XII
First day on a sugar estate—The coffee estates—Change from coffee estates to sugar estates—Causes and effects of this change—Cultivation of sugarcane—Making of sugar—Profits of sugar making—Process of sugar making, in the fields and mill—Division of labor—Engineer from the United States—Treatment and labor of Negroes—Officers of a plantation, and their duties: mayoral, mayordomo, contra-mayorales, boyero—Duties and cares of the master—Visit to Negro quarters.
At some seasons, a visit may be a favor, on remote plantations; but I know this is the height of the sugar season, when every hour is precious to the master. After a brief toilet, I sit down with them; for they have just begun dinner. In five minutes, I am led to feel as if I were a friend of many years. Both gentlemen speak English like a native tongue. To the younger it is so, for he was born in South Carolina, and his mother is a lady of that State. The family are not here. They do not live on the plantation, but in Matanzas. The plantation is managed by the son, who resides upon it; the father coming but occasionally for a few days, as now, in the busy season.
The dinner is in the Spanish style, which I am getting attached to. I should flee from a joint, or a sirloin. We have rice, excellently cooked, as always in Cuba, eggs with it, if we choose, and fried plantains, sweet potatoes, mixed dishes of fowl and vegetables, with a good deal of oil and seasoning, in which a hot red pepper, about the size of the barberry, prevails. Catalonia wine, which is pretty sure to be pure, is their table claret, while sherry, which also comes direct from the mother country, is for dessert. I have taken them by surprise, in the midst of the busiest season, in a house where there are no ladies; yet the table, the service, the dress and the etiquette, are nonetheless in the style of good society. There seems to be no letting down, where letting down would be so natural and excusable.
I suppose the fact that the land and the agricultural capital of the interior are in the hands of an upper class, which does no manual labor, and which has enough of wealth and leisure to secure the advantages of continued intercourse with city and foreign society, and of occasional foreign travel, tends to preserve throughout the remote agricultural districts, habits and tone and etiquette, which otherwise would die out, in the entire absence of large towns and of high local influences.
Whoever has met with a book called Evenings in Boston, and read the story of the old Negro, Saturday, and seen the frontispiece of the Negro fleeing through the woods of St. Domingo, with two little white boys, one in each hand, will know as much of Mr. C⸺ the elder, as I did the day before seeing him. He is the living hero, or rather subject, for Saturday was the hero, of that tale. His father was a wealthy planter of St. Domingo, a Frenchman, of large estates, with wife, children, friends and neighbors. These were gathered about him in a social circle in his house, when the dreadful insurrection overtook them, and father, mother, sons and daughters were murdered in one night, and only two of the children, boys of eight and ten, were saved by the fidelity of Saturday, an old and devoted house servant. Saturday concealed the boys, got them off the island, took them to Charleston, South Carolina, where they found friends among the Huguenot families, and the refugees from St. Domingo. There Mr. C⸺ grew up; and after a checkered and adventurous early life, a large part of it on the sea, he married a lady of worth and culture, in South Carolina, and settled himself as a planter, on this spot, nearly forty years ago. His plantation he named El Labarinto (The Labyrinth), after a favorite vessel he had commanded, and for thirty years it was a prosperous cafetal, the home of a happy family, and much visited by strangers from America and Europe. The causes which broke up the coffee estates of Cuba, carried this with the others; and it was converted into a sugar plantation, under the new name of La Ariadne, from the fancy of Ariadne having shown the way out of the Labyrinth. Like most of the sugar estates, it is no longer the regular home of its proprietors.
The change from coffee plantations to sugar plantations—from the cafetal to the ingenio, has seriously affected the social, as it has the economic condition of Cuba.
Coffee must grow under shade. Consequently the coffee estate was, in the first place, a plantation of trees, and by the hundred acres. Economy and taste led the planters, who were chiefly the French refugees from St. Domingo to select fruit trees, and trees valuable for their wood, as well as pleasing for their beauty and shade. Under these plantations of trees, grew the coffee plant, an evergreen, and almost an ever-flowering plant,
