Children in Slaves' Lives

The situation of slave children and, more specifically, the political, legal, and philosophical discussions it generated serve as additional in-

dicators of the importance of daily wages and of the possibilities for negotiation and accumulation that daily wages offered Lima's slaves. Slave children became a subject of contention among masters and slaves, specifically over the respective obligations of maintenance and the rights and privileges of the slave family. Children, like marriage itself, were part of a moral package dear to the Church.

In the residential census of the Santa Ana parish (mentioned earlier), of a total of 187 households containing slaves, only nine (4.8 percent) recorded the presence of slave children, an indicator at least as low as the one recorded for Lima's haciendas. The number of children ranged from one to twelve. Along with high mortality—we should not forget that the slave Luciana had given birth to sixteen children of whom only four reached adulthood (a fairly typical survival rate)—in the urban context, the type of residence outside the master's household was the key explanation for the low presence of children. Slaveholders were convinced that their slaves did not want to bear or raise slave children and that pregnant slaves would abort if they had the choice or the opportunity. On more than one occasion this resistance to procreate prompted contemporaries to describe slaves as simply clumsy, uneducated, and primitive. But matters were more intricate than masters perceived.

María del Carmen Breña, slave of a Lima merchant, purchased her freedom soon after giving birth. She left her owner's house and her child behind. In 1815 the owner demanded that she return to his house to nurse the child; however, María wished to move the child to her own house. The owner stated his conviction:

The [proposed] relocation exposes the infant to whatever might anger her mother, otherwise the slave will let the infant die through hatred of her masters, and to liberate the minor from slavery, with neither religion nor humanity to stop her, because owing to the uncouthness and ignorance of such people no rational consideration comes to their mind.... Being pregnant with another baby ... in another master's house ... she fiercely threw herself against a wall with the aim of aborting herself, and so that the fetus would not reach slavery alive. The black did this in the house of some masters who looked upon her with affection; what will she do when she comes up against the intentions of those whom she detests, and against whom she has litigated?^[24]

What the owner argued here was that hatred of masters and desire for freedom were stronger than maternal instincts. To this perception

we can add the fact that slave women who ceased being slaves often had a dangerous road ahead, particularly if they were to survive as single mothers. An infant, whom the master would safeguard in order not to lose a slave, at the very least had food and shelter. Moreover, it was no coincidence that freedom was granted to the woman after her child was born. A child born after the purchase of freedom would be free as well. María del Carmen's owner stated that in order to subsist, the slave mother "will have to spend all day in the street selling, leaving her daughter abandoned and exposed to all the accidents of her age. If she carries her on her back, the sun will be enough to kill her; and above all she is a bozal woman, so ignorant of religion, who was never convinced to go to church ... to learn the Christian doctrine. Causing death to her child would be such an ordinary thing, like going to sleep, or something similar."

While the mother sought a livelihood and a new way of life, the child would have the owner's help and maintenance 'allowance precisely because the child was a slave. Occasionally—as in this case—such assistance would lead the owner's wife to nurse the slave's child. María del Carmen had left her child behind as she was unable to carry it with her as a free child; at the same time she was saving her child by making very literal use of the master's shelter and concern.

Apparently a very widespread practice, which helps explain the low presence of children, was the concealment of children. More than one female slave managed to run away from her master's house, give birth, and return. When asked what had happened to the baby, she would claim that it had died or been stillborn.^[25] This alternative was possible when external links existed: loved ones or friends who would take responsibility for the newborn. Furthermore, if the slave mother lived with her masters, she would have to figure out how to leave in order to nurse her child or eventually find somebody to take her place. Claiming that children had died prevented an owner not only from designating them as his or her property but also from transferring children to another owner and separating them from the mother—a separation much more difficult to control because the slave mother would have a harder time tracing where her children were. The possible sale of children always loomed despite the Church's disapproval of the practice. Against the allegations of "clumsiness" that slaveholders imputed to their slaves we note accusations of "inhumanity" that slaves raised against owners.^[26] Even if masters later realized that their female

slaves had hidden children, time had passed during which the owners had not paid for the children's upkeep and thus the owners' property demands were weakened. Placement of children in a convent was a unique method of concealment. If an owner made a demand for the child in such circumstances, there was an entire institution behind the defense of the slave. The additional argument that the convent had assumed the child's maintenance would greatly decrease the child's price and facilitate manumission.^[27] To give birth outside the master's control, to look elsewhere for day labor, or to abandon a child was to act well within the interests of slaves, given the impositions of the slave system. In such contexts as the ones described, and others—as we will soon see—it is difficult to find one sole rationale for slaves to express parental or filial love.

