the one(s) who answer(s):
voices from José Antonio Aponte’s libro de pinturas and trial record
by Alyssa Velazquez
José Antonio Aponte was a free Black artist and solider who lived and worked in Havana, Cuba, and was one of the leaders of an ambitious revolt that would have ended colonialism and slavery on the island in 1812. That spring, Aponte and several objects from his home, including a “libro de pinturas” which can be translated as “book of paintings,” were taken into custody and interrogated. The images in this book were made by José Antonio Aponte, who hired the help of José Trinidad Nuñes, a local Black painter. Read and listen to two imagined testimonies based on this important but now lost work of art: the “Book of Paintings” from the perspective of Nuñes and an enslaved Black woman mentioned in Aponte’s trial record.
José Trinidad Nuñes
My name is José Trinidad Nuñes. I am a painter by trade and I don’t know if I will ever see my work again.
In the gathering crowd, I saw the Spanish authorities take the rods of silver and ribbons, and then Aponte’s book of paintings. One of them caught my eye looking at the book in his hand I quickly looked away. In my haste to look elsewhere my eyes recognized a black woman who sat for us — a fellow onlooker to their ongoing search of Aponte’s house. She is a beauty all her own, made more precious because she is alive — not carted off or carried away by the authorities like the still images I painted with Aponte. A living breathing black woman whose figure we’d stare at for hours. We painted her and titled her as royalty.
The court never asks for names. Saints are saints. A black cleric is a black cleric. Neither Aponte nor I had any shared ideas of what they looked like, so we hired devotees and slaves to be painted as soldiers, queens, and saints. Painting is artifice. We show what the eyes cannot see — we imagine what was — if only known from texts we show what can be — but the inquisitors took our pictures and turned them into text. They asked us if we could read Latin. Asked us if we owned books. Asked us to tell them the stories in the paintings. They only exposed their ignorance. I shook my head, why talk to me of language? I am a painter! Give me a brush and I can show you how through light and shadow a man becomes a king. But if that painted man gets caught up in a trial never to be seen again, never to have a gaze rest upon his face, then what did he actually do? Is it nothing? What changes have I made if there is no viewer to share in my work, my imaginations, my dreams. I want to laugh at them, hauling painters, carpenters, and their apprentices as witnesses for legible words when we build worlds and create histories.
Before me were men seeking explanations, asking who had the picture drawn. Who owns what. They were seeking authority. Perhaps that was why Aponte’s portrait was of such particular interest. Numbers twenty-four and twenty-five, Aponte at the foot of a carpenter’s bench taken from his shop. I contributed very little, the color pots, ruler, inkwell and compass. I had other commissions at the time. Though I did recommend that he add the laurel and palm. Which seemed to please him.
I am relieved that the painting is lost. I have no desire to claim a part in that work. Aponte is the author. If it survived, inquiries would continue to be made in Santo Cristo, where more artists would be picked up and questioned. The tribunal suspects not the work of one man, but many. We’d be referred to as a collective. I’d be known as a young studio partner, pupil or student. And all because I painted a few bishops in the book and his tools of tintero, regla y botes de pintura. Marks of the profession. Without the book of paintings I am a free painter, with no relation to Aponte. When my future images survive and are placed in a museo de la ciudad or elsewhere in the Caribbean, there will never even be a mention of José Antonio Aponte, or if there is it’s in passing — that we were residents of the City of Havana who painted history as we saw it or as we imagined it to be. A bit of paint to show the future.
My name is José Trinidad Nuñes. I am a painter by trade — and I have outlived my work.
Enslaved black woman
I am the Queen of Cyprus in Thrace
I am in the moats that surround the city
I am a lady with a sleeping man on her body
I am the woman at the door
I am Semiramis, a legendary queen of Assyria
I am Our Lady of the Remedies
I am a myth and a truth.
Who is so far-reaching as I, an enslaved black woman?
Aponte modeled women after my body and painted landscapes from my memories of the entrances and exits, the streets and walls, the fault lines that I passed by every day as part of my placement in Guadalupe.
Ask for what purpose Aponte and Nuñes created saints and goddesses with my face. Ask who is that figure that indicates victory, pride, and faith. I am in my proper place in all of these. Aponte hired to paint me. I was paid to be present in the book of paintings, repeatedly brought back to the studio to pose.
One day he summoned me to stand before a green paper. I remember the green paper because it stole all the color in the room. It took my face and transformed it into Our Lady of Remedies nestled in green. I didn’t know color had that power, the ability to take a servant and turn her into Virgen of Los Remedios. As a devotee of the Divine black female, I wondered what other believers like me would do if they saw me, really saw me, as I saw myself that day — adored and adorned with a crown of glass and sleeves of stone. The worshiper becoming the idol entrusted with the task of holding to her chest a heart of ebony surrounded with ribbons of bright red.
After the search, everyone in town talked about a book of paintings and white ribbons the authorities seized from Aponte’s house. Two strings of stamped white ribbons, two inches wide provided by Salvador Ternero for the decoration of the banner. But the extracted ribbons were not the ribbons intended to be put on our Lady of Remedies. I carry the ribbons to raise the flag. Aponte gave me the two bundles of ribbons to take with me. In the name of Saint Anthony the Abbot I swear that he knew that his house was to be searched and all its contents extracted. A missing book would be noticed. Paper in the hand of an enslaved woman would draw attention. But ribbons? The ribbons to host the banner at the door that had yet to be seen but whose content would be known at first sight, I could take those. They’re not white like the ones found along with the banner in Aponte’s quarters, but red.
Red like the red cross in the flag carried by Queen Candase or Makeda, the Queen of Sheba.
Red ribbons to adorn the order of the most holy trinity and of the captives. Who’s arms are better to receive those than I? Imagine these ribbons in the place of the ones they found. To find red with rods of silver. The significance of that, and the image of the Virgin Mary encrusted with yellow snail shells from this land. Not white and green as symbols of peace but red. I so swear on our Lady of Remedies and Anthony the Great to help me deliver these red ribbons onto the revolters for their survival and protection.
Aponte modeled women after my body and painted landscapes from my memories of the entrances and exits, the streets and walls, the fault lines that I passed by every day as part of my placement in Guadalupe.
Who is so far-reaching as I, an enslaved black woman?
