This week we take a break from our traditional style of reporting to interview a lovely lady about her life experiences on Cuba: Mrs. Alana S---.
“Alana, When and where were you born?”
“I was born around 1817 in Sierra Leone (Africa).”
“How did you come to be on Cuba?”
“I was brought here when I was about 13 on the slave ship Segundo Rosario. Upon arrival in Havana, I was sold to Mr. S---.“
“Did you come alone, or were you brought with family?”
“Oh no, I wasn’t alone. My two sisters were brought here with me, but they were sold to different plantation owners.”
“Mr. S---, did he own a plantation?”
“Oh yes, our plantation was a good sized sugar plantation, there were usually over eighty of us working there.”
“Alana, tell me a little about the work you did there.”
“My work? It was just like everybody else’s. I got up at daylight and had my breakfast. Then we all went to the cane-fields. Depending on which field and what time of the season there was always lots of work. Sometimes we weeded, sometimes we cut, sometimes we hauled, but the worst time of all was harvest. We had to work fast; sugarcane goes bad quick ya know? Anyways, we had to cut, press, boil, and pack it as quick as we could. During those harvests, we worked all day and night. Many poor slaves just got worked to death. Awful hard working in those fields.”
“You worked in the fields like the men?”
“Sure! We all worked in the fields. Except the children, and still they had light work.”
“Alana, describe to me what it was like living on the plantation.”
“Living on the plantation. Hmm, living like that is about the only living I can remember. We slept in long sheds, with tiny dividers for ‘privacy’. I slept close to Maria, she was a few years older than me, but we were friends. We cooked for ourselves from the gardens we worked on Sundays. There was never much rest or fun, mostly work.”
How about the overseer and Mr. S---, were they good?
“Mr. S--- was a fine enough man, we never saw much of him. He stayed in the house or was off with other plantation owners. The overseer was a different kind of man. He had a wild look in his eye, frightened me like the devil. He would take to whipping us for the slightest thing. I remember stories of him flogging an older slave to death. He was a merciless man with ambition dripping from his brow.”
“What were your biggest fears during that time?“
“Fears? There were lots. I was always scared of getting the lash; I had good reason. You could get lashed for just about anything: working too slow, talking back, arguing, anything you can think. I was also scared of the overseer, he was a cruel man, and he would do things… just makes me sick to think. I think my biggest fear was that I would never be free again. It’s hard being enslaved, ‘specially when you was free once before. Fear was just an everyday thing.”
“Going along with that, Alana, what were your hopes? Your dreams?”
“My hopes and dreams was that one day I might be free. There were other little comforts I thought about, but nothing stays with you like the hunger for freedom. To be able to go where I want, do what I want, work and get wages, these are the freedoms withheld from us. Nothing stays in the mind of a slave like freedom.”
“Alana, many say that slavery has been good for your people; that it has civilized you. Why do you think this is?”
“Because they have never seen this slavery.”
The above dialog is fictional in many regards. However, Alana was a real slave brought from Sierra Leone to Havana on the slaver Segundo Rosario. While there is no way to know if her story looked anything like the one above, this story is (in its broadest sense) somewhat typical of enslaved women. Interpret this dialog not as a single account, but as a conglomerate of what it might have been like to live the life of an enslaved woman in the sugar kingdom of Cuba.
Sources:
Prince, Mary. (2004). The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. (10/22/2011). African Names Database. Retrieved from
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/slaves.faces.
Staten, Clifford L. (2003). The History of Cuba. (pp. 23-26). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group