For slave women who did bear children in slavery, various options could at least guarantee that the slave family would not be arbitrarily scattered. Urban society offered nonmarried slave women with children alternatives that reflected its moral principles and sought to keep the slave family together without threatening the slaveholding system. A common practice among proprietary families was to make a prenatal partition of the slave children among their own sons and daughters. Contemporaries noted that "there is nothing more frequent in slaveholding families than parents distributing among their children the offspring of slaves."^[28]

This distribution was seen as a portion of the inheritance, one realized "by womb" that increased the likelihood of greater equity among an owner's children. If the assigned slave died, it would simply be a matter of misfortune. But with luck, slave children would survive and as children would be assigned to serve specific members of the owner's family. Thus, while the master's children grew up they would have companions who would play with them, then wait on them, and much later accompany them in their departure from their parent's house to begin this cycle anew. Such mechanisms internalized slavery from infancy and partly explain the loyalty of slaves toward their masters.

For slaves who did not abandon their children in order to scratch out a bare living in freedom or give up babies assigned before birth to serve members of the owner's family, a vast array of negotiations existed to keep slaves' families intact and obtain their children's freedom. Slaves who lived outside the owner's household faced urgent questions of legal responsibility for the slave children: who was obli-

gated to feed slave children—the couple, or the free spouse, or perhaps the owner? On the one hand, when slaves chose to live outside the household, owners would allege that they had to do without the services slave children usually provided—playing with their own children, doing minor chores of fetching and carrying—and that when slaves decided to live outside, they took on the parental duties and were obligated to nourish the children. On the other hand, slaves would say that the children were property that belonged to the owner who was therefore required to maintain the children. Maintenance costs, and the way in which they were provided, were at the heart of this dialogue. Both lines of argument furnished extensive matter for debate between two of the most distinguished lawyers of Lima's Audiencia Real at the start of the nineteenth century: Isidro Vilca who defended a female slave, and Pablo Ramírez de Arellano who represented this slave's female owner.

Between 1810 and 1814, the slave María Andrea had fought hard but failed to free two of her children from slavery. Five years later, Isidro Vilca would adduce in her name that the earlier negative judgment "also gives me the right to demand food for someone else's slaves [this was how the mother now referred to her two children] owing to the fact that I was not obligated to feed them. This petition is the most legal, just, and sacred of so many that may be filed in the courts of justice." The petition did not stop there. The owner's debt was specified: "The fairest sum that can be ruled for the sustenance of an individual is that of two reales per day , which makes eight pesos per month" (emphasis added). This sum is very close to that enunciated by hacienda owners intent on establishing their expenses, but it occurs here in a claim by slaves demanding retroactive payment.

María Andrea's oldest daughter was fourteen years old; her son eleven. Vilca's appeal continued:

In every court it is unquestionable and generally agreed that the owner should feed them.... No one is unaware that two reales per day is not sufficient even for the bare essentials, and even more so if one contemplates that we live in a country where in the last twenty years the cash supply has decreased and the price of the essential items has increased.

The total sum resulting from the petition amounted to 3,456 pesos. Announcement of the sum set off a cavalcade of arguments between the two lawyers. Ramirez de Arellano asked:

Who is the person filing a suit, and who is the one who has nourished these slaves? The same María Andrea who was owned by Don Eugenio, the natural mother of those children and who has benefited by her master's testament, obtained her freedom as well as that of her mother, María Jesús, and that of another daughter named Asención, a godchild to my party. With whose orders or capacity did she decide to assume charge of rearing her children? She did it all by herself because she wanted to do so as a mother, culpably and criminally swindling her master of his slaves.... After the violent extraction [of the children] from the owner's house, in which she would have never lacked food, with nothing to feed those two boys now, today she dares to demand food without honesty, owing to her rancor at her sons' declared slavery. This case is nothing more than a scandal.... She has done this because it pleased her, because she wanted to cheat her master, hide his slaves from him, feed them as if she had fed them as a mother. A popular saying tells us—and such attitudes are quite common among such people—that whoever gives bread to another's dog loses the bread and loses the dog.... [Furthermore,] it is indubitable that both boys at their respective ages, would have been capable of menial labor: in the house, accompanying their young masters to play and to school, taking care of the little tasks in their master's retail store for their own subsistence and for that of their master's children and family or of other jobs and tasks of this kind. From all these services my party has not benefited the least, but María Andrea has had them all to herself while the children helped her in the profession of preparing food.... Ultimately it must be said that obligations between masters and slaves are reciprocal.

