[In the following essay, Williams discusses the models of motherhood and nurturing imposed on female slaves by their white masters in Cecilia Valdés.]

In the antislavery narratives written by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Antonio Zambrana, the plot centers on the male protagonist's relocation to the countryside, which is motivated by the unequal struggle for sexual mastery between men from two radically different social spheres. In Cecilia Valdés, Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894) invokes another causal model. Instead, a female slave is banished to the sugar plantation for invoking a paradigm of maternity that violates the slaveholder's notion of what constitutes an appropriate model of maternity for the slave.

However, for Villaverde's slave, mothering is not the indissoluble bond that it is posited to be for her mistress. Since Doña Rosa de Gamboa's demand that María de Regla forgo nursing her own daughter conforms to the accepted practices of a slave society, whereby ties of bondage are expected to take precedence over kinship ties among slaves, in Villaverde's account, the sociocultural assumes priority over the genealogical. María de Regla evidently comes to accept as “natural” the model of maternity that the planters impose on her, because the terms in which she addresses the planters' daughter whom she was compelled to nurse instead of her own—“niña de mis ojos”;¹ “mi hija idolatrada” (p. 500); etc.—consistently express maternal devotion, whereas the narrator observes that the slave was less emotionally attached to her daughter, Dolores. Motherhood is thereby grounded in the act of nurturing, rather than in the biological process of giving birth. Indeed, the text locates Dolores's origins in an empty space, because of her upbringing by Mamerta, whose age and childless condition attest to her deficiencies as a mother, a lack that the name, Mamerta (dead mammy), already conveys etymologically, though in contracted form. Nevertheless, this organic notion of genesis is postulated only for the slave. According to Villaverde's formulation, the slave mother can only establish lasting affective bonds with a child whom she has nursed through the accepted moment of weaning. Since the process of creating a bond of intimacy with her own daughter was curtailed by the slaveholder's veto, the logical outcome was the displacement of the slave's maternal ties and the positing of her children as creatures of an irredeemable emotional and genealogical lack. Paradoxically, in Villaverde's text, the body of the female slaveholder does not constitute the locus of social origin in an analogous mode. For Doña Rosa's inability to nurse Adela does not suspend the slaveholder's maternal ties to her daughter. Villaverde's text thereby places the slave mother at the juncture of two incompatible discourses of motherhood: on the one hand, the narrator considers the slave's reproductive power to be a manifestation of her humanity; on the other hand, the human aspect of that reproductive power is placed under erasure when the mother's milk is presented from the outset as a product to be managed by the slaveholders. The narrator subsequently announces the economic terms in which the slave's reproductive capabilities are valued when he specifies the sums of money that the Gamboas exchange for María de Regla's nursing Cecilia Valdés. The primacy of the economic is upheld when María de Regla produces two additional slaves for the Gamboas's service, while she simultaneously nurtures another generation of planters.

At the same time, Villaverde's novel enables María de Regla to break with the specular model of maternity that Doña Rosa imposes on her, while appearing to uphold it. Since the slave nurtures both Adela and Cecilia Valdés, the text establishes a functional equivalence between Don Cándido Gamboa's legitimate and illegitimate daughters. Each of these children literally or figuratively supplants one of the slave's own children at his or her mother's breast, and thereby transforms the slave's body into a generative sign that exceeds the slaveholder's reductive logic of polar opposition. The slave who simultaneously feeds a free and an enslaved baby secretly inverts the image of the mother that Doña Rosa expects the nursing infant to mirror. The black woman who surreptitiously feeds a black and a mulatto child as well as a white baby becomes the normative maternal figure, since her breast is the site where similar and dissimilar versions of herself are sustained. The very slaveholder who would exclude the slave from the category of the maternal when she denies María de Regla the right to nurse Dolores tacitly privileges the slave's motherliness when she entrusts Adela to María de Regla's care. And the slave's account of her own situation is founded on an inclusive concept of motherhood in which she unveils her efforts to maintain the human dimension of her maternity that the slaveholders attempt to erase.

As William Luis has observed, the name that Villaverde chooses for his character, María de Regla Santa Cruz, confers symbolic status on the slave, since it simultaneously evokes the figure of the paradigmatic mother in official Cuban culture and that of the patron saint of the port of Havana, the Virgin of Regla.² However, in establishing the affinity, Villaverde's text rejects the widely-accepted archetype of the Virgin Mary's impossible maternity for an account of the slave's forbidden maternity, particularly through its reference to María de Regla's illicit parental union with the Basque carpenter. By assimilating the body of the female slave to that of the mother, Villaverde signals the insertion of his narrative into the prevailing Marianist tradition.³ If the diversity of the slave's offspring is intended to announce her structural similarity to the Christian Mary, who mediates between a heterogeneous humanity and a higher authority, the positioning of the children in the slave mother's regard unmasks the asymmetrical basis on which the racially different are incorporated into the normative Roman Catholic family.⁴ The novel upholds the Eurocentric focus of the Marianist tradition by making the planters' daughter, Adela, the measure of the slave's motherhood, since she is the only one of the four socioracially different children reared by María de Regla the one of whom, and to whom, the slave speaks in endearing terms. Villaverde's portrayal thereby becomes analogous to the Christian doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, in that María's maternity is represented to be a response to the will of a superior being, rather than an expression of her own desire for a child.

