Black Flower (12 page)

The Yucatán is famous for having no rivers. Most of the peninsula’s land is low and flat limestone, so even when rain falls no water gathers. There are few large trees; the land is covered in only short trees and brush. Water must be drawn from deep wells, and for this reason, great wells—underground ponds that go dozens of feet straight into the earth—are occasionally found near ancient Mayan ruins. People climb down ladders, past the limestone strata, to bring the water up. A small minority of the haciendas were fortunate enough to have these wells, called cenotes, nearby, but the rest did not. Cenotes were usually located at least a mile away. And the air was so hot that water either evaporated or was absorbed the moment it hit the ground. The very first thing to torment the Koreans, who came from a land with abundant water and firm earth, was precisely this lack of water. These were people who referred to the space between heaven and earth as “mountains and rivers.” They could never have imagined a world without mountains or rivers. The Yucatán had neither.

I
JEONG WAS TAKEN
to Chunchucmil hacienda. A unique, flame-shaped white arch adorned the entrance. Once inside, a number of narrow rail tracks branched off and disappeared into the interior, winding into a building that looked like a large storehouse and then emerging and disappearing in the vast fields. The large storehouse Ijeong had seen was the mill where the workers extracted the fiber from the henequen. Mayans dressed in white loaded bundles of henequen into carts, which they continuously pushed into the storehouse. They stared at the newly arrived Koreans with blank faces. Ijeong realized he would soon be doing what they were doing. He watched them closely even as they walked into the hacienda.

From within the mill came the regular click-clack, click-clack of machinery, but he did not know what was happening or how. He only saw people in clean clothes counting the bundles of henequen in the carts at the entrance to the factory and then giving the workers chits. Under a sun that blazed down so fiercely it seemed it would burn their flesh, Ijeong and thirty-five Koreans continued to walk along the tracks and into the hacienda.

The hacienda was not like the plantations of Cuba or Hawaii. Unlike these slave plantations, designed according to the spirit of capitalist mass production, the haciendas of the conquistadors were for the most part feudal. The conquistadors from the mainland of Spain wanted to carry themselves like the aristocrats of their native land. To build beautiful houses and surround them with high walls, reigning like kings over their servants and slaves—these were their goals. Their children studied in Europe, while they, the hacendados, enjoyed living in the pleasant villages near Mérida or Mexico City, dropping in on occasion to play king.

Ijeong’s group stopped in front of a great house. A man, perhaps the hacendado himself or just an overseer, appeared wearing a broad-brimmed hat, said something briefly in Spanish, and went back inside. The house was magnificent. The façade, decorated with marble and whitewash, was a vivid example of the wealth that the hacendados had accumulated. Red flowers bloomed in the splendidly decorated windows and verandas, and here and there around the building gilded angels blew trumpets. The group of Koreans began to march again. Every time they moved their feet, clouds of dry dust rose up. Finally they stopped in front of the casas de paja—which the Koreans shortened, incorrectly but conveniently, to “paja”—traditional Mayan housing that brought to mind the straw-thatched houses of Korea. They were huts with palm frond roofs, log frames, and walls plastered with mud and grass. The floor was slightly below the surface of the ground, so it was cool at night, but there were no windows and the huts were very small. The Koreans went inside and found dirt floors. When the first family entered, a squealing piglet leaped out. The Mayans cooked their meals, slept, and even raised livestock inside these huts.

One paja was provided for each family, and one paja was allotted for every four single men. Some had no problem adjusting to the pajas, but this was not the case for everyone. Many men sat outside their houses and gloomily smoked their pipes. Ijeong found a bed in the corner of his paja. It was a net bed, called a “hamaca” by the Mayans. Ijeong successfully strung up his hamaca while his bewildered comrades watched. And after a few tries, he was able to climb into it. His three comrades followed his lead and strung up their beds. Then they introduced themselves and talked about what would become of them.

