Finding La Negrita
Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere presents excerpts from her recent novel, a retelling of Costa Rica’s Black Madonna narrative
Detail of a mural (2012) by Guadalupe Álvarez Rojas depicting the history of Costa Rica, Museo Municipal de Cartago, Cartago, Costa Rica. It is the first mural of this size to be painted by a woman in Costa Rica. Shown around the yellow flower basket (towards the right) is the legend of La Virgen de Los Ángeles, the nation’s patron saint. This mural detail serves as the book-cover image for the novel Finding La Negrita (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022) by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere. Photo: Esteban Cervantes Jiménez ©2014
EDITORIAL NOTE
The Virgen de los Ángeles (Virgin of the Angels) is Costa Rica's patron saint, also known as La Negrita. Ahead of August 2nd, Día de la Virgen de los Ángeles, HTI Open Plaza celebrates the Costa Rican holiday with the feature “Esmeralda,” the second chapter of Finding La Negrita (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022) by Afro-Costa Rican writer Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere. The novel “is a captivating retelling of the Black Madonna narrative, which has driven the country’s national and spiritual identity since the 1700s,” according to the publisher. “In powerful prose, Gordon-Chipembere delivers a vivid and intimate living portrait of slavery in Costa Rica, which was radically different than plantation bondage in other parts of the Americas.”
My name is Esmeralda. It is only at this time in the morning, when the first birds are remembering the sounds of their voices–calling to the sun to warm their wings after a night of nestled perching–that I can stand outside. I am fifty-one years old as far as I have been able to count, which I learned only after being given to the church. I have always been owned by one form of oppression or another.
As an enslaved person, my life is one of interiors. I clean the church for Padre, and I live tucked away in a shack behind the looming gravity of stained glass and burnt candle stubs. Today, I stand in my doorway, edged slightly against the frame, so if anyone were to pass, they would have to look twice to see me. Instead of staring up into the fleeing night sky and seeing the shadow of Volcano lrazú, I look down at my shriveled left arm, hanging aimlessly against my thin green dress, its color lost years ago with constant washing. It is hard to see the width of this place around me as my left eye remains glassy and visionless. I do not think back to the fire but shrug off those memories that want to take over. I have been in this place, Costa Rica, for my entire life but came here to Cartago at the age of sixteen when my mother and brother died and I was gifted to the church. Thirty-five years have passed, and I serve as witness, now with one eye, to the comings and goings of this very different place. I do not remember the land beyond the sea that many speak about in La Gotera and I force myself not to take on their longing. Guatemala is the center of the universe in this place of mountains and volcanoes, and trees thick with arms that stretch into the nocturnal homes of hundreds of birds.
The air is chilled this morning. Padre has yet to stir, though at times I have been called to light candles in the small chapel alongside the altar this early in the morning when he has woken from a restless sleep and prayer is possibly his medicine. I don't know and I do not care about the things that move his world. I only care when his world collides with mine. Today, I think about this town that feels forgotten from the rest of the world. The labor of my enslaved brothers and sisters is shared alongside their owners in the cacao farms and cattle ranching to provide the meat which is cooked by enslaved hands at the tables of the panas in town. I hear them discussing how without a cash plantation crop, they are unable to compete with the silver mines or sugar cane plantations of Brazil. Our numbers are relatively small and that is why several have been able to hire themselves out and, over time, eventually buy their freedom. I have seen Dakarai do it, seven years owned and working for all those extra Sundays where he saved every real1 until he could remove the bitterness of slavery from his tongue and become reunited with his daughter, Jendayi. Some, like myself, do not have the fortune of skills that they can manipulate towards freedom. I am a slave of the church and I know this is how I will die. With my one working eye and arm, it is much more difficult to do the work of cleaning, yet Jendayi delivers water to the church before attending school here with the other children who are free Blacks under Padre's guidance.
Costa Rica is nestled between two wide oceans, I am told. It does not offer much and so we are poor and huddled in the confines of the Orosi Valley, pretending that the Spaniards here are not forced to labor among their enslaved workers in order to pay the taxes to the Grand Audience in Guatemala. The details are hard to work out, but I know there is not enough money to create certain distances between those who are free and owned.
