Calligraphy of the Witch

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611924725
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literature
• Index: Literature

Born of a Spaniard and a mixed-race woman, young Concepción Benavidez was apprenticed as a scribe to a convent. At nineteen, she escapes and is captured in the siege of Vera Cruz in 1683. She unexpectedly becomes the property of the Dutch pirate Laurens-Cornille de Graffe, who rapes her repeatedly on the long, deadly journey to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where he will sell his cargo. Realizing the young mestiza has fine penmanship, the pirate promptly sells her when they reach the cold New England coast.

Concepción is thrust into a strange world where she doesn't understand the language or the customs. Bought by a prominent Puritan, Merchant Greenwood, to tend to his old father-in-law and his chicken farm, the girl from New Spain is regarded with suspicion. She is considered a papist half-breed who speaks the language of the devil and practices an ungodly religion. Greenwood immediately forbids her to speak her native tongue, and he changes her name to Thankful Seagraves.

The merchant's barren wife discovers that the girl is pregnant with the pirate's child. And she covets the baby. In the following years, the two women spar for the child's love and affection. But when several women in Salem Village, including Concepción's friend Tituba Indian, are imprisoned for witchcraft, it's not long before people—and even her own daughter—start whispering about Concepción. After all, doesn't she keep a cat for a familiar and burn letters for the dead in the woods? Doesn't she appear lasciviously in men's dreams? How else could she have coerced the old man to marry and free her?

This riveting historical novel combines the horror of the Salem witch trials with the philosophy and poetry of the nun and writer known as the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this novel takes a mesmerizing look at women in the New World in the 17th century and the stubborn men who accuse them for no reason.

Chapter 1

“Laaaand fall!”

Captain Laurens de Graaf opened his spyglass and looked out. Yes, there it was, the dreary, foggy New En­gland coast. The Puritan merchants had commissioned him in January to bring sugar, molasses and slaves to the Bay Colony. Back then, the Captain had not been rich as he was now. At the time he had signed the agreement with the Puritan merchants, the siege of Vera Cruz was only a dare that Captain Van Horn had thrown in de Graaf’s face during a night of Christmas feasting in Port Royale.

If the Captain had known in January that Van Horn’s outlandish plan would work so well, that they would pull off the siege of Vera Cruz with the Spanish colors flying from the masts of their own buccaneer ships, while the Spanish Fleet sat like hens in the harbor, he would never have agreed to do business with the Puritans. This foggy, gloomy wilderness, which the Puritans referred to as the city built upon a hill for the chosen children of God, always gave Captain de Graaf nightmares. More and more he had come to despise his annual visit to the Boston port. Having to return twice in one year was enough to depress him until Christmas.

“Reyes!” the Captain called to his Spanish manservant. “Lay out my wig and greatcoat, and don’t forget the wool stockings. We’ll be putting into harbor soon.” Even in early summer, the coast of New En­gland chilled his blood. “Tell Cook to get the grog ready. I want it hot.” He turned and yelled for the quartermaster in French, ordering him to set up the auction table.

Though born of a mulata woman in the Netherlands and weaned on the odd dialect of the slaves, the Captain had been apprenticed at an early age to a cousin of his Dutch father’s who was a quartermaster in the Spanish navy, there to remain until his own induction as a sailor for the Spanish Crown. Thus, he managed Castilian more fluently than his own native Dutch and could be counted on to interpret the mixed argot of the slaves he carried across the Atlantic. He knew French as well, having picked it up from the corsairs who, ten years earlier, had captured his Spanish vessel and then invited him to join their company. Not one to bite the hand of Opportunity, Captain de Graaf had become a buccaneer and now commanded two ships, his favorite of which was the Neptune. Though he had some French sailors on board, his crew on the Neptune was mostly from the British Isles, and so Captain de Graaf had had to learn En­glish, too. A lifetime on the high seas had darkened the Captain’s skin like a vanilla bean, and the loose curls on his head, like his brows and his beard and even the lashes of his hazel eyes, had been bleached by sun and sea wind to the color of new beer.

The only Spaniard among them was Reyes, a sailmaker from the Captain’s Spanish navy days, who served as the Captain’s groom and, when necessary, bedmate. Reyes went below deck, and the Captain watched the crew scrambling on the poop, taking in the sails, uncoiling the anchor ropes, loading the guns to announce their arrival, shouting and slapping one another on the back in anticipation of going ashore. The Captain yelled for the quartermaster again, and told him to inform the crew that nobody would be leaving the ship. They would send out the longboat to bring the merchants aboard, dispose of the cargo and sail the same day for Virginia. It was early enough still, and a good wind would find them once they left the cold shadow of the Boston port. The New En­gland coast reminded him too much of the English dungeon where he’d been imprisoned at the beginning of his buccaneer fame.