“Aren’t they going to give us something to eat?” one of the men asked. They had just started to get hungry. He stuck his head out the door to see what was happening and spied a Mayan walking around and handing out something to everyone. Corn. Another Mayan brought water. The Koreans built a fire, boiled the water, dropped the corn in, and cooked it. They munched on the steaming kernels until only the cobs were left. As Ijeong chewed his corn, he realized that this was their final destination, that this was where he would spend the next four years until his contract with the Continental Colonization Company ended, in May 1909, without seeing anything like a school or a market or a city. Had he come all the way across that great, fearsome ocean just to arrive here, a place that was even worse than Jemulpo? With a gloomy spirit, Ijeong looked up at the sky and thought of Yeonsu. Will we not see each other for four years? No, surely we will see each other. This is an enlightened land, is it not? There will be days off. And what country does not have holidays? When the time comes, there will be days when the Koreans scattered here and there will gather together.

The four men climbed into their hamacas and tried to sleep. It had been a tiring day, but none of them could fall asleep easily. “It won’t be that bad.” A pimpled, eighteen-year-old bachelor from Suwon, who pretended to be unconcerned but was twisting about in his unfamiliar bed, tried to comfort them all. “Farming is the same wherever you go.” No one answered him. One boy thought of all the foods he had eaten at home. Stew, noodles, kimchi, red pepper paste, cabbage . . . food captivated him more fiercely than any other memory. Another young man thought of the bride he had left at home. Her parents stubbornly refused to send her, saying she was too young. So he asked her to wait four years, and left. Now, no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember anything about the girl except that her cheeks were ruddy. Would they recognize each other when he returned? He was suddenly worried. But he soon fell into a deep sleep, and a still silence covered the Korean workers’ paja village.

Before they knew it, it was four o’clock the next morning. The whole hacienda began to stir to a clamor that sounded like someone banging on a pot lid. Some of the Koreans asleep in their hamacas were startled by the sound and floundered about before they flipped over and fell to the ground with a crash. Amid the chaos, the quicker ones had put on their shoes, gone outside, and were looking around. Men on horseback were cracking leather whips in the air and shouting. Over by the pajas where the Mayans lived, workers had already picked up their tools and formed a line.

Shortly thereafter, a man pushing a wheelbarrow tossed some long knives on the ground in front of the Koreans’ pajas as he passed by. They were machetes, used to cut the henequen leaves. The women and children stayed in the pajas and the men grabbed the machetes with stern faces. The air was tense. The men’s hearts grew warm with the excitement and fear of starting a new job. And as soon as they grabbed the hafts of their knives, they felt as if they were going to war, and the adrenaline began to flow through their bodies. Having done nothing even resembling work for nearly two months, the men felt that they could handle whatever was before them, and their bodies burned with the desire to show these Mexicans, with whom they could not speak, what excellent workers they were.

Before long, a man who looked like an overseer appeared on horseback carrying a torch, and he took command of the people. The Mayans went first and the Koreans followed behind them. The sky was still dark. After they had walked for about ten minutes, a vast field spread out before them, filled with the henequen they had seen on the train, looking like demons’ toenails. Torches burned here and there, and the Mayans began to work. The Koreans stood by and watched. The Mayans cut the henequen leaves at their base with their machetes; when they had gathered fifty leaves, they tied them into a bundle and placed it to the side. That was all; it was very similar to harvesting rice. The machetes were like scythes, and the henequen plants were rice stalks. A few of the newcomers wanted to start working so badly they were licking their lips. When the Mayans’ short demonstration was over, the Koreans entered the henequen field. Ijeong rushed in vigorously and grabbed a henequen trunk in order to cut the leaves. “Agh!” Sharp thorns stuck in his hand. Blood trickled down and wet the dry earth. It was not only Ijeong. Nearly all of the barehanded Koreans had injured their hands and were in pain. Henequen was no plant to be trifled with. Unlike rice, which had been carefully bred over thousands of years, henequen was practically a wild plant. Now Ijeong gingerly took hold of the trunk with his left hand and brandished the machete with his right. He failed to cut the leaf in one stroke, and so his left hand ended up scraping the thorns. With the next stroke of the machete he cut the leaf, but this time the leaf scraped his leg and left a scratch. It was still early morning and he was already sweating. A man on horseback approached, grinned, and kicked Ijeong in the back. “Hey, chales!” It was Spanish for sluggard, but Ijeong didn’t understand him. He knew, though, that the man was telling him that he had to work faster. This was why the Mayans they had seen on the train from Progreso to Mérida had been working so slowly. The sharp and pointy thorns of the henequen made it utterly impossible to work faster.

