclothes turned down by the stewards.
The sailor assigned to make sure Vicente didn’t jump into the ocean brought him a flask of whiskey, compliments of the captain. Raulito snuck on deck, and they stood vigil through the night. The stars illuminated the waves that moved the ship further away from all they had known and all they had lost.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
RON CAÑA HELPS
No sky for days—five days. No sky for a people born into sun. Streaks of light, too dim to give courage or hope, came in through portholes that they couldn’t open to dispel the stench. In the cavernous hold of the ship, the men were separated from the women and children, they slept on pallets of straw in iron cages set in double banks, row after row, tier upon tier. The women hung their mantillas or whatever they had for privacy.
They shivered in their thin cotton clothing when the steamship Arkadia docked at Port Eads Harbor in the chill of a New Orleans winter. They complained that they had never felt so cold, not even after Hurricane San Ciriaco, when some of them had been naked and without shelter, no señor, not even then. They were allowed on deck when they reached port and watched in amazement as stevedores carried crates filled with bananas off the ship. Bananas were mother’s milk! They shouted, “Minvielle, Minvielle, why didn’t you give us bananas?” When they saw mangos carried off by the hundreds, they thought it was but a dream. Why weren’t they given mangos? The cabin passengers disembarked, men and women brilliant like peacocks in their fur-cloaked plumage. A Puerto Rican child called out to one of these lovely ladies, who waved a fur muff in condescension.
“The doctor is coming.” Minvielle pointed to a tugboat sputtering up to the ship, its yellow flag flapping in the wind. “Everybody has to be inspected.”
“What are we? Cattle?” the Puerto Ricans complained.
“What about them?” Vicente gestured to the cabin passengers.
“They’re not emigrants,” Minvielle said.
“Or Puerto Ricans,” Vicente said.
The men refused to leave their womenfolk, despite being directed to a separate line. The doctor had no choice but to conduct a cursory examination on deck. He took from his pocket an instrument that looked like a hairpin to check underneath their eyelids.
Minvielle told them that the ship would dock at the Algiers pier for a day or two before they could continue their journey. Not to worry. There was plenty of food and water. It could be worse; on the first trip, they’d had to wait for someone in the United States Customs Office to decide whether or not the Puerto Ricans were American citizens because US law wouldn’t permit foreign immigrants to work in the territory of Hawaii. US Customs had declared them Americans. ¡Oye, americano! In Puerto Rico, they weren’t citizens—neither American nor Puerto Rican, and certainly not Spanish, not since the war. Look how they were already ahead! Minvielle, maybe we’ll get paid more now that we’re Americans?
“Probably best not to get too excited.” Minvielle turned to leave.
Vicente called out to Minvielle, “¿Somos americanos? Do we Puerto Ricans have the same rights as people in the United States?”
Minvielle shrugged. “I’m just doing my job. I work for the Hawaiian planters just like you.”
They passed the time in steerage playing music, dancing, and telling stories.
“Óyeme bien,” said a man from Adjuntas who reached for a jug of ron caña making the rounds. “I swore that I would never again leave my beloved country after the Cuba Company and the iron mines. I had an old mother to support and three unmarried sisters. We starved in Puerto Rico like everyone else, and when a man has four women to feed, he will do anything, even go down into hell.”
Murmurings. Agreements. Calls for the jug of ron caña.
“It was like a voyage to hell. On la California, an American ship. Half of us barefoot and in rags. All of us skin and bones, some men were sick or dying from the hunger. They gave us something putrid to eat, que ni el diablo la comía, and dirty water for coffee. Vomitando y durmiendo tirados en el piso. Sleeping like animals on the deck. A thousand men. More. When a man died, they stuffed him in a sack of sand and threw him in the sea. By the second day, almost all of us were sick. Por fin, half dead, we arrived at a little town called Daiquirí where americanos—grandes, gordos y colorados—picked out two hundred and fifty men. The ship sailed to another town, where more fat Americans picked out another couple hundred men. At Nipe, the third stop, some yanquis came on the boat and took seventy-five men. Ese tiempo, I was one of them. That left over four hundred puertorriqueños, negros, todos. They could all be in the sea, for all I know.”
“Ay bendito, Santa María,” somebody said.
“Nobody cares about los negros,” somebody else said.
Raulito looked around steerage; he was one of the few black men. What if it were worse in Hawaii for a black man than it had been in Puerto Rico? He looked at Vicente, sitting with Valentina, and he knew that as long as he had his brother he would be all right.