In 1819 the owner agreed to sell the two boys and signed their cartas de libertad .^[29]

In accordance with the legislation in force, an owner was required to feed his or her slaves. A slave remained a slave whether or not he or she lived in the master's household. If a slave couple had been given permission to leave along with their children, the slave family regained not only family unity but also—as in the cited case—the benefit of the children's labor; in effect the family deprived the owner of their labor. The defender of the owner's interests based his argument on this deprivation: the slave stole the children from the owner's house. Thus, the owner was freed of the responsibility of feeding them, and the mother, María, had to assume it. The fact that the lawyer revealed that María Andrea's demand was commonplace among "such people" corroborates not only our assertion that slaves could live with their children outside the owner's household, but also that conflicts over the

obligations of parents and of owners were common and that these contradictions were frequently utilized by the slave population.

The amount María Andrea claimed was not small. Nonetheless, it tallies with what was minimally needed at that time for daily maintenance. Furthermore, it represents a decision by the slave family to feed itself and bear the costs of distance from the owners' house through daily wages. Tacitly, owners allowed familial slave life outside their dominion with the intent, once the children reached working age, of resuming their proprietary rights. When an owner did so, the loss for slave parents was double: they lost the granted maintenance allowance and were menaced by the owner's potential sale of the children. Lawyers for one such owner argued, "As the control of slave children belongs to owners, it is further just that during infancy these latter also furnish food and appropriate clothing until they [the children] are able to be passed into the hands of other owners."^[30]

Law and reality clashed. While legislation stated that maintenance was an owner's obligation, many slave families chose to live outside the owner's household. Such a decision on the part of slaves presupposed the existence of mechanisms decisive to the attainment of freedom that could stop owners from selling their children. An extraordinary mechanism in the context of slavery—which relied on the apt intervention of the lawyers of the Audiencia Real—was a concrete calculation of the amount that the slave parents had invested in rearing their children, an investment that owners were responsible for repaying to the slave parents. The calculation simply followed the law. It safeguarded family unity even against owners' well-entrenched notions of private property. And in the case of María Andrea, it resulted in her son's accession of freedom.

Even so, however, the space claimed by the slave population remained—as inscribed by the definition of slavery itself—a transitional context. No slave's success was ever completely assured, and it is likely—as has been asserted for other areas as well—that this insecurity itself imparted particular traits to filial relations.

The supreme decree of 24 November 1821 reasserted that owners were responsible for feeding slave children, a ruling that gave slave petitions an even firmer basis. If the slave could prove that he or she had assumed these costs, it would be difficult for owners to recuperate their rights of property over the children. Thus the decree set up conditions in which slave children could live with their parents outside the

owner's household.^[31] The Defensor de Menores was the official commended to enforce this decree, and it is through his agency that slaves and slave children expanded their civil and legal representation.

For widowed and single slaves, and for those in situations such as the ones they have described for us, struggling to pay daily wages and at the same time to maintain one or several children, existence was a doubly demanding and toilsome task. The weight of this two-sided burden was also probably a key reason for marriages between slaves and arrangements in which, from the onset, one freed spouse lived outside the owner's household (see chapter 5). We observe the relative weakness of a single woman in the case of María del Milagro Solórzano, who was represented by the Defensor de Menores. María filed a suit against Doña Juana Murga over the freedom of her daughter, Micaela Bartola. The owner had placed María in the San Bartolomé hospital, where she remained for many years until she was well. In the hospital she was required to work; in other words, she paid for her own treatment with her daily wages. While in the hospital María gave birth to a daughter. When the daughter was only a few years old, the owner snatched Micaela from her mother's side and sold her, even though the owner had never made the slightest gesture to support the mother or the child. María set before the court the arguments of her use of daily wages to survive and her owner's failure to provide food or pay for her treatment, and attempted to take her daughter out of slavery and patronage. The judge denied the child freedom, despite the fact that María could even demonstrate that her daughter had been registered as free at her baptism.^[32] María—so ran the counterargument—had not delivered daily wages to her master, which would have allowed the owner to provide food and medical expenses. Thus, the litigation turned the reasoning from wages against the slave. María was not married when she gave birth to Micaela, an additional fact that the judge might have viewed with disdain. Furthermore, the father of María's daughter did not admit his paternity or was at least unwilling or unable to help María out. Still, considering the decisions made in most cases, this judgment appears exceedingly arbitrary, and the Defensor de Menores must have appealed it.