Their bodies covered with wounds and sweating profusely, the Koreans cut the henequen leaves like the Mayans, and time did not pass quickly. They all spoke much less. At midday, the sunshine was more unbearable than the henequen. Sweat poured down and soaked their filthy clothes and seeped into their wounds, doubling their pain. There was no shade in the field. In that regard, it was far crueler than the sugar cane plantations of Hawaii or the orange orchards of California. At four in the afternoon, the Mayans pushed their carts filled with henequen bundles back to the hacienda. Only then did the Koreans realize how much work they were expected to do: thirty bundles of henequen, at fifty leaves per bundle, which made at least 1,500 leaves they had to cut each day. Yet by four o’clock they had each cut no more than five hundred leaves. The overseers picked up their whips, and cries of “Chales! Chales!” could be heard here and there. The whips flew toward their sweat-drenched backs. Ijeong turned his head. A man on horseback was leering and laughing. The whip flew again. Most of the workers were baptized by the whip that day. To the Koreans, who had no culture of whipping, this was a surprise before it was a disgrace. That is, it took a while for them to realize the shame of it. If the Mexicans had spit in their faces, they might have brandished their machetes on the spot. But none of them knew how to cope with this; whips used on horses and cows were being used on people.

The Koreans continued working until the sun set. That day, they barely managed to cut an average of seven hundred henequen leaves. They could not tie the bundles properly, and there were those who did not know that there should be fifty leaves to a bundle and so tied them up however they wished, so it took even longer to finish. As the Mayans had done, they loaded the bundles into carts and walked back along the rail tracks to the henequen storehouse. They were so hungry that their legs buckled. They had finished working so late that they had missed dinner.

In front of the storehouse sat a man who appeared to be a paymaster. He inspected the bundles, and when he finished, he gave the workers wooden chits according to the number of leaves they had cut. The men took the chits to the hacienda store, where they exchanged them for food. One thing soon became obvious: if they continued to work like this, not only would they not be able to earn money and return to Korea, they would end up starving here. Men without families were a little better off. The family men bought food that wouldn’t have been enough to feed just themselves, and returned to their waiting families. Children were on the verge of tears when they saw their fathers with cuts and scrapes all over their bodies. The women boiled kernels of corn and made gruel. The men ate the thin gruel and lay down in their hamacas without a word. They were so very tired, but their wounds ached and they could not sleep. The wounds that the henequen juice had dripped into hurt even more. The men had no choice but to talk to their families. “At this rate, we’ll all die. Tomorrow, everyone will have to go out to the fields.”

Ijeong filled his stomach with the food he had bought from the store and lay down to sleep. In the beginning, Meyers had said that adults would be given 35 centavos a day, bigger children 25 centavos a day, and smaller children 12 centavos a day. Yet it cost 25 centavos alone to buy food for one person for one day at the store. That meant that most of what they earned went toward food. If someone grew ill and bought on credit at the store, he would be bound to repay the hacienda no matter how long it took. Any fool would soon realize that this was unjust. The uprising of Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, would be sparked by this exploitation in the haciendas. The hacendados were working the peasants as bond slaves and would exploit them forever. If two peasants got married, the hacendado presided over the ceremony and demanded a large sum of money for his services. If a family member grew ill and required treatment, if someone died and a funeral was held, or if a peasant was caught up in a criminal case and needed money, he borrowed it from the hacendado and became further indebted.

There were differences from place to place, but before long the Koreans scattered among the twenty-two haciendas realized the injustice of the system in which they worked. They had been thoroughly deceived by John Meyers and the Continental Colonization Company. The promise that they would be able to work freely, earn lots of money, and go back home wealthy was just candy coating. This was the reality that all the weak people of Mexico faced; the hacienda system had been making serfs of the natives for hundreds of years. The Koreans were stuck here, cut off from communication or traffic, their eyes darting back and forth like frightened mice, desperately trying to think of a way out of a horrible situation.