The entry into the symbolic order that María de Regla's name announces coincides with the genealogical move of her original owners who evidently assigned her a name that would mark her status as their property in the public realm. At the same time, María de Regla's connection to Cecilia Valdés reminds us that her name, like the maternal function she fulfills for the Gamboas, is a site of dual meanings. One, like the slave's ties to Adela, is openly acknowledged; the other, like the attachment to Cecilia Valdés, remains screened from public view. Yet, while Villaverde's slave is seemingly inserted into the Eurocentric frame of reference that her masters have devised for her, the properties with which she is invested simultaneously evoke her continuity with her African heritage. Indeed, the African element that remains unspoken creates the ground of meaning for many of the novel's events. For example, in her version of her misfortune, María de Regla assures her audience that she was biologically capable of nursing the infant Adela and Dolores without depriving either of an adequate supply of mother's milk. Consequently, in the emblematic scene that prompts her expulsion to the plantation, the maternal body that the text parades hypostatizes that of an African fertility goddess, with her twin daughters sucking at each breast. It therefore appears that María de Regla's belated banishment to the sugar estate is not simply intended to provide an instance of the planters' predictably irrational behavior, in keeping with the rhetorical strategies of the antislavery novel. The expulsion to the countryside also enables Villaverde's slave to assume the African-inspired destiny inscribed in her name. For, as Lydia Cabrera points out, in Cuba, the Virgin of Regla was conflated with the Yoruba goddess, Yemanja, a syncretism often made visible when signs of veneration for the African sea goddess intruded into the ostensibly Roman Catholic celebration of the feast day of Havana's patron saint.⁵

In one of the Afro-Cuban variants of a traditional narrative, Yemanja was the deity who reared Shango, the fire god and “patron of impulsive lovers,” after the latter's mother expelled him from her domain in heaven, because he was the product of an illicit love affair.⁶ In Villaverde's novel, María de Regla's function as Cecilia Valdés's surrogate mother resembles that of Yemanja in the traditional tale. Both novel and the myth which it recalls announce themselves as cultural expressions of the New World. For it is unlikely that the Yoruba in their African homeland would have founded a narrative on the premise of a child's expulsion from the family because of its illegitimacy. In a cosmogony in which children are regarded as a blessing from the gods, and in which divinities are attributed the fallibility common to human beings,⁷ differentiating legitimate from illegitimate children seems unthinkable, particularly because polygamy was an accepted practice in traditional Yoruba society.⁸

The various modes of care-giving that Villaverde's slave performs throughout the novel—from wet nurse to Cecilia Valdés's housekeeper—serve to equate her with Yemanja, whose name already alludes to her maternal traits, which are usually conveyed iconographically by her distinctive breasts.⁹ Thus, the representation of María de Regla's maternity conjoins the same and the different beneath its semblance of univocality. The recurring figure of the suckling children affirms the slave's resemblance to Yemanja by restoring the sensuality latent in the maternal body which conventional portrayals of the Virgin Mary are expected to obscure. At the same time, María de Regla's solicitude for the children placed in her care parallels that of the Yoruba divinity, who became known to her Cuban devotees as “Criandera del mundo.”¹⁰ Moreover, when Villaverde's character attributes a runaway's death in the infirmary to her momentary distraction by a sequence of drum dances, she manifests an unspoken link to the African sea goddess, whose love of drum music and dancing reportedly earned her the praise name, “Reina del Tambor.”¹¹

The textual counterpoint between the Marianist model and its Yoruba variant becomes evident in the persistent effort of Villaverde's novel to buttress belief in the notion that Adela and Dolores are twins, a concept that reinforces María de Regla's resemblance to Yemanja by reproducing the Yoruba sea goddess' fondness for, and association with, twins.¹² Indeed, the very name of the plantation to which the slave is sent, La Tinaja, evokes a connection with the Afro-Cuban cult of twins by becoming a verbal equivalent of the iconographic signs through which Yemanja's maternal link to twins is conveyed. The name of Villaverde's sugar estate reminds the reader that the Yoruba sea goddess was often represented with two identical earthenware jars to emblematize her affiliation with twins, because in the realm of the sacred, such jars embodied the twins' presence.¹³ In Villaverde's text, repeated mention of the girls' identical age and of their simultaneous breast-feeding responds to an intent to convince the reader of Dolores's similarity to Adela. Thus, the following passage proclaims the elision of socioracial differences:

y como crecieran juntas, como en realidad mamaran una misma leche, no obstante su opuesta condición y raza, se amaron con amor de hermanas. (…)

