In a short note at the beginning of Erika Rummel’s fascinating novel, What They Said About Luisa, the author explains the historical inspiration for the book. Luisa de Abrego, a formerly enslaved woman from Seville, had the first known Christian marriage in the New World. She married Miguel RodrÃguez in St. Augustine, in what is now Florida, in 1565. Ten years later, however, de Abrego accused herself of bigamy before the Inquisition in Mexico City. This article from ABC Sevilla, in Spanish, has images of de Abrego’s marriage certificate and trial documents. These documents are the only way we know about Luisa de Abrego. Without them, we wouldn’t know her name, of her enslavement, and of her journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Florida and Mexico. Because there is so little documentation about de Abrego herself, Rummel explains that if we want to know what her life was like, we would have to piece it together based on the better-documented attitudes of people who would’ve left more trace on the historical record: the rich, the privileged, the male, the white. Rummel takes that premise and runs with it.
We see Luisa’s story through a glass darkened by prejudice, lust, avarice…honestly, through quite a few of the seven deadlies. From the wife of the man who enslaved Luisa, Doña Ana, we learn that Luisa was manumitted and given a generous inheritance. We also learn just how furious Doña Ana is that her husband seemed to care more for the welfare of an enslaved woman than his own family. Doña Ana believes there has to be some kind of trick. From Don Fransisco and Captain Juan Diaz, we see how Luisa came to travel across the ocean to Mexico and what she had to leave behind. Alonso de Herrera, a lawyer who reluctantly works for the Inquisition, untangles the legal and church laws Luisa is caught up in. Other characters share their perspectives: a landowner who squeezes every drop of profit from the land and people of Zacatecas, a dying priest who tried to do right by Luisa, a nun who definitely did not try to do right by Luisa. What They Said About Luisa is an incredibly rich book because we learn not just what the title promises but also what they reveal about themselves.
The only thing that marred my experience of What They Said About Luisa was the abrupt shift in the last quarter to the incredibly strange and brutal experience of the child Luisa left behind in Spain when she traveled to Mexico. The abrupt change of focus from the stories of Luisa and the people who knew her makes this last section feel like an extended coda rather than an integral part of the whole novel. Even this I might have been able to roll with but the boy’s life is so packed with the bizarre that it read like a sprint through early Gothic literature. There might be reasons for this section’s inclusion but, for me, this quarter erased a lot of what I was thinking and feeling for Luisa with a large, “Huh?”
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.