1. Silver currency of the time period.
View of the Santiago Apóstol [James the Apostle] Parish ruins, Cartago, Costa Rica, 2010. Photo: Daniel Vargas
I waited an extra hour for her this morning. Jendayi cannot see me, but I can smell her youth, even after she has put the water down, making prints in the soft, slushy mud that has been made from the water she spilled. I only see out of one eye, so the world is concentrated in the other senses of my body. Creaks fill my ears as I straighten from the small kerosene stove which I have warmed my café con leche on. This is my only weakness, as I do not always have access to milk. Normally, my coffee is rumbling brown and steaming hot. However, yesterday, Doña Elena came to the church to arrange for the baptism of her grandson with Padre and she brought offerings of milk and sugar. When Padre came out to my small shack, I thought he was coming for other things; things that go unsaid. Even in this old age, I do not have the freedom of my body. But Padre cleared his throat and handed me a tin cup filled with fresh milk through the partially opened crack in my door. As soon as he turned his back to go inside the church, I touched the cup to my lips and drank just a sip. Instantly, I was taken back to the time when my brother, Enrique, would milk the cows at the hacienda and bring some of it back to our mother. This is when I did not know the formal bonds of slavery; I was a child. Yet, I was smart enough to notice that my mother's back was like a crescent moon. She hardly looked up from her work and I have few memories of Mama ever looking at my face. I was left to play on my own and then eventually work on the hacienda until Don Domiques gave me to the church. I have seen three different Padres run this church. But this one is like the other bad one, who killed his brother in their sacred place, blood spilt on the altar where his spirit continues to moan at night, witness to my sleeplessness. However, this one is really the worst. He is young, perhaps forty, but already he has a stout body from all the rich food he finds at the tables of hospitable Spanish families. His straight brown hair often covers the meanness in his dark, narrow-set eyes. There is no kindness in him, though he pretends to be respectful to the wealthier patrons of the church to ensure his place at their Sunday dinner table.
Though I could be his mother, he expects things from me that no son should want. I think it is this church that makes his blood tainted. There is only death and sadness here, since the killing brothers. I have heard the tales, whispers, about the wandering soul whose voice I too have heard lamenting, as I clean the floors of the nave. I never fear him since his sorrows mirror my own. At times, these sounds provide company for me in a world that is so silent and cruel. The crimes of its current master scream louder than any dead man looking for redemption. In the daytime, Padre is the center of the community in Cartago and on Sundays he preaches the message of a vengeful God. When enraptured on the pulpit, the spittle from his mouth has often reached into the first pews, covering his parishioners like holy benediction. I can see, even with my one eye, that the Spanish people respect and fear him. He wears the brilliant robes I wash by hand and lay out in the sun to maintain their whiteness. If there is a stain from the wine when he performs Mass and I cannot get it completely out, he beats me.
After service, there is always a Cartago family who will invite Padre to their home for dinner. Usually, it is during this time that I am most afraid. He will return to the church, full of wine and talk and then when the night has turned down, he will come to me. Like a dog, he sniffs and grabs me with an unexplainable force. He is a holy man of their church and yet he climbs on me with a violent urgency that forces my spirit to sit at the hollow of my throat, deciding if it should finally escape this body called woman. This has been happening most Sundays for a year now and I want to rest. He never looks at me as he removes himself from my body. He always takes me from behind and though I used to hide in the corners, he forever captures me with such rage that now, I just sit at the door, expecting.
The first time he came, a year after he was installed in the church, I was so stunned that we fought. He climbed on me and I tried and tried to buck him off. When he was finishing, holding my face down into the earthen floor, I grabbed a candle nearby and swung my left arm wildly behind me. I caught him off guard and the flame grabbed the edge of his shirt and my dress. I could not move with his weight on my back and so by the time he got up to save himself from the flames, my dress was already on fire. He ran out, leaving me to scream as the flames ate my left arm and up my face to my left eye. All I have today are the external scars from a battle that I lost.
I am too old to bear a child. I have never been pregnant, and it is for the best. I cannot bring someone into this world that will have to face this life, especially if the child is a girl. Her status as slave is guaranteed because in the will of Don Domiques, he said that should I bear children, they too will be inherited by the church. My generations are imprinted with pain before their spirits even have a chance to enter this world. And so, I give thanks for the barrenness of my woman-body. Many times Padre has spilled his seed inside me, wiping himself on the coarse green edges of my tattered dress which I have worn day in and day out since that evening when my other dress burned. No life has ever resulted from this violence and this is my only redemption.