Dolores no sabía más que amar a su joven señorita, siendo todavía muy joven para amar a otra persona de contrario sexo, y hacía esfuerzos constantes para identificarse con ella, imitar el tono de su voz, sus modos, su aire de andar y de llevar el traje, sus coqueterías; de manera quelos compañeros de esclavitud, cuando querían decirle algo que la complaciera mucho, la llamaban allá entre ellos: Niña Adela.

(pp. 281; 286)

The linguistic merger of the identity of the young slave and that of her mistress points to a willingness on the part of the other slaves to hold the radical dissimilarity of the two girls in abeyance, if only in jest. Sameness is projected onto a dichotomous cultural field. If in materialist terms, the pattern of behavior ascribed to Dolores documents the futile striving of the enslaved to mimic the governing codes of conduct that the slaveholders have established, on the symbolic level, the text masks the split that the masters have inflicted on María de Regla's maternal body. For the girls' avowed resemblance is grounded in their common maternal origin.

As Rafael López Valdés points out, in many cultures, multiple births are a troublesome occurrence, because of the lack of an explanatory model to account for such phenomena. Although the members of those cultures usually invoke myths for that purpose, the birth of twins often triggers reactions of joy or hostility, according to whether it is deemed by that culture to be an auspicious or an inauspicious event.¹⁴ Given the intent of Villaverde's narrative to postulate Dolores's resemblance to Adela, the reader is invited to locate Doña Rosa de Gamboa's reaction to the signals of María de Regla's multiple maternity within this mythical scheme, whose ground of meaning enables the slaveholder's intense hostility to seem plausible.

Similarly, Villaverde's novel substantiates López Valdés's observation that in the belief system of various cultures, the mother of twins tends to be closely identified with water divinities, because the latter are invoked as icons of fertility, since water is considered to be the primary source of life.¹⁵ In this respect, Villaverde's insistence on specifying María de Regla's mode of travel to the sugar plantation no longer appears to be an inessential detail, included to lend the weight of factuality to the narrative. While the slave's journey by schooner symbolically reenacts the archetypal transatlantic voyage on which other Africans embarked for a similar destiny of hardship and degradation, for Villaverde's character, the trip by sea is also a voyage of reconnection with an African heritage beyond the slaveholder's material control. The slave's outward compliance with the slaveholders' dictates conceals her metaphysical entry into Yemanja's domain:

“Señorita consultó con el amo lo que había de hacerse conmigo; dio orden de embarcarme en la goleta de señó Pancho Sierra y me soplaron en el ingenio de La Tinaja el día menos pensado, para que purgara mis culpas y pecados.”

(p. 523)

María de Regla's report of her mistress' actions calls attention to the divergent sets of meaning embedded in the religious terminology that both slave and slaveholder utter. What Doña Rosa de Gamboa intends to be a punitive act, modelled on the Christian cycle of sin and penance, evokes a radically different model of propitiatory rites. The secular space that marks María de Regla's passage to a new social state is also a sacred site, where Yemanja's devotees are expected to engage in proper purification ceremonies in instances of personal or communal disaster, so that wholeness may be restored to the human order.¹⁶

Once Villaverde's slave acquires a new social status, she manifests another mode of being. The slave, whose master initially declares her to be an appropriate surrogate mother, a claim that the narrator subsequently confirms and expands when he characterizes María de Regla as Dolores's “legitimate” parent, who “quería a su propia hija entrañablemente” (p. 279), is transformed within her mistress' discourse into a paradigm of seduction, whose flagrant sexuality demands containment:

—me parece que ya María de Regla no puede vivir con nosotros. Sería un mal ejemplo para ti, para Carmen y aun para la misma Dolores. Desde que entró en el ingenio, entró allí la guerra civil; de cuyas resultas ha habido que cambiar a menudo de mayordomos, de mayorales, de maestros de azúcar, de carpinteros, en fin, de cuantos tienen la cara blanca, pues no parece sino que la maldita negra tiene un encanto para los hombres o que todos ellos son fáciles de infatuarse con cualquiera que lleva túnico. Tirso es una acusación viva contra la moralidad de María de Regla, pues su padre fue un carpintero vizcaíno que tuvimos hace tiempo en La Tinaja … Los bocabajos que ha llevado no la han corregido …

