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 13th 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.
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