The Book that Took Forty Years to Write

Cecilia Valdes

By Cirilo Villaverde

Though it may be Cuba's counterpart to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cecilia Valdes nonetheless stands apart as its own work with its own agendas. More than forty years after publishing Cecilia Valdes as a short story, Cirilo Villaverde, in 1882, published it as a novel - a very large novel. Villaverde confesses that the length of time it took to finish the novel, including how little he could dedicate to it at extended periods of time, accounts for the novel's unevenness, which includes long stretches of unnecessary detail and other such disruptive passages. Most disruptive of all is the one hundred page trip to a Cuban slave plantation, which damages the novel beyond repair. One has to wonder how much better the novel could have been, had Villaverde had the chance to write this novel without interruption (he faced many political conflicts, which led to his exile to the United States). This isn't to say it's not a great novel, in many ways it is, but it's not, in the end, a successful novel. The fatal flaw, as I've already said, is the lengthy scene, three hundred pages in, at the plantation. The novel never recovers from it. Wikipedia describes the ending accurately: "as if [the] author h[ad] lost interest in his story and wanted to finish it as fast as possible." For scholars on slavery and race, Cecilia Valdes is a crucial read, but for the rest of us, it just breaks our hearts to see the novel crumble before our eyes.

Does that mean you shouldn't read it? No. As a matter of fact this novel does many things very well. You could even say that an excellent book was ruined by one hundred pages of poor writing, but those first three hundred pages aren't any worse for it. The book's downfall, it seems, can easily be explained by Villaverde's politics. While the book is essentially an anti-slavery novel, it is only in a very complicated way. For one, the novel provides hints that, though Villaverde may have truly been against slavery, he was nonetheless a racist. His stance against slavery was owing to the fact that abolishing slavery would abolish Spanish rule in Cuba, which is what Villaverde wanted. There is evidence that he was pro-slavery up until he learned that slavery was what kept Spain in Cuba, and it is at this point I imagine he decided to take the anti-slavery route that Stowe made very popular. Three hundred pages into the writing of his book he decides to insert an agenda that turns out to be ruinous.

But first I want to show why these ruinous pages are so heartbreaking.

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Proslavery Adventure

The Musical

*Spoilers aplenty--I will discuss the entire movie

In 1977, the beloved Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls came out in their own animated musical adventure, directed by Richard Williams. Beneath the innocent facade of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure lie some rather dark themes. I think it's enough to say that, had this movie been released two-hundred years ago (imagining there were movies that far back), we would be viewing it through a much different lens. The images and dialogue of the movie conjure themes of slavery, suicide, and eroticism. Perhaps this is accidental on the part of the director, but it's too pervasive, too well conceived to ignore.

Raggedy Ann and Andy takes up a concept that was later made popular in Pixar's first full-length film, Toy Story. This concept, of course, involves toys coming to life when their owners are absent. While this is a very imaginative idea, I don't believe the implications of staging what turn out to be living, rational beings as pieces of property has been widely considered, if at all. I'm talking about implications of slavery. In Toy Story, favorite toys are branded with the first letter of their owner's name, they oversee the working order of the toys in the absence of said owner, and they come face-to-face with one cruel toy owner no toy wants to be sold to. Toys are, in many ways, the perfect symbol for slaves. In the eyes of their owners, they're nothing but hunks of plastic incapable of intellectual or rational thought. But when these human owners leave the room the toys come to life and speak and behave intelligently. To compare, slave-owners viewed Africans as brutes who lacked the requisite degrees of humanity to make them equal to their white owners. It was simply unthinkable that the slave could have the intellectual capacities to plan a revolution, much less a successful one, and inconceivable, as well, that they would even want to revolt. However, the slaves did plan revolts, but only when their owners weren't looking. The most successful one was the Haitian Revolution, during which the black slaves wrestled Haiti, formerly St. Domingue, from the French. Toy Story, as well, stages a revolution, in escaping the maniacal and cruel Sid, and the toys use to their advantage that Sid couldn't conceive of them being able to act on their own.

The little girl who owns Raggedy Ann, Marcella, falls somewhere between toy owners Andy and Sid. She's more like a clueless, less sadistic version of the latter, in carrying Raggedy Ann by the ankle and letting her head knock against the stairs. And after one look at the toys in her bedroom you might be inclined to think she's walked into Sid's bedroom. Why a little girl would own such toys is beyond me. Raggedy Ann has a privileged position among Marcella's toys. Not only was she taken on a journey into the outside world, but she receives a seat on a chair that elevates her above the other toys. Raggedy Ann is something of a leader character, and this becomes more apparent when the toys become animated. All the toys gather around Raggedy Ann as she tells of her adventures with Marcella, hardly distressed that the bumps to her head require stitches. The stitching is done not by a human, but a large woman doll reminiscent of an Aunt Chloe or Aunt Jemina figure (the harmless, family-oriented slave). The toys are all happy despite Raggedy Ann's beating. It's like the myth of the submissive slave, which states that blacks are naturally submissive, thus naturally composed for slavery. Raggedy Ann and company offer evidence that this myth is true. But, wait! They're toys...