The cannon went off, and he blessed himself with the triple sign of the cross. Though a Lutheran, Captain de Graaf was a superstitious man, and he had picked up many of the habits of the Spanish.

“That little bitch hija de puta made a mess in your cabin again, mi capitán,” Reyes said when he returned to the poop.

“¡Joder, hombre! For fuck’s sake!” the Captain swore at Reyes. “I told you to keep an eye on the wench. What now? Another fire?”

“Looks like she got into your logbook this time, sir. There’s chicken scratch all over the pages.”

“I curse her whore of a mother!” said the Captain, snapping his spyglass shut. “Why did we let her loose again, Reyes?”

His lips pursed tightly, Reyes followed the Captain down the ladder, wanting to say, You’ve been craving bitch meat ever since she came on board, but el capitán de Graaf, the infamous Lorencillo, scourge of the Spanish Main, took to insolence the way he took to the pox. “You wanted her last night, mi capitán.” Reyes tried to keep the edge of jealousy out of his voice. “You know she always pays you back in some way.”

“Damn her to Hell! I should’ve left her in Campeche. What am I doing with that crazy wench aboard?”

Mexican half-breed bitch, Reyes wanted to correct him, but again he kept his mouth shut. In his cabin, the Captain threw his arms up in anger. The wench had spilled the inkhorn on the floor and smeared ink all over the bedclothes. The written pages of his log ­were torn in half, the other pages . . . The Captain dragged the lamp across the desk to see his logbook better. “By your life,” he said under his breath. “This is no chicken scratch, you imbecile! This is the calligraphy of a trained scribe.”

On one page the wench had written the name Jerónima over and over, on the other pages a long verse, in a penmanship so elegant and curlicued it confirmed his suspicion that the half-breed he’d been sporting with for the past five weeks had been educated in a monastery. How she’d gotten mixed in with the Negroes he didn’t know. It wasn’t common buccaneer practice to take Indians or half-breeds for slaves, but the girl was attached to one of the Negro girls in his share of the plunder they’d captured in Vera Cruz and had pleaded with him to take her along, had actually knelt at his feet and kissed his groin, promising to do what­ever he wanted in exchange for coming on the Neptune. Captain de Graaf had a weakness for brave women. Besides, he had never bedded a wench who had eyes of different colors: one dark as Jamaican rum, the other green as French chartreuse.

At first, the girl was dutiful and obedient, though she was a virgin and wept each time he took her. Then the Negro girl, who was her friend, caught the pox from some of the slaves they’d picked up in Havana. His quartermaster had ordered them all thrown overboard to keep the rest of the cargo from getting infected. Ever since then, the half-breed wandered through the decks, calling for her friend, wailing like a madwoman.

At midday, when the slaves were brought up to the deck to eat and exercise, the coffle of men to the starboard side, the women to the larboard, the girl served their food, chanting the Latin Ave Maria with such sorrow that the slaves and some of the Irish sailors broke into sobbing. Cook said that when the girl helped him in the galley she talked to a black figure that she carried in a wee purse hanging from her neck. She could stand for hours in the stern, staring at the water, ignoring storms or squalls or even the sailors’ pinching and fondling, holding an invisible rosary between her hands, her lips moving in silent prayer. When the Captain brought her to his bed, she stared at him with crazed, terrified eyes, shouting a rhymed verse to him—something about stubborn men and the flesh of the Devil—until he finished.

One evening she had almost castrated Cook.

Dozing in his hammock, Cook had told the Captain, he did not feel the hand on his groin, untying his breeches, until the fingers raised his member. He could smell that it was the half-breed touching him and kept his eyes closed, expecting something else, swelling quickly. The tip of the blade cutting into his flesh startled him awake. In the glow of the lantern, the half-breed’s eyes burned like a lunatic’s. Cook wrenched the bone of her wrist, and she thrust the blade into his testicles. He released her. She ran out of the galley shrieking curses, Cook was certain, in her heathen tongue.

“The wench about gelded me, Captain.”

“Did she damage you, Cook?”

“Hard to tell, Sir, but I don’t think so. Just a bit of bleeding, I hope.”

“Then you are not to damage her. Understood?”

“Aye, Sir.”

“Warn the others. A murdered wench would bring us evil winds. She is to be left alone. She should never have been touched in the first place.”