What is certain is that slave mothers who had little contact with other persons, or who were not married, even if they might have managed to reside outside their owner's household, encountered the

most difficulties in liberating their children. There were many women in similar situations who, with their "incessant work, industry, and economy," managed to amass enough money to manumit themselves and eventually their children.^[33] In every case the slaves needed external support to strengthen and legitimize their demands. Sometimes the cogency of demands even led to physical confrontations between owners and slaves. At times the Defensor de Menores appeared; at others it was the slave couple who acted to free the children, especially when one of the spouses was free. Godmothers and godfathers (either black or white) also were decisive agents who intervened on the road to freedom.

In 1839 Marcos Esquivel, a disabled first sergeant of the Colombia battalion, filed a suit against Doña Isabel Espinoza, the owner of his mother and of his wife, Justa Torres. Justa and Marcos had given birth to two daughters, one eighteen years old, and the other nine. Marcos claimed his military salary had enabled him during all the past years to contribute a sum of twelve pesos each month to Justa, who lived with their daughters in the owner's house: "whom I have fed and educated since birth, paying for baptismal fees, clothes, and whatever they needed for subsistence."^[34] Marcos alleged that because the owner had failed to provide for the children she had lost her patronage of them; he based his claim on the November 1821 decree. In December 1839 Marcos was imprisoned. The owner had appeared at his house in order to take away the youngest daughter.

And because I insisted that my daughter did not have to leave so soon, she raised the parasol that she was carrying in her hands, she hit me repeatedly, I prudently told her not to abuse me. Her furor increased and she continued to beat me with no respite; upon which I took out some small scissors that I was sharpening and gave her a small cut: the grocer Don José del Carmen Seco, the immediate neighbor of my workshop, was witness to all this.

The owner told the municipal governor what had happened, and Marcos, a free black, was sent to prison. The April 1841 judgment ruled that since Marcos had not convincingly proved that he had fed his children, the owner could recuperate the right of patronage. This episode shows the violence that could ensue over negotiations involving children: from scissor cuts to umbrella beatings and owners' visits to slaves' homes. All participants dreaded such actions and escalations but they did occur, despite attempts to mark spatial segregation. Vio-

lent encounters occurred and expressed changing social claims from Lima's black population.

Throughout the range of possible arrangements for slaves—from continuity within a fixed time and space to various demands for upkeep by slaves and ex-slaves who had gained a measure of independence—the elements of the situations we have depicted were the daily wage and the gradual distancing from an owner's control. The situations varied in rates of accumulation and in living arrangements, particularly those involving children. In a situation of womb assignment, children and the daily wages they produced were the property of the owner, even if a margin of accumulation (in Luciana's case, fifty pesos in fifty-seven years) existed. But a slave who had managed to purchase freedom but still had enslaved children had two options. Slaves might leave the children in the owner's house, thereby transferring the maintenance costs to the owner and risking the possibility of the later sale of the children. Or, gathering together 'all their funds, they might ask for the children back and consolidate the family unit. Conflict arose when both possibilities intersected: when an owner imposed his or her property rights and a slave demanded the ordained maintenance allowance. A successful outcome depended on slaves' skill in negotiation and accumulation.