(p. 285)

Doña Rosa de Gamboa's evidence of María de Regla's eroticism invokes the very principle of substitution encoded in the label, “esa negra de Barrabás” (p. 284), which the slaveholder has already applied to her slave. Just as Doña Rosa's use of the Biblical figure alludes to the replacement of one sacrificial victim by another, so, too, the focus of the slaveholder's speech records the shift in narrative emphasis from the nurturing slave to the one who arouses sexual desire. This reorientation enables the planter to justify her intent to relegate the slave's existence to the margins of discourse on the basis of its violation of the prevailing moral code.¹⁷ Yet, the chronicle of María de Regla's sexual slips suggests that their scandalous aspect resides in their unsettling effect on the socioeconomic order of the sugar plantation. The acknowledged rivalry among white men for María de Regla's sexual favors not only carries with it the threat of undermining the existing racial hierarchy through the birth of a mulatto child. The male workers' quest for sexual access to the female slave also drains their energies away from the economic enterprise of sugar production. Hence the attempts to make the signs of sexuality disappear from the slave's body by force.

As in Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab, the slave secretly violates the injunction to silence that the planter strives to impose. Villaverde's displaced urban slave doubly violates the slaveholder's ban by entering the forbidden space of the great house under cover of night to speak about her proscribed sexuality. The locus of sexuality is thereby restored to the very site from which Doña Rosa sought to expel it. As in Avellaneda's novel, the circumstances under which the slave affirms her sexuality modify its subversive thrust. Like Sab, Villaverde's slave must acknowledge her erotic desires before the members of a social group, who maintain their control over her by first denying her the right to express such desires in order to make her subsequent disclosure of them necessary. As in Sab, the narrative pauses to document the implied audience's shifting expressions of sympathy and disbelief, as well as their leading questions, become rhetorical strategies to incite the slave to reveal her secret. María de Regla's effort to reclaim the disparaged aspects of her being therefore gives rise to a coded form of discourse before her intended audience of female slaveholders. The slave's urge to reappropriate her lived experiences thus becomes a flawed expression of her will to freedom.¹⁸

In seizing the opportunity to defy Doña Rosa's decree of nonexistence, María de Regla seemingly echoes her mistress' version of events, even though she refers to things that Doña Rosa leaves unsaid. The signs of sexuality that Doña Rosa considers to be illegitimate constitute the means through which Villaverde's slave establishes her resemblance to another Yoruba water divinity. In crossing the boundaries of Yemanja's domain, María de Regla acquires the attributes of the river goddess, Oshun:

yo joven y bonita, según decían los hombres, ¿qué querían que hiciéramos? (…) yo, he sido solicitada por cuantos han llevado calzones en este infernal ingenio. (…)

Ningun hombre se ha acercado a mí sino para hablarme de amores. (…) así me hablaron el tejero, el maestro de azúcar, el Mayordomo, todos. Parecía que no habían visto mujer en su vida y que ninguno era casado ni tenía hijos. Mas, ¿qué me dicen las niñas del señor don José, el médico del ingenio? Ese también me ha enamorado y sigue enamorándome con otra música. (…) pues está que se le cae la baba por mí. No lo he querido nunca. ¡Es más agarrado … ! Don Alejandro en puño. (…)—Yo no podía querer; no me salía de adentro el querer a nadie.

(pp. 503; 505)

In nineteenth-century Cuba, the celebration of the feast day of Havana's patron saint, the Virgin of Regla, coincided with that of Santiago's Virgin of Cobre, who was named Cuba's patron saint in 1916.¹⁹ Widespread devotion to the Virgin of Cobre, on which official endorsement of her elevation to national status is founded, led to the blurring of the distinctions between the two Roman Catholic icons.²⁰ As Villaverde's treatment of María de Regla indicates, in a similar move, prompted, no doubt, by the believers' geographical displacement from the source of religious continuity in Africa, in several instances, Cubans also conflated the features of the Yoruba equivalents of the Virgin of Regla and the Virgin of Cobre, Yemanja and Oshun.²¹

In the passage above, Villaverde's character proclaims her resemblance to the Yoruba goddess of sensual pleasure who simultaneously belongs to all men and to none. María de Regla's beauty, the hint at prostitution, as well as the description of “sus formas redondeadas y voluptuosas” (p. 477), and stylish accessories—gold earrings and flirtatiously-worn scarf—all confirm the slave's similarity to the Yoruba deity, Oshun, whose devotees reportedly conferred on her the label, “Puta Madre.” For the Afro-Cuban believer, acknowledgment of Oshun's sexual excesses does not diminish reverence for her,²² because such sexual activity was evidently taken to be a constitutive aspect of her identity as a fertility goddess.²³

