The Barefoot Queen Read Free Page B

herself into the sea, to put an end to her constant suffering. “Get away from there, darkie! Do you want to fall into the water?” warned one of the sailors. And she obeyed, moving away from the gunwale.
    Would she have had the courage to throw herself in if that sailor hadn’t shown up? She didn’t want to replay the scene in her head again; instead she watched the men on the tartan: they seemed nervous. The tide was high but the winds weren’t favorable. Some of them smoked. She skillfully struck the steel against the flint and the tinder soon lit up. Where would she find the trees whose bark and fungus she used to make the tinder? As she lit the cigar and inhaled deeply she realized she didn’t know where to get tobacco either. The first draw calmed her mind. The next two relaxed her muscles and made her slightly dizzy.
    “Negress, share your smoke with me?”
    A cabin boy had crouched down in front of her; his face was dirty but lively and pleasant. For a few seconds, as he waited for an answer,Caridad took in his smile. All she could see were his white teeth, just like Marcelo’s when she wrapped her arms around him. She’d had another son, a mulatto born of the master, but Don José sold him as soon as the boy could do without the care of the two old women who looked after the slaves’ little ones while they worked. They all went down that same path: the master didn’t want to support Negro children. Marcelo, her second son, conceived with a black man from the sugar mill, had been different: a difficult birth; a child with problems. “No one will buy him,” declared the master when he began to show signs of clumsiness and defects. He agreed to let him stay on at the plantation, as if he were a simple dog, or a hen or one of the pigs they raised behind the shack. “He won’t live long,” everyone predicted. But Caridad didn’t let that happen, and many were the beatings and whippings she got when they discovered she’d been feeding him. “We provide you with food so you can work, not so you can raise an imbecile,” the overseer said time and again.
    “Negress, would you share your smoke with me?” insisted the cabin boy.
    Why not?
thought Caridad. He had the same smile as Marcelo. She offered him the cigar.
    “Wow! Where did you get this? It’s amazing!” exclaimed the boy after trying it and coughing. “Is it from Cuba?”
    “Yes,” said Caridad as she took the cigar back and brought it to her lips.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Caridad,” she answered amid a puff of smoke.
    “I like your hat.” The boy moved edgily on his legs. He was waiting for another puff, which finally came.
    “It’s blowing!” The captain’s shout broke the stillness. From the other ships similar cries were heard. The southern wind was blowing, perfect for crossing the sandbar. The cabin boy returned the cigar and ran to join the other sailors.
    “Thank you,
morena,
” he said hastily. Many in this new country called her that, since her dark skin was the first thing they noticed about her.
    Unlike the other passengers, Caridad didn’t witness the difficult nautical maneuver that required three changes of course in the narrow canal. All along the mouth of the Guadalquivir, both on land and on the barges moored on its banks, fires were lit to guide the boats. She didn’t share the others’ nerve-racking worry about the crossing: if the wind died downand they were left halfway through, it was likely they would run aground. She remained sitting against the gunwale, smoking, enjoying a pleasant tickle in her muscles and letting the tobacco cloud her senses. As the tartan entered the formidable Canal de los Ingleses, with the tower of San Jacinto illuminating their course on the port side, Caridad began to sing softly under her breath to the rhythm of her memories of the Sunday parties, when after celebrating mass in the neighboring sugar factory, which had a priest, the slaves from the various estates gathered