Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 33

My grandfather was in the habit of talking to us in the evening at the table after dinner, while we listened in silence. He would tell us stories about relatives and friends, embellishing the events with picturesque details. He would say;

“Such and such happened before the cholera of ’48 or after the cholera of ’56.”

Such was the dark manner in which he noted time. His great topic, though, was slavery.

“Uncle Leitão would thrash the Negroes like beasts of burden. He didn’t have many slaves, each one doing the work of three. Major Ursulino de Goiana rebuilt his house so he could look out on his Negroes climbing the ladder carrying the hot syrup. They were chained together when they cut the cane. One day a Negro from Pinas arrived at his house wearing shoes and a tie. He had come to talk to the plantation owner. He went up the steps smoking a cigar. He was there to advise the major that his cattle were damaging the crop at Picos. He was the manager there. His boss had asked him to deliver the message.

The major, though offended, said nothing. He ordered that the slave be bought from the other plantation. But the Negro was only partly a slave. He had belonged to two people as part of an inheritance and one of the owners had freed his part. So the major bought half of the slave. He took him to the distillery, tied him to a cart and lashed him, but only on the side that belonged to him.”

My grandfather recounted this story of the half owned slave to show Ursulino’s wickedness. A hard hearted plantation owner was a rarity. My grandfather’s slaves had always been well clothed and plentifully fed by him.

“You need your Negro to have a full belly. There were, of course, those who had to be lashed, even here at Santa Rosa, such as the Negress who put a poisonous herb in the cooking pot for the slaves. They nearly died of stomach ache. She’d been fighting with a Creole woman over a Negro, and she had wanted to kill him and all the other Negroes with him.

At the abolition, the newspapers spoke of owners who would whip their slaves to death, but nobody beat to death a useful work horse. An owner needed his worker fat enough to work, and to fetch a good resale price. He wasn’t going to throw his money away. Here at Santa Rosa the slaves ate well, and in the district only Ursulino chained them. His slaves were a disgrace. If a slave ran away they were sold to Ursulino. Slaves were sent to Ursulino like boys are sent to sea these days, to calm them down.

“The people in the Liberal Party gave Ursulino the name of Baron Whip. When the 13^th May came our Negroes partied till late. With the sound of the drums nobody on the plantation could sleep. I got up early as usual, to send the cattle out to pasture, and I came across all the black men walking to the fields, spades over their shoulders. They all stayed with me, every single one. For these poor people abolition was useless. Now they live on dried flour and are paid by the day. With what they earn they can’t even afford dried codfish. My Negroes used to fill their bellies with meat and meal, and they didn’t walk about half-naked like they do these days, with everything on show. I only started earning money from sugar with the abolition. All I did before was buy and clothe Negroes.

Cabeça do Puque was a teacher who taught the children of Manuel António do Bonito. One day some of the old man’s money disappeared. The blame fell upon the teacher. They knocked him about so much, to find out where he had put the money that he died. Some days later, in Itabaiana, a mason who was spending gold coins at a market was arrested. Then everything was discovered. The mason had been working on a roof at Bonito when he saw old Manuel Antonio stashing away a bag behind a brick in the wall of the stables. Because he had killed the teacher Manuel António had to flee to the forests till his friends in the Conservative Party came to power.

The Emperor Dom Pedro came to Pilar one afternoon. Nobody was expecting him. The town hall was shut. He was expected in Pilar the next day, but the Emperor was always in a hurry. When the cavalcade came down the main street the people ran out to see him. Dom Pedro stopped in front of the town hall. They came to open it up. Alderman Henrique trembled with fear. There wasn’t even a chair inside. Everything was at the cabinet makers being polished. The court room was empty too. Dom Pedro went up the steps, looked around and saw no furniture. He threw his hat on the floor and lay down in the hammock of the workman who was tidying up the town hall for the party. The provincial governor had Alderman Henrique arrested on account of the disaster.”

My grandfather’s stories held my attention in a quite different way to Totonha’s. They didn’t appeal to my imagination, to the fantastic. They didn’t have the miraculous solution of Totonha’s fairy tales. Grandfather’s tales were based on facts and they were marked on my memory as if I had been there myself. They were the work of a chronicler recounting reality.

The whole family history was told in these after dinner gatherings. José Paulino’s grandfather had come from Pasmado to S. Miguel with a brother who was a priest. There in the meadows and the leas of the Paraíba he founded a great plantation, fathering many children amongst the blacks and the Indians while he was at it.

“These days it’s all gone to pot. There’s hardly a dowry worth having that will allow a girl to marry.”

José Paulino was proud of his caste, the only vanity of that saint who planted cane.

                 

Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 32

They were clearing the part of the meadow nearest the Mill. From the house we could see the heads, covered with straw hats, going up and down to the rhythm of the spade. There were some eighty men commanded by the overseer José Felismino, who, with club in hand, watched over their labour. They laboured from dawn, at about six o’clock, till night fall. Sometimes I went along with them, amused by their conversation. They talked while they worked, full of banter, the youngest ones boasting about women.

Some worked silently, concentrating on their work. Others turned over the soil while telling stories and chatting away.

“Enough of the conversation!” José Felismino would shout.

“Let’s be getting on with the work. The colonel will be here soon.”

The spades rang out on the hard earth, and they spread with their feet the soil that they dug up. The sun beat down on their naked backs, sweat running down their bodies.

Manuel Riachão was the first in line, a team leader. He was more agile than most. His head shrunk into his shoulders as his spade pounded the ground relentlessly and mechanically, always faster than his workmates. Zé Passarinho was the slowest. No amount of shouting could spur on this lazy drunkard. They only paid him two cruzados, the same as the cotton pickers.

