The pregnant slave was tied to the tree of ingenuity… But what he said between Dolores no one expected. – YY
Under a leaden gray sky, the fine rain of 1858 fell on the vast cane field of the Boa Fortuna sugar mill. The air smelled of wet earth, of the cloying sweetness of molasses, and of the bitterness of injustice that pervaded those lands.
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From the gallery of the big house, Doña Gertrudes watched with an iron countenance. Her cold blue eyes were fixed on the courtyard, where two foremen were dragging Benta, a young slave who was nearly nine months pregnant, to the centenarian gameleira. The silence of the other captives was deafening, a heavy silence that anticipated tragedy.
“Tie it up tightly, Chicão!” shouted Joaquim, the foreman, with his rawhide whip in his hand. “This black woman needs to learn that insolence has a price.”
Benta, his face bathed in sweat and tears, pursed his lips. The pain of the contractions was mixed with fear and humiliation. His hands instinctively protected his belly. No one dared to say out loud what everyone suspected: the reason for this punishment.
The Boa Fortuna sugar mill, in the heart of the Recôncavo Baiano, breathed oppression. The large, white, stately house contrasted with the senzala, the damp, dark slave barracks where Benta slept and kept her secret.
Days before, Gertrudes had found among Benta’s rags a handkerchief of fine linen, embroidered with the initials “M.V.”. From that moment, the suspicion was confirmed. Her husband, Mr. Martim Vincent, spent too much time outside the big house at night, claiming to supervise the milling. Suspicion poisoned Gertrudes’s heart.
“That child she is carrying in her womb cannot be born here!” shouted Gertrudes, uncontrolled, when ordering the punishment. The older slaves whispered that it was a sickly circle, but others believed it was fear; an ancestral fear of losing what he had built on the foundations of lies.
They tied Benta to the sacred tree, arms stretched above her head, exposing her belly to the coming storm. Thunder rumbled. It was then, in his supreme agony, that Benta decided to speak.
With a weak but firm voice, he fixed his deep eyes on the lady’s. “This little girl growing in my womb is the true hope of this cursed wit,” she said, breathing between contractions. “And the blood that runs through her veins is the same blood that runs through the veins of her own husband.”
A collective shiver ran through the courtyard. Foreman Joaquim froze with his whip in the air. Doña Gertrudes turned pale, her lips parted in a mute cry of horror. Without a word, she turned and staggered away toward the big house, as if she could escape the truth that had just collapsed on her. In the senzala, the old healer, Abílio, murmured: “The truth, when it is born from the womb of a suffering woman, not even iron chains can hold it.”
The night fell like a heavy blanket. Benta was still bound, trembling with pain and fever, as a pool of blood began to form at her feet. Gertrudes, shut up in her room, walked like a caged beast, on the verge of madness. In the senzala, Abílio warned: “If they don’t get her out of there before the next hour, she and the baby won’t see the next full moon.”
Martim Vicente, the master of the sugar mill, returned from his business trip to Salvador late at night. When he heard of the punishment, he felt his blood run cold. He ran into the courtyard, and seeing Benta’s deplorable state, shouted with an authority he seldom used, “Untie her right now, you morons! Don’t you see that he is dying?”
But Benta was already lost in the haze of pain. Martim took her in his arms, feeling the feverish heat of his body, and the brutal reality struck him. The young woman he had secretly loved was dying. For the first time, he felt that all his wealth was worthless.
Gertrudes appeared at the door, disheveled, her clothes stained with wine. “Are you going to kneel for that little black bastard?” he spat venomously.
Martim looked up, his eyes red, and his voice cut through the night. “That black girl, as you call her with contempt, is the only person in this world who gave me true peace in this white hell that you have commanded for more than twenty years.”
At that moment, Abílio, the healer, approached and asked permission to take care of Benta. Martim, the absolute master, for the first time in his life, nodded without hesitation to the authority of a slave.
Under the gameleira, Abílio prepared his sacred herbs, rosemary compresses and prayers in Yoruba, invoking the protection of Oxum, the orixá of motherhood. Meanwhile, in the big house, Gertrudes shattered the golden-framed mirror she had brought back from Europe, shattering into a thousand pieces the reflection of a life built on lies and a terrible secret she had kept for decades.
Hours of struggle between life and death passed. And then, when all hope seemed lost, a loud, vibrant cry cut short the night.
All eyes turned to the tree. Abílio, with the skill of an expert midwife, cleaned the newborn. Benta, pale but alive, smiled faintly.
“He was born,” Abílio declared in a strong voice. “She is a girl, beautiful like her mother. And this girl was born free like the birds of the sky!”
Martim fell to his knees on the damp earth, crying like a child. Tears washed away decades of hardness and blindness. For the first time, the captives of the wit smiled widely. Gertrudes did not appear again.
The next morning, a new, almost sacred silence covered the mill. Benta and the girl, who slept with clenched fists, rested in the senzala, receiving small amulets and blessings from others.
Martim Vicente spent the morning in the gallery, his gaze lost on the horizon. She remembered the day she bought Benta, when she was just a child, and how she had forcibly separated her from her mother, a mother who cried and implored. A pain that he had ignored and that fate was now charging him.
In the following days, Martim Vicente did the unthinkable. With trembling hands, he drafted a letter of alforría, officially freeing Benta. And then, the most revolutionary act of all: he went to church and registered the girl as his legitimate granddaughter, giving her the name Maria Esperança Vicente.
The scandal shook the entire province. Other lords of wit questioned his sanity, the priests threatened him. But Martim didn’t care; he had found redemption.
Gertrudes disappeared. It was said that he took a ship to Lisbon, taking only his jewels and the weight of his secrets, fleeing from a horror that his lies could no longer contain.
The Engenho Boa Fortuna, once synonymous with oppression, began a slow transformation. Gradually, Martim freed the other captives. Most decided to stay, not out of submission, but because a community united by suffering and now by hope had been formed there. They created a cooperative, working as free men and women on the same land where it was previously treated as property.