In negating the planters' Marianist frame of reference, a frame of reference to which Don Cándido's first speech attests—“Ella la devolverá sana, salva y cristiana” (p. 25)—, María de Regla seemingly reconciles the dichotomous aspects of her being that the planters' discourse postulates. By appropriating the Yoruba model, the slave evidently closes the gap between the erotic self and the maternal self that the Marianist paradigm presumes. In restoring sexuality to the maternal body, Villaverde's slave also unveils the ideological ground on which the slaveholders attempt to locate the primary site of differentiation in the body of the female slave by equating the signs of sexual desire with the presence of “mulatas y gente sucia” (p. 517). The moral order that the planters claim to ensure reproduces the prevailing social categories of racial purity. Consequently, in her clandestine testimony, María de Regla inverts the order of precedence that Don Cándido and Doña Rosa observe by positioning herself in her own discourse as a wife and mother before identifying herself as a surrogate mother and lover. Villaverde's slave establishes herself as a locus of domestic order prior to acknowledging the fictive and consensual ties of kinship that the members of the dominant society consider to be improper.

Villaverde's slave also advances a claim of typicality in order to justify the detailed exposure of her experiences:

—Su merced no sabe, ni Dios quiera que sepa nunca lo que pasa por una esclava. Si es soltera porque es soltera; si es casada porque es casada; si madre porque es madre, no tiene voluntad propia. No le dejan hacer su gusto en ningún caso. Parta su merced del principio que no le permiten casarse con el hombre que le gusta o que quiere. Los amos le dan y le quitan el marido. Tampoco está segura de que podrá vivir siempre a su lado, ni de que criará a los hijos. Cuando menos lo espera, los amos la divorcian, le venden el marido, y a los hijos también, y separan la familia para no volver a juntarse en este mundo. Luego, si la mujer es joven y busca a otro hombre y no se muere de dolor por la pérdida de los hijos, entonces dicen los amos que la mujer no siente, ni padece, ni le tiene cariño a nadie. Piense su merced en lo que pasa por mí.

(pp. 500-1)

Assertions about the slave's lack of freedom are a commonplace in the antislavery narrative. Yet, no sooner does the author allow María de Regla to proclaim her representativeness than she is obliged to call into question the opening statements of her story. In positing her socioeconomic and erotic ties to the Counts of Jaruco, Villaverde's slave manifests her uncommonness by her fictive insertion into the “Noble Negro” tradition that Juan Francisco Manzano's autobiography inaugurates in Cuba. Nevertheless, by being invested with speech, María de Regla is evidently positioned to speak on behalf of the silent slaves on the surrounding plantations that are reportedly similar to La Tinaja. Since it is her master who initially authorizes her to speak on behalf of a runaway laborer on his plantation, Villaverde's fictive slave narrator is empowered to integrate her personal testimony into the narrative by maintaining the collective structure of address.

However, María de Regla's diction sets her apart from the field laborers in the novel. As with Suárez's Francisco, the signs of her prowess in the masters' language are expected to convey her entry into the category of the reasonable, and thereby mark her distance from the status of “gente más bruta” (p. 445), to which slaveholders routinely assigned field slaves. The grammatical improprieties that Villaverde attributes to his field workers—“Mi ricorde, niña” (p. 383), for example—are not merely a conventional signal of foreignness, grounded in the author's desire for linguistic authenticity by rendering a phonetic approximation to the sounds that most of his characters of African origin were likely to pronounce.²⁴ The break with the syntax and spelling of standard Spanish, that is visually highlighted in the text is a traditional means of signifying the linguistic practices of the unlettered. Since fluency in Spanish was then taken to be the distinguishing feature of “gente de razón,” as the opening statements of Manzano's autobiography attest, the representation of the slaves' dialect becomes a metonymic sign of the slaves' mental deficiencies and therefore, the basis for their displacement from the human condition.²⁵ Consequently, the rhetorical competence that María de Regla will display in her tale requires a preliminary justification in order to make her speech plausible to the novel's intended readers:

La precisión y claridad de las pocas palabras vertidas, junto con el acento argentino y medido de su voz, pregonándola como mujer de talento y de algún trato social, le ganaron desde luego la atención de los circunstantes. Poseía ella ambas cosas en grado notable, relativamente a su falta de escuela y a su condición de esclava desde la cuna. A la natural perspicacia y carácter dulce y simpático, combinados con un exterior agradable y fino, se agregaba el haber servido de doncella a sus primeros amos; teniendo ocasión de rozarse más con éstos y con las personas decentes que visitaban la casa que con las ignorantes de su misma condición, y de aprender, no ya sólo las maneras, sino el modo de decir y de portarse en sociedad la gente blanca y educada.