As the price of slaves dropped and that of clothing and food rose, to leave the children under the temporary care of the owner was a way to accelerate accumulation. Rather oddly, the slaveholding system worked to the slaves' advantage in this situation because the value of slave children was, according to age, less than that of adult slaves. The calculations made by Isidoro Vilca, the lawyer of the Audiencia Real, represented the minimum amount necessary for survival—ninety-six pesos a year for the upkeep of a child. Thus, the cost of a child's maintenance for four years might equal the purchase price of an adult slave. Within the slave family's budget maintenance of sons and daughters was a considerable expenditure for slaves whose first necessity was to pay the daily wages they owed to owners. Because many slaves opted for family life, we conclude that they were willing to pay these expenses. Their decision to maintain a family outside the master's household delayed the attainment of their own freedom in order to negotiate the freedom of their children through the argument of maintenance. In calculating the profitability of the hiring-out system, we must add sums from daily wages to the maintenance costs of chil-

dren. For owners, the strategy of leaving slave children with their parents meant reducing costs; yet for slaves, leaving their children with owners was a choice with the same objective. It was more profitable to wait until children grew up (and in the meantime avoid relocation outside Lima), and pay their purchase price when they reached working age. María Andrea's eleven- and fourteen-year-old sons assisted her with the chores of food preparation and strengthened the likelihood of their continued freedom. Freedom was a double-edged sword; for slaves, the final outcome depended on their place in the labor market. And success was skewed. After all, every nuance of any potential negotiation—including the payment of daily wages—was an expression of a slave system.

The circumstances of the slave Antonio described by his wife, Juana Pedreros, a free black originally from Angola, remind us of the brutal dimensions of slavery. When Antonio and Juana married, the master allowed the couple to live outside his household in exchange for the payment of six reales a day (twice what was currently stipulated). The couple had religiously complied with the payments for many years. One morning in 1812, however, Antonio hanged himself from a tree in the Alameda del Pino. Eloquent in its description of the reasons for this act was the declaration of Antonio's wife:

For some years she has been married to the black, Antonio, the slave of Don Ignacio Meléndez. Together they had five children. Her husband earned money as a water carrier, for which reason his master obligated him to pay the daily wage of six reales even if he did not earn them, and because of this contribution the declarant and her children had to pass many days begging in order to sustain themselves. Yesterday morning the black, Antonio, awoke at five to go to work and left, as he usually did, and a little while later she was notified that he was found hanged in one of the trees of the Alameda ... that the reason that the black, Antonio, had hanged himself is the very obligation to his master who required from him the payment of six reales a day.... When he could not come up with the money he had to resort to borrowing. He mentioned this situation to his wife on several occasions. Added to all this distress was the illness of one of their children, and often they simply had no medicine to treat her, for which reason her illness worsened. Two months' rent was also owed to the owner for the room where the declarant is staying.^[35]

Although the image of success overshadows the hardships on the journey toward freedom, some individuals could not face the dual

exigencies of daily wages for an owner and bare necessities for a family. This compounded burden crushed their plans and desires for freedom and demonstrates both the fragility of the liberation process and the merits of those who crossed the threshold. For this same reason, it suggests that we must avoid excessive optimism about the possibilities of self-manumission.

The situations we have viewed lead us to three general points. First, the daily wage gave impetus to the development of an artisanal market for black urban labor. Second, owners benefited from their slaves' daily wages as the slaves gradually accumulated their purchase price. Third, the slaves' capacity to earn and save depended on their owners' circumstances and their own. The more slaves owners had, the less their dependence on slaves' earnings; the fewer slaves they had, the greater flexibility for slaves to negotiate spaces of relative freedom—circumstances that fit a significant percentage of urban slaves. The slaves' varying degrees of urban experience and real or fictive kinship ties shaped their opportunities and strategies for urban life. Over the long term and despite the enormous disparity in wages, the daily wage had not only the greatest influence on the organization of the masterslave relationship; it spurred the dissolution of the slaveholding system and the differentiation among slaves and the black population in general. For the slaves—witness Antonio's case—this transition was risky and hazardous. Yet slaves were ready and willing to take this risk and exploit all the small openings Lima's slave system provided.

We can confirm many of the tendencies we have analyzed by examining Peruvian slavery from another angle—from the perspective of the marriages and family life of slaves. Considering the debates about the vitality of the slave family and its importance in the construction of black culture, we must ask how slave family life began and flourished. Did an urban slave family often start with the birth of an owner's illegitimate child to a slave woman in domestic service? What disappointments and triumphs emerged from marriages between slaves and free persons and from other relationships that involved slaves; and how did all these factors influence conceptions of family life and slaves' marriages? Here are the questions we will explore next.