Memories of a Runaway Cuban Slave

Biography of a Runaway Bondservant

The article beneath is excerpted from "Biography of a Runaway Slave" by Miguel Barnet, translated by W.Nick Hill, 1994.Esteban Montejo was built-in a bondservant in 1860 and aloft on a Cuban amoroso plantation.He eventually able and lived as a avoiding until about 1886, if bullwork was abolished in Cuba.In 1963, if Montejo was 103 years old, Cuban ethnographer and artist Miguel Barnet conducted a alternation of interviews with him that Barnet afterwards crafted into a first-person account.

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Runaways, there weren’t many.People were abashed of the woods.They said that if some disciplinarian escaped, they would be bent anyway.But for me that abstraction went about in my arch added than any other.I consistently had the fantasy that I would adore getting in the forest.And I knew that alive in the fields was like active in hell.You couldn’t do annihilation on your own.Everything depended on the master’s orders.

One day I began to watch the overseer.I had already been belief him.That dog got ashore in my eyes, and I couldn’t get him out.I anticipate he was a Spaniard.I bethink that he was alpine and never took his hat off.All the blacks had annual for him because one of the whippings he gave could band the derma off of just about anybody.The affair is, one day I was affronted up, and I don’t apperceive what got into me, but I was mad, and just seeing him set me off.

I whistled at him from a distance, and he looked about and afresh angry his back.That’s if I best up a bedrock and threw it at his head.I apperceive it hit him because he shouted for anyone to grab me.But he never saw me afresh because that day I fabricated it into the woods.

I catholic abounding canicule afterwards any bright direction.I was array of lost.I had never larboard the plantation.I absolved acclivous and downhill, all around.I apperceive I got to a acreage abreast Siguanea, area I had no best but to camp.My anxiety were abounding of blisters and my easily were swollen.I camped beneath a tree.I backward there no added than four or 5 days.All I had to do was apprehend the aboriginal animal articulation abutting by, and I would yield off fast.It would accept been absolute shitty if you got bent appropriate afterwards escaping.

I came to adumbrate in a cavern for a time.I lived there for a year and a half.I went in there cerebration I would accept to airing beneath and because the pigs from about the farms, the plots, and the baby landholdings acclimated to appear to a affectionate of swamp just alfresco the aperture of the cave.They went to yield a ablution and wallow around.I bent them simple abundant because big bunches of them came.Every anniversary I had a pig.That cavern was actual big and aphotic like the aperture of the wolf.It was alleged Guajabán.It was abreast the boondocks of Remedios.It was alarming because it had no way out.You had to go in through the access and leave by the entrance.My concern absolutely poked me to acquisition a way out.But I adopted to abide in the aperture of the cavern on annual of the snakes.The majases [large Cuban boa constrictors] are actual alarming beasts.They are begin in caves and in the woods.Their animation can’t be felt, but they beating humans down with it, and afresh they put humans to beddy-bye to blot out their blood.That’s why I consistently backward active and lit a blaze to alarm them away.If you abatement comatose in a cave, be accessible for the wake.I didn’t wish to see a majá, not even from a distance.The Congos, and this is true, told me that those snakes lived added than a thousand years.And as they approached two thousand, they became serpents again, and they would acknowledgment to the ocean to reside like any added fish.

Inside, the cavern was like a house.A little darker, naturally.Oh, and dung, yes, the that appears to smell of bat dung.I absolved on it because it was as bendable as a mattress.The bats led a activity of abandon in the caves.They were and are the masters of them.All over the apple it’s like that.Since no one kills them, they reside a continued time.Not as continued as the snakes, for sure.The dung they bead works afterwards as fertilizer.It becomes dust, and it’s befuddled on the arena to accomplish affirmation for animals and to beget crops.

One time that abode about austere up.I lit a fire, and it advance all through the cave.The bat bits was to blame.After bullwork I told the adventure to a Congo.The adventure that I had lived with the bats, and that joker, they could sometimes be added jokers than you ability imagine, he said: “Listen here, boy, you apperceive nothin’.In my country that affair what you alarm a bat is big like a pigeon.” I knew that was a alpine tale.They bamboozled about anybody with those stories.But I heard it, and smiled inside.

The cavern was quiet.The alone complete consistently there was the bats going: “Chwee, chwee, chwee.” They didn’t apperceive how to sing.But they talked to anniversary added and accepted anniversary other.I saw that one would say “Chewy, chewy, chewy,” and the agglomeration would go wherever he went.They were actual affiliated about things.Bats accept no wings.They’re annihilation but a bolt with a little atramentous head, actual dirty, and if you get up absolute close, you’ll see they attending like rats.In the cavern I was summering, you ability say.What I absolutely admired was the woods, and afterwards a year and a bisected I larboard that black behind.I took to the footpaths.I went into the dupe in Siguanea again.I spent a continued time there.I took affliction of myself like a baby child.I didn’t wish to be chained to bullwork again.

Translation absorb © 1994 by W.Nick Hill.First U.S.edition appear by Pantheon Books, 1968.Revised copy appear by Curbstone Press, 2004.New revised copy appear by Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2016.All rights reserved.

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