(p. 477)

The slave's verbal resemblance to her masters places her in the paradoxical situation that John Sekora considers to be typical of her North-American counterparts in the empirical realm. In both instances, a slave narrator proposes to tell a story of physical and/or metaphysical resistance to enslavement that must be codified in the masters' authoritative idiom in order to be acceptable to an intended audience of the free. The competing aims of narrator and audience lead to an implicit doubling of narrative voice and focus, which often strains the narrator's ability to produce a coherent and believable version of events.²⁶ For instance, in his critique of Cecilia Valdés, Martín Morúa Delgado observed that the facility for erudite expressions and the free play of signifiers with which Villaverde invests María de Regla was an improbable attribute of an uneducated slave.²⁷

The textual signs of cultural dissonance is precisely what the passage quoted above seemed designed to erase. The passage invites the reader to accept the slave's undifferentiated speech as evidence of her lengthy exposure to the standardizing influence of the masters' tongue. Although the label, “bachillera” (p. 480), conferred on her evokes a troubling affinity with the burlesque traits of the “negros catedráticos” of Morúa's day,²⁸ it also serves a functional purpose in the novel. Since Villaverde has already transferred to the field slaves the phonetic and grammatical deviations that were a conventional source of humor in the theater,²⁹ María de Regla's statements stand in a less patently absurd position of contiguity with their implied model by calling attention to the gap between her excessive “letras menudas” (p. 480) and her ascribed social status. By affording her the space to parade her eloquence, the text allows María de Regla to enact a symbolic confrontation with her masters in order to demonstrate her cultural right to be considered a Hispanic subject. The formulation of the slave's experience of differentness in the idiom of sameness becomes a textual indicator of the slave narrator's readiness to assume the social status of the free.³⁰

Indeed, the climax of María de Regla's tale is her reverse movement from the countryside to Havana when Doña Rosa de Gamboa grants her permission to hire herself out in the city. The social effects of the slave's discursive act thereby confirm Valerie Smith's contention that for slave narrators, telling the story of their lives was a gesture of self-creation that granted them figurative power over their social superiors.³¹ What J. Kubayanda would term the art of “palavering”³² enables the slave to elicit a symbolic concession from slaveholders who were prepared to resist material attempts at self-liberation from the enslaved. The adverse fate ascribed to the runaways in the novel, Villaverde's condensation of the free-born historical figure, José Antonio Aponte, from feared conspirator to the elusive site of a haunting memory for his slave narrator, and his substitution of an assimilated coachman for the would-be founder of an Afrocentric tradition, all emblematize the will of the free to maintain their hegemony by consigning the destabilizing presence of other modes of order to the sociohistorical void.³³ Villaverde's text provides further evidence of the slave narrator's symbolic power when it recounts that María de Regla subsequently invokes her rhetorical skills to secure the release of the novel's free-born protagonist, Cecilia Valdés, from jail. As in prior instances, words become a key to release the self or another from an enclosure that is both literal and figurative.³⁴ Thus, as a performative act, María de Regla's statements are a fictive analogue to Manzano's reciting his sonnet, “Mis treinta años,” before the members of the Del Monte circle prior to his emancipation.³⁵

As with Manzano, María de Regla's arena of freedom is circumscribed by the master's words. The socially-valid locus of freedom resides not in the slave narrator but in the “papel” (p. 561) that Don Cándido Gamboa signs. In Villaverde's novel, the verbal competence attributed to the slave becomes secondary in its effectiveness to the slaveholders' written words, which define the domain of wage labor and the concomitant sphere of self-determination for the slave who would be free. Rather than simply attesting to her enhanced legal status, the document that María de Regla is obliged to carry also announces her continued dependence on the slaveholder to validate her social identity. The document's physically soiled condition thus comes to symbolize the bearer's frustrated quest for personal liberty.³⁶

That an accomplished oral narrator must rely ultimately on a document to validate her social existence points to the privileging of literacy over voice in the economic order that the novel enshrines. Consequently, for Villaverde's virtually unlettered slaves, papers, whether in the slaves' possession or not, always already signify the negative embodiment of the slaves' intentions.³⁷ The case of Dolores Santa Cruz is evidently meant to be exemplary by recounting the story of a self-liberated slave, who loses her carefully-accumulated property—both human and non-human—as well as her sanity in a lengthy process of litigation. The fragmented and indirect narration of Dolores's experience rhetorically replicates her material loss of control over the self and its items of value, which therefore serves to create an impression of the unimpeachable integrity of the slaveholders' documents.

