The Indomitable Doña Santos
A Personal Essay by Ronald C. Flores-Gunkle
Note: I was reminded of this piece I wrote during my first year on Medium — when readers could clap but once! — during an exchange with my grandson about his heritage. Doña Santos is his great-great-grandmother. I am pinning it here temporarily to make it accesible to new readers.
Doña María Santos Betancourt Morales died in December of 1977 at the age of 93 at her home in Buen Consejo, a modest hillside barrio of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Most deaths — and lives, for that matter — go unnoted. It is the inexorable fate of all of us, even the most famous and infamous. In Doña Santos’ case, however, 39 years after her passing, the rhythmic hoofbeats of her paso fino horse still resonate and her phantom image races side-saddle in my imagination along the trails of her hundred-acre farm in the mountains of Gurabo.
Villa Flores, my home, occupies a five-acre strip on the northwest side of the land that once belonged to Doña Santos and Don José M. Ferrer Hernández, my wife Olga Ferrer’s grandparents. Don José, in turn, inherited land from his father, Lorenzo “Alonso” Ferrer Perdomo, a Spaniard born in the Canary Islands who, sometime in the 1850s, established his family in eastern Puerto Rico.
Santos married José, a man nearly a quarter of a century older than she, in 1901, three years after Spain ceded its island of Puerto Rico to the United States of America. When he passed away in 1909, barely nine years later, she had born eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. I don’t know how they met and how their romance came about, but it can be assumed that they were neighbors. Don José is recorded as being born in Quebrada Grande, Trujillo Alto, and Doña Santos, in Masas, Gurabo, but a look at local maps show that Trujillo and Gurabo abut each other: indeed the current property straddles both municipalities.
Eight children in nine years may seem like an unusually fertile run, but records of most of the farming families that settled in the interior of the island show a similar — and even more enthusiastic — accounting. Some people ascribe it to the fact that rural electrification didn’t take place in the interior until much later in the century; couples went to bed at sundown and, although they rose before sunrise, there was plenty of time for connubial bliss. Mortality was also high — Doña Santos lost 2 of her children in childhood and in the interior of Puerto Rico, just as in other remote agricultural areas of the world, farms needed workers and large families provided them.
It may be that Doña Santos was also ruled by passion. Later evidence abounds. However she once described Don José as “very big, a big nose, old, and sort of ugly,” which suggest another motivation. Yet, her family, the Betancourt Morales were landowners, certainly not sharecroppers or peones. As such they were near the top of the jíbaro social order. Most of them were only a generation or two from Mother Spain and although not nearly as sophisticated or educated as the urban gentry, they maintained the customs, courtesy and traditions of the rural Canary Islands.
When Don José died in 1909, Doña Santos was 25 years old, Lorenzo, her oldest son (and eventually my father-in-law) was 7 years old, and she was pregnant with no. 8. After recovering from the birth of José (“Pepe”) and with the household still in mourning, Doña Santos — undoubtedly dressed demurely in black with black lace petticoats, took charge.
It was an unusual move for a woman of her time. She took complete control of the house and farm, ordered about the workers, negotiated purchases and sales, kept the accounts, and rode the best horses to patrol the plantations of bananas, oranges, grapefruit, tobacco, coffee, root crops, and at least one perfumed hill of azucenas (tuberrose). She supervised the birthing of heifers, the pigpens and the pasturing of cows and goats. “She was a sight,” a neighbor once related. “She rode like a lady, sidesaddle, wore a broad-brimmed hat like a man, but her dress was always soft and white with layers and layers of petticoats that you might glimpse when the wind was right.”
Minerva, my wife’s oldest sister, remembers that their grandmother had bolts of fine cloth and lace brought from the specialty stores in Old San Juan and was fastidious in her dress. “She was both formidable and feminine. Everyone respected and admired her,” Minerva said.
Minerva also recalled the original plantation house that once stood down the road from the house that her father Lorenzo had built, where she and her brothers and sisters had lived. “It was a grand wooden house with a double marble stairway in front that led to the second floor living quarters,” Minerva recalled. “The stables and the servants’ quarters were on the lower level. I don’t remember the rest of the house, but I do remember Abuela Santo’s room because I spent a lot of time noseying around in it. It was huge, furnished with a beautiful carved mahogany bed, tables, porcelain pitchers and bowls, large ornate urns; really special things.” Minerva would have been 4 years old at the time. “Abuela always kept a jar of Pond’s face cream next to her bed. She said that’s what kept her young.”
Doña Santos had plenty of company and domestic help in the early days after Don José’s death. Her mother María Dolores Morales, “Mama Lola,” was usually on hand and there were aunts, uncles and other relatives, housemaids, as well as plenty of peones (the word was generic for farmworkers and was not pejorative) to take care of the animals and the crops. Doña Santos arranged to have a school built on her property and a schoolmaster brought in from Gurabo for the education of the children.
The schoolmaster was young, slim, smart, dark-haired and bronze-skinned. The widow was young, slim, smart, fair, rich and ready. He read poetry to her, played soulful melodies on the violin. They rode together to see the waterfalls in the valley and the view of the ocean from the fatherest moutaintop. Of course, they became lovers. How the affair ended is not clear. Some say the man wanted to marry her but the family opposed because of the “doubtful” color of his skin. Others say he was already married to a teacher in Gurabo. Yet others say he was divorced but went off to finish his studies and to play violin with the symphony orchestra in San Juan and never returned.
This idyllic period came abruptly to an end with the terrible San Felipe storm, a category 4 hurricane that scored a direct hit on the island on Thursday, Sept. 13, 1928. After the storm’s 144 mph sustained winds finished destroying almost everything in its path, it left behind 312 dead and more than $50 million in property damage ($683 million in 2016 dollars) before going on to trash and kill in Florida and points north.
The cataclysmic cyclone arrived so quickly and powerfully that Doña Santos had to rush her household — a crowd that included her brother-in-law José (Pepe) Ferrer, his young wife and cousin Blanca Ferrer, and their baby Aida — into the storm shelter. The baby was in a “coy,” a round hammock-like bed, and the infant was snatched up just before a powerful gust lifted the coy along with part of the roof. As they ran into the shelter, the coy could be seen flapping like a kite high in a tree.
When they emerged hours later, they found the second floor of the house had been sheered off, nothing of it remained but the ruins at the end of the marble stairs. The lower level was shielded by the incline of the hill, and was roofless but reasonably intact. It was here the family would move until a new house could be built next door. The beautiful things that had traveled with the colonists from Spain were lost forever.
I have no doubt Doña Santos, then 44, surveyed the damage, picked up a miraculously intact jar of Ponds from the rubble, applied some to her lovely skin, rescued her hat, and took charge of the rebuilding.
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Note: This is an accurate retelling based on stories that were told to me by the people involved or their descendents. No names or incidents were changed in an attempt to preserve this tiny fragment of history on a small parcel of this island, Puerto Rico, a place I call home. RCFG.
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