Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

One June afternoon, Enrique Otway rides up to the Bellavista sugar plantation, near Puerto Príncipe, and asks a farmhand the way. It is Sab, the overseer, an enslaved mulatto of refined manners, son of an African woman brought from the Congo, who grew up beside Carlota de B…, the owner’s daughter, learned to read with her and has belonged to her since childhood. From their conversation, Sab realizes who he is: Carlota’s fiancé.

Enrique is the son of Jorge Otway, an Englishman who started as a peddler and grew rich in Cuba. The engagement was arranged when Carlota seemed a great heiress, but her father, Don Carlos, has just lost a lawsuit and the family fortune is not what it was, and old Otway thinks of nothing but money. Carlota, passionate and dreamy, sees none of this. The one who sees everything is Teresa, the poor orphaned cousin who lives with the family, cold on the surface and silent.

Sab rides with Enrique through a stormy night, guides the whole family on an outing to the caves of Cubitas and takes them to the hut of Martina, an old woman who claims descent from Cuba’s native people and whose grandson he saved from a fire. There the slave’s heart begins to show, and so does Teresa’s, who has guessed his secret. A lottery ticket that has won forty thousand duros will put them both to the test.

Avellaneda began the novel in Cuba and kept writing it on her voyage to Europe in 1836; it was published in Madrid in 1841 and not published in Cuba until 1914. In her preface, “Dos palabras al lector”, she says the book slept for three years in her desk. It is a Romantic novel, with storms, caves, a prophesying old woman and impossible loves, and at the same time an indictment of slavery: Sab tells Enrique that “a veces es libre y noble el alma, aunque el cuerpo sea esclavo y villano” (“sometimes the soul is free and noble, though the body be enslaved and lowly”).

It came out more than a decade before Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is counted among the first antislavery novels in Spanish. Many readers also see in it a critique of marriage: in his final letter, Sab writes that women, like slaves, “arrastran pacientemente su cadena y bajan la cabeza bajo el yugo de las leyes humanas” (“drag their chains patiently and bow their heads under the yoke of human laws”). For that, and for the greatness of its hero, it is still read as a classic of Cuban literature.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was born in Puerto Príncipe (now Camagüey), Cuba, on 23 March 1814, and died in Madrid on 1 February 1873. At twenty-two she moved with her family to Spain, where she published her first poems under the pen name La Peregrina.

A poet, novelist and playwright, she was one of the great figures of Spanish-language Romanticism: she wrote Dos mujeres, the historical novel Guatimozín and plays such as Saúl and Baltasar. In 1853 she stood for the Royal Spanish Academy, which did not admit her.