“The doctor is coming.” Minvielle pointed to a tugboat sputtering up to the ship, its yellow flag flapping in the wind. “Everybody has to be inspected.”
“What are we? Cattle?” the Puerto Ricans complained.
“What about them?” Vicente gestured to the cabin passengers.
“They’re not emigrants,” Minvielle said.
“Or Puerto Ricans,” Vicente said.
The men refused to leave their womenfolk, despite being directed to a separate line. The doctor had no choice but to conduct a cursory examination on deck. He took from his pocket an instrument that looked like a hairpin to check underneath their eyelids.
Minvielle told them that the ship would dock at the Algiers pier for a day or two before they could continue their journey. Not to worry. There was plenty of food and water. It could be worse; on the first trip, they’d had to wait for someone in the United States Customs Office to decide whether or not the Puerto Ricans were American citizens because US law wouldn’t permit foreign immigrants to work in the territory of Hawaii. US Customs had declared them Americans. ¡Oye, americano! In Puerto Rico, they weren’t citizens—neither American nor Puerto Rican, and certainly not Spanish, not since the war. Look how they were already ahead! Minvielle, maybe we’ll get paid more now that we’re Americans?
“Probably best not to get too excited.” Minvielle turned to leave.
Vicente called out to Minvielle, “¿Somos americanos? Do we Puerto Ricans have the same rights as people in the United States?”
Minvielle shrugged. “I’m just doing my job. I work for the Hawaiian planters just like you.”
They passed the time in steerage playing music, dancing, and telling stories.
“Óyeme bien,” said a man from Adjuntas who reached for a jug of ron caña making the rounds. “I swore that I would never again leave my beloved country after the Cuba Company and the iron mines. I had an old mother to support and three unmarried sisters. We starved in Puerto Rico like everyone else, and when a man has four women to feed, he will do anything, even go down into hell.”
Murmurings. Agreements. Calls for the jug of ron caña.
“It was like a voyage to hell. On la California, an American ship. Half of us barefoot and in rags. All of us skin and bones, some men were sick or dying from the hunger. They gave us something putrid to eat, que ni el diablo la comía, and dirty water for coffee. Vomitando y durmiendo tirados en el piso. Sleeping like animals on the deck. A thousand men. More. When a man died, they stuffed him in a sack of sand and threw him in the sea. By the second day, almost all of us were sick. Por fin, half dead, we arrived at a little town called Daiquirí where americanos—grandes, gordos y colorados—picked out two hundred and fifty men. The ship sailed to another town, where more fat Americans picked out another couple hundred men. At Nipe, the third stop, some yanquis came on the boat and took seventy-five men. Ese tiempo, I was one of them. That left over four hundred puertorriqueños, negros, todos. They could all be in the sea, for all I know.”
“Ay bendito, Santa María,” somebody said.
“Nobody cares about los negros,” somebody else said.
Raulito looked around steerage; he was one of the few black men. What if it were worse in Hawaii for a black man than it had been in Puerto Rico? He looked at Vicente, sitting with Valentina, and he knew that as long as he had his brother he would be all right.
“How did you get back to Puerto Rico?” Raulito recalled the stories the family had read in the newspapers about the Cuban mines.
The miner put his hand out for the jug. “Alive, gracias a Dios.”
Laughter.
“Escucha mi cuento. Soy Gómez de Peñuelas,” one of the Puerto Ricans said. “The day before San Ciriaco, I was to take the boat to Santo Domingo to work the cane, but there was this woman—”
“Ay los amores,” somebody said.
“Women got that sweet stuff that healthy men can’t resist.” Gómez touched his hat. “Perdón, damas, Mamá didn’t raise me to be so crude.”
“That’s what my father always told my mother when she complained about his pocas vergüenzas,” somebody said.
“A woman is always ready with her sugar when a man is weakest,” Gómez said.
Laughter.
Vicente put his arm around his wife. He couldn’t bear the pain in her eyes, pain that he felt, too, but that they couldn’t express to each other without two or three hundred people witnessing it.
Gómez was still telling his story.
“This woman used to be my wife, but certain things occurred, as they often do when a woman is cursed con mal genio. If a man wants to take another woman or even two, well, who can blame him? Still, except for certain episodes, she was a good wife. I only had the shirt and pants—the ones I have on—and she washed my clothes on Saturday so I didn’t have to shame myself when I went to town on Sunday. Muy buena mujer, but she wanted a saint, not a man. Soy hombre. The day came when I said ¡Basta! I was sick of her quejas. I heard there was work in Santo Domingo. She said that a curandera had told her to stop me from getting on the boat. I don’t believe in brujería, that witchcraft stuff, but because she was a woman, one thing led to another, and by the time I got to Mayagüez, the ship had already left the harbor. The sky had a strange tint to it and the wind was a demonio. It was the hurricane coming. San Ciriaco. I survived el huracán without a scratch in the home of a kind family. And the ship—all those puertorriqueños and their families going to Santo Domingo—the hurricane picked it up and threw it down, but la gente survived, sí señor, I helped to bring them out of the water.”
Gómez crooked his finger for the jug.
“Everybody lived except for two little girls.”
The jug of ron caña was passed around; another jug appeared.
“We are born to die,” a woman said. “Dying is part of life. Just like being born, just like having children. And being buried out in the ocean is much better than being buried in dirt.”
Valentina felt as if the woman were talking only to her.
“You know how we bury the poor. Los muertos are carried to the cemetery in a rented coffin and dumped in the graves.” The woman took a swig of ron caña. “My father was the keeper of the cemetery, and part of his job as a palero was to dig up the bones to make room for the new dead.”
Valentina was tempted to tell the woman to shut up.
“We grew vegetables in a tiny plot near the boneyard,” the woman said. “Mamá said that’s why our vegetables weren’t very big, because they came from the graves of the poor, there weren’t enough vitamins in the earth.”
“Coño carajo,” somebody said.
Valentina accepted the jug from the gravedigger’s daughter and took a long swig that ended in a fit of coughing. Vicente patted her back.
After the second day, the Puerto Ricans were herded off the steamship and into small boats that took them to the pier. They searched the gray sky for snow. Someone said it was 40 degrees. Surely that was cold enough for snow! Stevedores from other ships loaded onto the pier crates of vegetables and fruits like asparagus and oranges. Valentina recalled a story her father had read to them from a newspaper long ago, about six Italian sailors who had been lynched in New Orleans, the murderers were never found. The Puerto Ricans, mostly country folk, marveled at the fancy carriages and the horse-drawn milk wagons transporting huge containers of milk. It had been years since they had drunk milk, not even the children could recall the taste of it.