“Pull your finger out, you lazy rascal!” But still he dawdled, his feet swollen and his body aching.

The men would stop at ten o’clock for a lunch of flour and dried fish. They would eat out of a pan, licking their lips as if it were a banquet. Then they would lie down in the shade, stretching out to rest for fifteen minutes.

Some of the wives brought their men food wrapped in a dirty cloths - cold meat and farofa. Then they would set to work again, till six in the evening.

My grandfather would come and visit the ‘rabble’ doing their forced labour.

“What’s going on here, Mr. José Felismino?” he would ask the overseer. “Eighty men! More like eighty women!”

They ignored the old man’s shouts. It was the same every day, whether they did a lot or did a little. Colonel José Paulino was all bark. He would call them names, haranguing them like they were criminals, but they all received their due when it was time to pay them.

Skinny little dogs would accompany their masters to the site of their labour. They would run about the plum trees chasing the birds away. These dogs never came into the yard at the main house. Our fat dogs never gave any quarter to their poor unhappy brothers.

João Rouco came with his three sons to the fields. His wife and little ones stayed at home in their clearing. At seventy years of age he put in as much work as his youngest son. His mouth was already toothless, but his arms were strong and his legs hard. My grandfather never shouted at him. He wasn’t subservient, like the others. If my grandfather yelled at him he would yell back. They were the same age and they had played together as children,

“Wretched rascal!” my grandfather would shout, but when he needed someone good and reliable for a difficult piece of work he would call on João Rouco.

Old Pinheiro, on the other hand was worthless. He was a thief and an intriguer. And his sons were the same. When they came to work in the fields they spent their time complaining about their aches and pains. They were only given light tasks. When the overseer shouted at them they just stared back blankly.

Old Pinheiro’s neighbour didn’t breed chickens because the old man was as bad as a hungry fox. Neither workmates nor neighbours reckoned much to him.

On the other hand, everybody respected João Rouco, calling him Mr.João. Nobody ever messed him about. All of us, the children of the main house, the kitchen maids, the plantation boys, thought well of him.

In times of necessity the tenants and the farmers came to help the master of the plantation. At such times, more than two hundred spades were working the soil. The farmers and the tenants, the petit bourgeoisie of the plantation, would lower themselves to work alongside the plebs. They received no money for the day’s labour that they gave. They did not want to share the indignity of a field worker so they worked for free. For us children it was a great show when there was such a gathering as this. We took sugar sticks to give to the men for a snack. At night the yard of the great house was crowded with an army of ragged workers. When it rained they would drink cachaça and then they would return home for their miserable sleep on a bed of sticks.

Seeing these degraded people every day got me used to their misfortune. Never, as a child, did I feel sorry for them. I thought it natural they should live and sleep in a hovel, eating little and working like beasts of burden. My understanding of life made me see in this a work of God. They were born to live like that because it was the will of God, because God wanted us to be white and to rule over them, like we also ruled over the oxen, the donkeys, the forest.

Plantation Boy - Menino de Engenho - Chapter 31

A boy ran up shouting, “Fire! Fire! Paciencia is burning!”

It had been a spark from the train, for sure. Everybody ran there armed with spades, scythes and clubs. We could see the smoke on the other side of the river, billowing up into the sky.

“Go get the workers from the fields,” my grandfather yelled.

The men were there like a shot, on all sides of the conflagration. The fire was ferocious and soon reached the cane fields. The cane exploded like burning bamboo. It sounded like there was a gunfight going on.

“Cut off the fire at the Middle Brook!”

It was the only way of cutting off the fire and saving the rest of the fields at Paciencia, by using the spades and scythes at the stream that cut the fields in two, making a clearing on either side.

The Negro Damiao’s house was eaten up in an instant. There wasn’t any time to get his stuff out. The wind was blowing, throwing sparks into the distance. A thousand tongues of flame swallowed up the ripe cane, like a thousand hungry dogs. The wind inflated the fire’s diabolic appetite, never ceasing to blow for a moment. But the fieldworkers were in there fighting furiously to contain the blaze, Uncle Juca in the middle of them. The spades dug into the soil, the scythes cut through the cane, creating the clearings that would hold back the course of the fire. They beat back the flame with green branches, yelling all the while as if they were in hand to hand combat.

We stayed back, watching and listening to the manoevres and the sound of the fight. My eyes were weeping from the smoke and the smell of burned sugar that filled the air. People were coming from the surrounding farms to help. And, as the night fell, the fire burnt bright.

The flames climbed higher now as the wind slackened. The men would walk over the embers, and singe their hair in the close combat with an enemy who would not surrender.

“Look! Ze Passarinho’s house is burning!”

Ze Guedes ran through the flames and came out with old Naninha in his arms, throwing her to the ground like a sack of sugar.

“Attack the fire,” my grandfather shouted, his stick in his hand, pointing.

My Uncle Juca grew in my estimation that day, with the courage that he and his friends showed. Uncle Juca stood with them, sharing in their danger and their exertions. Tenants arrived from Maravalha and Taipu. And there were more than five hundred men confronting the desperate enemy. The fire did not cross the stream because the stream was surrounded by clearings and people were waiting for it with branches, ready to beat it back.

The wind had abandoned its ally on the field of battle.

People were left with burnt feet, singed cheeks, red eyes and ragged clothes. Ze Guedes’ chest was covered in burns. The fields smouldered.

“We’ll have to keep people in the clearings through the night.”

Back at the mill my grandfather put ironwood resin in people’s wounds to disinfect them or else the burns would fester.

There would be work to do in the fields the next morning.