The Barefoot Queen Read Free

he stopped. What kind of a job could that poor wretch find? She didn’t know how to do anything, except labor on a tobacco plantation; that was where she’d lived since she was ten years old, after English slave traders had bought her for five paltry yards of fabric from the kingdom of the Yoruba in the Gulf of Guinea, in order to resell her in the bustling Cuban market. That was how Don José Hidalgo himself had explained it to the chaplain when Don Damián asked why he’d chosen her to accompany him on the voyage.
    “She is strong and desirable,” added the tobacco farmer, winking at him. “And it seems she’s no longer fertile, which is always an advantage once you’re off the plantation. After giving birth to that idiot boy …”
    Don José had also told him that he was a widower and had an educated son who’d taken his degree in Madrid, where Don José was headed to live out his last days. In Cuba he’d owned a profitable tobacco plantation in the lowlands near Havana that he worked himself, along with some twenty-odd slaves. Loneliness, old age and the pressure from the sugar growers who wanted to acquire land for their flourishing industry had led him to sell his property and return to his homeland, but the scourge attacked him twenty days into the journey and fed viciously on his weak, elderly state. He had fever, dropsy, mottled skin and bleeding gums, and the doctor declared him a lost cause.
    Then, as was mandatory on royal ships,
The Queen’
s captain ordered the notary to go to Don José’s cabin to bear witness to his last wishes.
    “I grant my slave Caridad freedom,” whispered the sick man after ordering a few bequests for the Church and arranging for the entirety of his assets to be given to the son he would now never see again.
    The woman didn’t even curve her thick lips in a glint of satisfaction at learning she was free, recalled the priest, who had now stopped in the street.
    She didn’t say a word!
Don Damián remembered his efforts to hear Caridad amid the hundreds of voices praying at the Sunday masses on deck, or her timid whispers at night, before sleeping, when he forced her to pray. What could that woman work as? The chaplain knew that almost every freed slave ended up working for their former owners for a miserable wage that barely allowed them to cover their necessities, which as slaves they’d been guaranteed. Or they ended up forced to beg for alms in the streets, competing with thousands of mendicants. And those had been born in Spain: they knew the land and its people; some were clever and quick. How could Caridad find her way in a big city like Cádiz?
    He sighed and ran his hand several times over his chin and the little hair he had left. Then he turned around, snorted as he lifted the trunk again and prepared to retrace his steps.
What now?
he wondered. He could … he could arrange a job for her in the tobacco factory, she did know about that. “She’s very good with the leaves; she treats them right—affectionately and sweetly—and she knows how to choose the best ones and roll good cigars,” Don José had told him, but that would mean asking for favors and making it known that he … He couldn’t risk Caridad talking about what had happened on the boat. Close to two hundred cigar makers worked in those factory rows, constantly whispering and finding fault with others as they rolled the small Cádiz cigars.
    He found Caridad still up against the wall, unmoving, defenseless. A group of unruly youngsters were making fun of her and the people coming and going did nothing to stop them. Don Damián approached just as one of the boys was about to throw a rock at her. “Halt!” he shouted.
    Another boy stopped his arm; the young woman removed her hat and lowered her eyes.
    CARIDAD DISTANCED herself from the group of seven passengers who had embarked on the ship about to head upstream along the Guadalquivir River to Seville. Weary, she tried to settle in among a