That Sunday night a year ago, I managed to stagger to the Cruz of Caravaca and someone in passing must have taken me to Dakarai's home, since it was the first on the road in La Gotera. I was not fully conscious but at times, I would awake to Petronila's cool hand on my face. She used aloe on my burns over the days it took for my body to decide to stay on this earth. Dakarai and Petronila have become my people, though I carry no memory of Africa beyond the sea as they do. I was born in this place. Only the two of them stand as witnesses to what Padre did to me and continues to do. I cannot voice it, but they can read it on my body and in my one eye.
Now, one night every other week when Padre visits a parish in the north which requires an overnight stay, I walk to the back of Dakarai's house and sit in the little work shed where he turns stone into language. In the corner, there is a clean sisal mat which I sit on and light a small candle. With very few words, I remove the small book I have sewn together from old parchment taken from Padre's desk and a piece of charcoal which Dakarai has whittled into a pencil for me. Here, with the respectful distance of a true son, he teaches me to read and write. I know that where he came from in Africa, he was a great, knowledgeable man. He told me that he can speak and read several languages.
Today, I can smell Jendayi's freedom. She has no idea that the soles of her feet can take her far away from this life. The panas call her Juana Maria, but I know she is Jendayi because I heard her father call her this name from when I entered their home a year ago. Jendayi has the carelessness of a child who has always had food in her stomach and people to protect her. She is a girl who dreams. I sleep in the hollow of darkness, always with an ear open to the night. She is the only child who has made me feel the emptiness of my arms. And so, I watch her from the shadows, and I hold the sadness on my left side.
When she delivers the water, I can tell sometimes that she wants to come and talk to me. She strains her eyes to see into the corners of my shack. But I always stand away. She does not know that her father is teaching me to read and write. I wrote a letter once to my older brother, Enrique. He died when disease came to the cattle on the hacienda and no one noticed him as all the Spaniards in the house were sick. No one cared about an enslaved African. I found him on his mat with our mother dropping water on his tongue as he could no longer swallow. He died in her arms. This is the only time in my life that I saw my mother cry. I did not utter a word, but I knew even then that I was saying goodbye to an entire life. Don Domiques was so distraught that his daughter, the same age as Enrique, had succumbed to the fever that he sold his hacienda and moved to Nicoya. This is when he left me to the church in Cartago. My mother died soon after my brother, and they are left in small, unmarked graves near the hacienda. I wrote Enrique a letter saying all the things I never said as a child when I watched him die. Today, this letter is my most prized possession, even at the age of fifty-one. I can never reveal the secret of my learning to Padre but whenever I clean, I read the letters that are on his desk and many times I have given the news to Dakarai to share with people in La Gotera. If I can help them be prepared, then I have done my job of mothering in this lifetime.
Finding La Negrita
By Natasha Gordon-Chipembere
Jaded Ibis Press, 2022
“A brilliantly written novel of triumph over despair, victory over failure, and clarity over confusion…Immensely captivating, and hauntingly beautiful, this novel is sure to establish Natasha Gordon-Chipembere’s book as a major contribution to literature and historical consciousness.”
—Molefi Kete Asante, Scattered to the Wind
“This well-told story is a clarion call for true feminism, an inspiration for women all over the world regardless of age, race, class, ethnicity and gender identities. Evoking the sights, scents and sounds of Costa Rica, Gordon-Chipembere immerses the reader in the untold lives of the freed and enslaved Black people of Costa Rica as well as the mixed-race. Long after the last page of Finding La Negrita is closed, these vividly painted characters will resonate in the hearts and minds of readers. ”
–Elizabeth Nunez, Prospero’s Daughter, Bruised Hibiscus, and
Now Lila Knows
This is a compelling conjuring of La Negrita that takes us deep into the history of enslaved people as they struggle for their loves and freedom. There is so much vision here that shines a light on unspoken stories. Gordon-Chipembere’s is a storyteller who makes connections, who unravels and puts together anew. A vibrant and much needed voice! The characters will steal your heart, leaving you empowered.
–Olúmìdé Pópóọlá, When We Speak of Nothing