“All due respect, Captain, but she’s a danger to the crew, is what I think. The way she can sneak up on a fellow. And there’s that black doll she be forever whispering to, that voodoo thing she carries around her neck.”

“The men can take care of themselves, Cook. If I were you, I’d sport with someone else. The wench doesn’t take well to our kind of sporting. As to that figure she’s always talking to, that’s not a voodoo doll. I’ve seen it. It’s just a game piece.”

“Funny games she plays, Captain.”

“Well, you never know the ways of women.”

“Aye, that’s God’s truth, Sir.”

The Captain thought the girl had lost her wits completely, but this writing on the page showed him that he was wrong, that there was still hope of getting rid of her at a good price. The Captain scanned the stanzas of the verse, chuckling to himself at the sweet prize that Lady Fortune had just bestowed on him. This was no simple wench. Whoever wanted her would have to pay her price in coin.

“Reyes! Go find her, quick! I need to talk to her before the merchants arrive.”

When Reyes had gone, the Captain sat down at his desk and drew up a bill of sale, dipping the pen into the thick puddle of ink soaking into the floor.

I, Captain Laurens-Cornille de Graaf, commander of the buccaneer frigate the Neptune, hereby sell this half-breed wench, captured in war on the coast of New Spain and subject to servitude. Her name is Jerónima. She is approximately twenty years old. Has all her teeth. Is immune to the pox. For her sturdy health and her knowledge of letters, her price is 50 sterling pounds. 21 June 1683

The Captain signed the bill, sprinkled sand over the ink, and poured a generous shot of Spanish brandy into his polished silver goblet to celebrate his good luck. If there was one friendly thing he could say about the Puritans, it was that they knew how to appreciate good penmanship, even in a wench. He heard the guns go off in the harbor and knew that the New England merchants were on their way.

Chapter 2

She could not remember how long the voyage had taken. After Aléndula’s disappearance, she stopped counting the days since the pirate’s ship had left the port of Vera Cruz. She stopped listening to the wailing of the slaves and to the strange sounds of the pirates’ language. She heard only water, the flapping of sails, the night wind howling through the portholes.

In the mornings, when she mashed the horse beans for the slaves’ only meal of the day, the stench of it brought her momentarily out of the numbness that had grown around her like a silkworm’s case. In that slit of time, she would notice where she was and remember what had happened to Aléndula. She would see the slimy planks of the galley floor that she scrubbed every night, where once the cook, reeking of onions and rum, had taken her like a dog, entering a part of her body that she did not know could be entered, which felt like being skewered on a hot spit. She would hear the clank of chains on the ladders and know that the slaves were being prodded to the upper deck for their pitiful ration of horse beans, weevil-ridden hard tack and rank cider. After they ate, one of the pirates would pound stupidly on a drum, and the other pirates would prod or whip the slaves to dance to the drumbeats, their chains rattling, their moans making a perverse harmony.

It was this, more than being shackled to the lower deck, breathing the fumes of excrement and listening to the constant keening of the other slaves, it was this denigrating dance in the open air that had most poisoned Aléndula’s soul, until finally she could not stand up any longer and could not climb the ladder out of the hatch and had to be left below. The little water she drank convulsed her body.

She remembered saying, “You’re making this more difficult for us, Aléndula. You have to eat. You have to get up. Look at you! You’ll die down here without any air. Please try to get up!”

“I know my papi’s ashamed of me, locked up in this convent for three years. I have to get out of here. I have to be free. You can get me out, Concepción; I know you can. Even if you free just one person you’ll be a cimarrona. Then you can go with me to San Lorenzo and we’ll both be free.”

“Does this look like freedom to you? We’re not in the convent anymore, Aléndula. I did get you out, don’t you remember? We escaped from the convent and walked all the way to Vera Cruz and ended up getting captured by pirates. Please, Aléndula! Tell me you remember!”

“My mother’s a free woman. Tell them that, Concepción! If my mother’s free, I’m free. Don’t they know that? I’m not a slave. They ­can’t make me a slave! I’m from San Lorenzo! I’m the daughter of a free woman and Timón de Antillas, the king of the cimarrones of New Spain. I’m the goddaughter of Eleguá.”

From lack of water and air, Aléndula had become delirious, her mind still traveling to the village of San Lorenzo de los Negros, where there was no such thing as a slave, she said, where old women smoked cinnamon bark to see the future and sacrificed roosters to talk to the dead, the village where Aléndula was born and to which she would have returned before the foiled insurrection in Mexico City and the ambush and the hanging.

“I told him my dream...