“Sí, señor. A day like today should include a woman. And that memory,” the waiter sighed also, “would make you warm on a cold night when you are old, like me.”
“Yes, you’re right. Please tell me, Jorge, just how did your English get so good?” Wake had wondered that since the waiter first greeted him at the café.
“My original master was a British man in St. Augustine, up in Florida, señor. When the Americans bought it from Spain, he sold me to a Spanish family that was moving to San Juan. Then they sold me to this café owner’s father, who bequeathed me to his son. I was twenty years old when I left Florida all those years ago, but I never forgot my English. My master here used me as a translator with American sailors in the port.”
Wake did the mathematics and realized the man would be about seventy-three. “But now you are free,” he said.
“Yes, señor. God has allowed me to live long enough to be a free man. I still work for my master here at the café, but now I do so willingly.”
“And, of course, now they pay you for working.”
“Oh no, señor. My master has no money to pay me, but he lets me stay in my old room and still lets me eat in the kitchen.” Seeing Wake’s reaction, the waiter shrugged, paternal softness coming into his voice. “Slavery is a state of mind and heart, señor. Money does not matter—my mind and my heart are now free.”
As the waiter went back to the kitchen, Wake remembered the former slaves he had seen in Pensacola after the recent war in his country. The Republicans were trying hard to assimilate them into society as freedmen, but the problems of that lofty endeavor were far more difficult than anything a legal proclamation or the recent Constitutional amendment could overcome. Politics had a way of slowing the best of intentions and Wake wondered how much longer the effort would continue before the Democrats in Congress would grind it to a halt. In addition to all of that, corruption was widespread in the Reconstruction, with a lot of people—except the new black citizens—getting rich off the government. The thought of the whole mess depressed him. A lot of men, some of them his friends, had died in that war. Liberating the slaves was the one tangible outcome he could point to with pride.
“You are looking very pensive, my old friend.”
Wake turned around. Standing there was a slender, handsome man in his late forties, silver hair flowing over his collar. The man moved easily and could pass for a local, for he was wearing a guayabera, the Latino white shirt of the tropics that was so much more comfortable than Wake’s wool coat. His smile was accented by crinkled eyes and one eyebrow cocked high in a mien of mock concern. This was the man who had sent Wake the invitation for lunch.
Jonathan Saunders was a former Confederate blockade runner and wartime foe turned friend. Wake had chased Saunders for two long years in Florida, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba—catching him twice and thinking him surely dead once, but the devious rebel always escaped. Both had developed a grudging respect for the other, and after the war, in January of 1866, Wake had conducted an official naval visit to Saunders’ colony of former Confederates on the west end of Puerto Rico. The two men finally became friends and had stayed such in the years since.
“Just thinking of the old days, Jonathan. It’s good to see you,” replied Wake. They shook hands and he beckoned Saunders to sit. “Been far too long. Now, how in the world did you know I was here? We just pulled in yesterday.”
“Whenever I come to San Juan for business I always check the harbor to see if any American naval vessels are in. If they are, I always ask for you. But lately there haven’t been any, what with the war scare and all. Then this morning I saw the Omaha, asked, and heard you were aboard. It’s been, what, two years? You were just coming home from the Panamanian jungle then.”
“Ah, yes, the Selfridge Survey Expedition. I was damn near dead from the fever when I saw you in seventy-one.”
Saunders nodded at the memory. “You did look pretty bad. I was worried about you. It’s amazing, Peter—you managed to avoid yellow fever all those years in Florida, but it nailed you good in Panama.”
“Enough of that story, Jonathan,” said Wake with a visible cringe at the memory of the pain endured while nearly dying from what the Royal Navy called the “black vomit.” It was time to change the subject. “Tell me, how’s your colony at Por Fin doing?”
“Well, the sugar cane’s doing fine. Of course, people’ll always drink rum, so we’re making it through the money panic without too much trouble,” said Saunders, referring to the economic depression caused by the failure of financier Jay Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad three months earlier in September. By November, the panic that devastated the United States’ banks had spread worldwide. “We didn’t use slaves anyway, so emancipation hasn’t hurt us like it did some planter folks. As far as socially, the people at Por Fin have settled in with the surrounding towns pretty well, I think. You know, the west coast is a world away from the bureaucrats here in San Juan, so we just don’t have the same problems as many of the immigrants on the island.”
“Then a toast is called for to celebrate continued success in your new life, Jonathan,” offered Wake when his friend’s drink arrived.
“Thank you, my friend—”
Saunders was interrupted by a Southern-accented feminine voice from behind Wake. “Oh my Lord, I do declare! If it isn’t my heroic savior, in the