In the prologue to his novel, Villaverde claims that he subscribed to the principles of critical realism in Cecilia Valdés. And indeed, the presence of historical figures, such as Plácido and Manzano, as well as the Captain-General, Francisco Dionisio Vives, and the narration of incidents that the author's footnotes acknowledge to be modelled on empirical events, are rhetorical strategies that Villaverde invokes to give a semblance of exactitude to his assertions. However, several of the novel's propositions defy the conditions of the realistic illusion. For example, the sexual desirability of the woman who had been portrayed as a disruptive presence on the plantation inexplicably evaporates when María de Regla returns to the city. At the same time, the Oshun-like traits conferred on her during her stay on the plantation serve to mark her difference from the African river goddess. For unlike the Yoruba deity, who engages in sexual adventures for her own pleasure, María de Regla is posited to be merely the object of male desires. Thus, Villaverde's slave is simultaneously similar to, and different from, both her Roman Catholic and her Yoruba paradigms.

Ultimately, Villaverde's female slave differs from the ordinary characters that in his prefatory statement the author claims to have depicted by reproducing them directly from Cuban life.³⁸ For by her close ties to Cuba's titled aristocracy and her improbable items of dress—“zapatos de raso y medias de seda” (p. 506)—, María de Regla proves to be a “Noble Negro,” in the fictional tradition of Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab and Zambrana's Camila. If her marriage to Dionisio initially separates María de Regla from her female antecedents, she eventually comes to resemble them by becoming a site of illicit sexuality on the plantation. However, once María de Regla returns to Havana, her erotic self recedes before the assertion of the caregiver. When she assumes the role of Cecilia Valdés's housekeeper, what eventually prevails is a variant of the maternal self already inscribed in her name.

Notes

1. Citations are from Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Angel: Novela de costumbres cubanas (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964), p. 438.

2. William Luis, Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 116.

3. Helena Araujo, “El modelo mariano (tema y variaciones),” Eco, 41 no. 248 (June 1982), 117-45; Evelyn P. Stevens, “Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America,” in Female and Male in Latin America, edited by Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), pp. 89-101.

4. On the hierarchical mode in which the ethnically different are assimilated into the Hispanic text, see José Piedra, “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference,” New Literary History, 18 (Winter 1987), 303-32.

5. Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún: Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas (Madrid: Colección del Chicherukú en el exilio, 1974), pp. 9-19.

6. Cited in José Luciano Franco, La presencia negra en el Nuevo Mundo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1968), pp. 47-48.

7. J. Omosade Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites (London: Longman Group Limited, 1979), pp. 50; 106-7; 127-28; 137; 150-52.

8. According to Awolalu, polygamy was an accepted custom in Yorubaland, even though adultery was held to be a heinous crime among certain groups; Ibid., pp. 41-43; 73-78; 88.

9. In Yoruba cosmology, Yemanja is the mother of several divinities. According to William Bascom, the word, Yemanja, means “mother of fishes;” Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 46.

10. Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún, pp. 21; 34; 36.

11. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

12. Ibid., pp. 39-40.

13. Rafael López Valdés, “El complejo mitológico de los jimaguas en la santería de Cuba,” Islas, 66 (May-August 1980), 103-4; 111-12.

14. Ibid., pp. 96-104. On traditional Yoruba attitudes to twins, see Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs, p. 192.

15. López Valdés, “Complejo mitológico,” pp. 103-4.

16. Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs, pp. 100-56. For a believer's view of the centrality of such ceremonies and their role in strengthening the bond between the human and the divine realms, see William Luis and Julia Cuervo Hewitt, “Santos y santería: Conversación con Arcadio, santero de Guanabacoa,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 6 (January 1987), 11-15.

17. On the rhetorical link between exile and the proscribed sexuality of the black woman, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 85-86; 94-95.

18. On the link between sociopolitical repression and Afro-Hispanic literature, see Piedra, “Literary Whiteness,” pp. 303-32.

19. Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún, pp. 55-60.

20. Franco, La diáspora africana en el Nuevo Mundo (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), p. 205. Evidence of this conflation is implicit in Alejo Carpentier's identifying Yemanja as the Afro-Cuban equivalent of the Virgin of Cobre. Cited in Sergio Valdés Bernal, “Caracterización lingüística del negro en la novela ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! de Alejo Carpentier,” Anuario L/L, 2 (1971), p. 133.

21. Isaac Barreal, “Tendencias sincréticas en los cultos populares de Cuba,” Etnología y Folklore, 1 (1966), 17-24; Jesús Guanche, Procesos etnoculturales de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983), pp. 352-56. Maureen Warner Lewis has uncovered a similar blending of traits in Trinidad; “Yoruba Religion in Trinidad—Transfer and Reinterpretation,” Caribbean Quarterly, 24 (September-December 1978), 24; 31.

22. Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún, pp. 55-90.

23. Miguel Barnet, “Divinidades yoruba en la santería cubana,” in his La fuente viva (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983), pp. 189-91.

24. In several essays, the African-born critic, J. Kubayanda, argues that many Afro-Hispanic texts use traditional African and African-related signs and symbols that critics without the necessary competence in African languages and cultures necessarily fail to recognize; “The Linguistic Core of Afro-Hispanic Poetry: An African Reading,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 1 (September 1982), 21-26; idem, “Notes on the Impact of African Oral-Traditional Rhetoric in Latin American and Caribbean Writing,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 3 (September 1984), 5-10.

25. On the link between linguistic prowess, reason and freedom, see Piedra, “Literary Whiteness,” pp. 304-9. Villaverde's description of the cook, Dionisio, affirms the accepted link between fluency in Spanish and rational status: “el cocinero, negro de aire aristocrático, bien hablado y racional, según dicen los esclavistas” (p. 236). For an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of that link, consult Jean Lamore, “Cecilia Valdés: realidades económicas y comportamientos sociales en la Cuba esclavista de 1830,” Casa de las Américas, 19 no. 110 (September-October 1978), 43.

26. Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in The Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo, 10 (Summer 1987), 482-515. I am grateful to Arlene Clift-Pellow for bringing this article to my attention.

27. Martín Morúa Delgado, “Las novelas del señor Villaverde,” Unión, 2 (1979), 110-11.

28. For a linguistic analysis of the slaves' imperfect Spanish, see John M. Lipski, “Golden Age ‘Black Spanish’: Existence and Coexistence,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 5 (January-September 1986), 7-12; idem, “On the Construction ta + Infinitive in Caribbean Bozal Spanish,” Romance Philology, 40 (May 1987), 431-50; idem, “On the loss of /s/ in ‘Black’ Spanish,” Neophilologus, 70 (April 1986), 208-16; Manuel Alvarez Nazario, “Notas sobre el habla del negro en Puerto Rico durante el siglo XIX,” Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2 (1959), 43-48; Valdés Bernal, “Caracterización lingüística,” pp. 123-70; idem, “Las lenguas africanas y el español coloquial de Cuba,” Santiago, 31 (1978), 81-107; idem, “Sobre locuciones y refranes afrocubanos,” Beitrage zur Romanischen Philologie, 15 no. 2 (1976), 321-28.

29. Fornarina Fornaris, “Orígenes del teatro bufo cubano,” Universidad de La Habana, 215 (1982), 101-14; Joseph R. Pereira, “The Black Presence in Cuban Theatre,” Afro-Hispanic Review, 2 (January 1983), 14-15.

30. On the textual link between literacy and freedom in Afro-Hispanic literature, see Martha K. Cobb, “The Slave Narrative and the Black Literary Tradition,” in The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory, edited by John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb, Illinois: Western Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 37-38.

31. Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 2-3.

32. Kubayanda, “Notes,” pp. 6-9.

33. On the Aponte conspiracy, see Franco, La conspiración de Aponte, 1812 (Havana: Publicaciones del Archivo Nacional de Cuba, 1962); idem, Las conspiraciones de 1810 y 1812 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1980).

34. For an analysis of the recurring figures of confinement in the female slave narrative, see Smith Self-Discovery, pp. 28-43.

35. Fina García Marruz, “De ‘Estudios Delmontinos,’” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, 11 (September-December 1969), 25; 37-38.

36. On the prevailing legal disabilities of the freed, see Franklin W. Knight, “Cuba,” in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 282-95; 300-2.

37. For a semiotic analysis of paper in Afro-Hispanic literature, consult Piedra, “The Value of Paper,” Res [Review of English Studies], 16 (Autumn 1988), 92; 94-101.

38. In a letter responding to a query from a fellow writer, Villaverde virtually retracts his earlier statement, by acknowledging his own inventiveness: “En su apreciable del 6 me pregunta U. si todos los personajes de mi novela fueron reales y verdaderos, y por decontado (sic) desea U. saber—qué se hicieron algunos de ellos. Aunque todos los que en ella figuran los he tomado de entre mis amigos, condiscípulos, conocidos, parientes, etc. no se puede decir que son retratos. Todos me han servido para trazar los cuadros de la vida real de mi patria, durante una época fija; pero con unas pocas excepciones no retraté ninguno d'aprés nature.” Villaverde to Julio Rosas, New York (November 21, 1883). Cited in Roberto Friol, “Cartas de Cirilo Villaverde a Julio Rosas,” Bohemia, 57 no. 40 (1965), 100.

    Note: Research at the Library of Congress for this study was made possible by a grant from the Social Science Research Council.