| Sumario: | In 1837, a 30-year-old enslaved African woman known as Teresa Lucumí faced charges of criminal infanticide following the gruesome death of her son. Local authorities in her small western Cuban town received news of the crime from Teresa's enslaver, who recounted a harrowing story of an enslaved mother turned violent murderer. Extracting a confession, authorities took Teresa into custody. Subsequent court records suggest that this confession was likely fabricated. When an appeals judge asked Teresa to ratify her account, she declared that local authorities had silenced her. She then recounted a version of events that not only challenged the story her enslavers told, but also implicated them in chronic physical abuse, rape, attempted murder against her, and murder of her son, likely sired by her enslaver. With its two diametrically opposed explanations of the child's death, Teresa's case allows a rare exploration of the way enslavers constructed narratives of infanticide, how police and judges interacted with them, and why they apparently proved so compelling. Tracing their medical and legal logics, I question the extent to which the infanticide narrative that so captivated judges reflected the enslaved woman's experience. I propose that the stories ratified by criminal infanticide cases like Teresa's more accurately reflect enslavers' strategies for navigating evolving medical, legal, and moral frameworks governing slavery after the legal abolition of the slave trade to Cuba. The label "infanticide" does more to obscure than to explain how this woman negotiated the complexities of motherhood in Cuba's nineteenth-century slave society.
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