Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

Author:Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro [Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2012-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

5.

Petro gently taps my face, so I would wake up. His pink, familiar look quenches my thirst. He puts water and medicine, made of painkilling herbs, down my throat to ease the pain in my body. “You were talking in your sleep,” he says, and when the jailer passes nearby, he makes as if he were praying with his rosary in Latin. He then combines compound syllables to explain to me that I am not an animal. Mbwa / ‘m.bwa / dog; tembo / elefant / thembo / elefante; ne.nda / not / no; you/ toi. There is rebellious empathy in his voice that makes me believe him, and even feel sorry for him. I mumble in French, and he freezes, surprised at discovering of my language proficiency. I repeat the phrase in Castilian Spanish and Igbo. Petro shuts my mouth with this hand, that way I’ll be silent and would not be found out. The guards are coming. They feed the other two women in my cell leftovers from the neighboring plantations; nothing for me. I’ve been declared a Seditious, and Subversive Black Woman according to the public bulletin boards, identified by my birthmark near my eye, a P-shaped mark made with a branding iron, offering a reward for my capture. When they leave, Petro takes out some casaba he had concealed, and puts it in my mouth, inviting me to chew it slowly, that I would not choke. The other women share their water with me. Everything tastes like the candy they made in the valley near our native river during the ceremony of masks.

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