“How did you get back to Puerto Rico?” Raulito recalled the stories the family had read in the newspapers about the Cuban mines.
The miner put his hand out for the jug. “Alive, gracias a Dios.”
Laughter.
“Escucha mi cuento. Soy Gómez de Peñuelas,” one of the Puerto Ricans said. “The day before San Ciriaco, I was to take the boat to Santo Domingo to work the cane, but there was this woman—”
“Ay los amores,” somebody said.
“Women got that sweet stuff that healthy men can’t resist.” Gómez touched his hat. “Perdón, damas, Mamá didn’t raise me to be so crude.”
“That’s what my father always told my mother when she complained about his pocas vergüenzas,” somebody said.
“A woman is always ready with her sugar when a man is weakest,” Gómez said.
Laughter.
Vicente put his arm around his wife. He couldn’t bear the pain in her eyes, pain that he felt, too, but that they couldn’t express to each other without two or three hundred people witnessing it.
Gómez was still telling his story.
“This woman used to be my wife, but certain things occurred, as they often do when a woman is cursed con mal genio. If a man wants to take another woman or even two, well, who can blame him? Still, except for certain episodes, she was a good wife. I only had the shirt and pants—the ones I have on—and she washed my clothes on Saturday so I didn’t have to shame myself when I went to town on Sunday. Muy buena mujer, but she wanted a saint, not a man. Soy hombre. The day came when I said ¡Basta! I was sick of her quejas. I heard there was work in Santo Domingo. She said that a curandera had told her to stop me from getting on the boat. I don’t believe in brujería, that witchcraft stuff, but because she was a woman, one thing led to another, and by the time I got to Mayagüez, the ship had already left the harbor. The sky had a strange tint to it and the wind was a demonio. It was the hurricane coming. San Ciriaco. I survived el huracán without a scratch in the home of a kind family. And the ship—all those puertorriqueños and their families going to Santo Domingo—the hurricane picked it up and threw it down, but la gente survived, sí señor, I helped to bring them out of the water.”
Gómez crooked his finger for the jug.
“Everybody lived except for two little girls.”
The jug of ron caña was passed around; another jug appeared.
“We are born to die,” a woman said. “Dying is part of life. Just like being born, just like having children. And being buried out in the ocean is much better than being buried in dirt.”
Valentina felt as if the woman were talking only to her.
“You know how we bury the poor. Los muertos are carried to the cemetery in a rented coffin and dumped in the graves.” The woman took a swig of ron caña. “My father was the keeper of the cemetery, and part of his job as a palero was to dig up the bones to make room for the new dead.”
Valentina was tempted to tell the woman to shut up.
“We grew vegetables in a tiny plot near the boneyard,” the woman said. “Mamá said that’s why our vegetables weren’t very big, because they came from the graves of the poor, there weren’t enough vitamins in the earth.”
“Coño carajo,” somebody said.
Valentina accepted the jug from the gravedigger’s daughter and took a long swig that ended in a fit of coughing. Vicente patted her back.
After the second day, the Puerto Ricans were herded off the steamship and into small boats that took them to the pier. They searched the gray sky for snow. Someone said it was 40 degrees. Surely that was cold enough for snow! Stevedores from other ships loaded onto the pier crates of vegetables and fruits like asparagus and oranges. Valentina recalled a story her father had read to them from a newspaper long ago, about six Italian sailors who had been lynched in New Orleans, the murderers were never found. The Puerto Ricans, mostly country folk, marveled at the fancy carriages and the horse-drawn milk wagons transporting huge containers of milk. It had been years since they had drunk milk, not even the children could recall the taste of it.
The massive iron and steel machine was as terrifying and foreign to the Puerto Ricans as Columbus and his ships must have been to Puerto Rico’s Tainos. They stared up at the black monstrosity. Thirteen tourist cars had been added specially to the Southern Pacific Railroad freight train for the trip across the country. It started to rain. Wind blew through the women’s thin mantillas, and the rain ran off the men’s straw hats. Children covered themselves with bundles. Mud splashed the women’s long skirts as they hurried down the sidewalks to the arched causeway that led to the railroad depot.
“Frío, frío,” they called out as they ran on the wet pavement.
Near the depot, a group of indios, Native American men and women, passed out blankets to the Puerto Ricans, who thanked them in Spanish.
The Taste of Sugar Page 20