Tale of a Puerto Rican Plantation Mistress
By GAIUTRA
BAHADUR
CONQUISTADORA
By Esmeralda Santiago
414 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.50.
If the American South had Scarlett O’Hara as its
Civil War antiheroine, the English-speaking Caribbean of the 1800s had Annie
Palmer. The real-life mistress of a Jamaican sugar estate during the final days
of slavery, Palmer was the subject of legend and many lurid novels, most
enduringly 1929’s “White Witch of Rosehall.” Lore says (most likely
inaccurately) that Palmer practiced obeah, or sorcery; bedded slaves, then
killed them; and murdered three husbands. She set the standard for cruelty and
debauchery in a woman presiding over a plantation.
In fiction, plantation mistresses have tended to be
either unbridled despots (often with a touch of the “madwoman in the attic” à
la “Jane Eyre”) or demure creatures who stay in the Great House, civilizing
everyone in and around it. Esmeralda Santiago plays with, then capsizes, these
caricatures in “Conquistadora,” which she has set in mid-19th-century Puerto
Rico. Like Palmer, the novel’s heroine, Ana Cubillas, ends up a widow running a
sugar plantation who becomes romantically involved with an overseer. Ana
doesn’t literally kill her husband, Ramón, though her mother-in-law makes her feel
responsible for his death. Ana did, however, flatter him into leaving their
pampered life in Spain for empire’s fatal edges. She married him because his
family owned a plantation on the very island where, three centuries earlier,
her illustrious colonizing ancestor had landed with Ponce de León. Ana believes
it’s her destiny to seek her own greatness in Puerto Rico. Later, her husband
claims she “bewitched” him into going. The “white witch” stereotype sticks to
the hem of Ana’s skirt like cane-field mud. When she extols the healing powers
of herbs, learned from her slaves, another character charges, “That sounds like
witchcraft.”
But Santiago’s plantation mistress isn’t a shrew
who derives sadistic pleasure from flogging her slaves. Nor is she their ministering
angel, although she tends to the sick and oversees baptisms and prayers. Ana is
something much more elusive and contradictory. She delegates the flogging, but
flinches when the slaves scream.
Santiago, who was born in Puerto Rico, chronicled
her personal struggle with a controlling partner in the memoir “The Turkish
Lover” and has written before about strong-willed women trying to break free
from machismo’s grip. In her previous novel, “América’s Dream,” a housekeeper
flees an abusive relationship by emigrating. The Ana of “Conquistadora” is a
feminist before her time. She is resented by her parents for not being the male
heir they desired. Their private succession crisis overlaps with a bloody,
public one — Spain’s Carlist wars, fought to allow a woman to inherit the
throne. As that conflict unfolds, Ana makes furtive love to her friend Elena at
their convent school. (Santiago, fancying symbolic if unsubtle names, calls it
the Convent of Good Mothers.)
A side benefit to Ana’s marrying Ramón is that she
and Elena can continue with their affair, as Elena has long been promised to
Ramón’s twin, Inocente. But that plan goes awry as the twins, who finish each
other’s sentences and enjoy watching each other have sex with the same woman,
both fall for Ana. They follow her to the plantation, and when Ana gives birth,
it’s unclear who the father is. The plot turns, sometimes improbably, sometimes
predictably. There’s a good deal of soap-operatic excess in “Conquistadora,”
including some sensational fights between Ana and her mother-in-law.
The book’s strength is its Rubik’s Cube portrait of
Ana, an unconventional, ambitious woman whose attitudes toward children, slaves
and lovers perplex and engross. She isn’t much of a mother, but she takes in a
humpbacked baby girl abandoned on her doorstep the same day she trades her own
son away in order to keep running the plantation. She’s a liberal mistress,
expressing interest in the African songs her maid sings and allowing the
slaves’ midwife to deliver her son. (“We all look and function pretty much the
same down there,” she declares.) Yet she achieves freedom by exploiting those
who, starkly, lack it. Noting that none of her slaves have challenged her, Ana
reflects: “But of course, they could. . . . She would, if she were one of them.”
Is Ana believable? Santiago herself has asked that
question. “I worried that I was creating a character who would have been
impossible in that time and that place,” she said in an interview on her
publisher’s Web site. In fact, a small percentage of women did own or control
plantations in the Caribbean. Whether the obstacles they faced in a world
dominated by white men sensitized them to the oppression of slaves is another
question entirely. White women in the 19th-century Caribbean were largely
silent on the subject of slavery. Most who spoke publicly, defended it. With
her tough portrait of a female planter, Santiago speculates, charitably but
unromantically, about those who didn’t speak. Ana is emotionally intelligent
enough to imagine how slaves might feel, to understand their longing for
freedom, yet ruthless enough to use and punish them in order to flourish
herself. Neither white witch nor angel, she is convincing despite her
contradictions — indeed, because of them.
Annie Palmer’s Rose Hall plantation is now a
vacation resort, offering a chance to tee off on the White Witch Golf Course or
exchange vows in front of the Great House. Many historical novels function this
way, too, mingling levity with solemnity, turning fact into entertainment.
“Conquistadora,” for one, presents a guided tour of the history of sugar and
empire. Santiago takes us through events of the past as if they were rooms,
narrating the cholera epidemic that ravaged Puerto Rico in the 1850s here,
depicting the secret abolitionist societies active in San Juan there, and, over
all, divertingly evoking a place that was one of the last holdouts for slavery
in the Americas.
Gaiutra Bahadur is writing a book about Indian women indentured to
Caribbean sugar plantations after slavery.
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