Field or wheel?
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— Também a dizer a verdade, não sei o que será melhor,— observou outra escrava,— se estar na roça trabalhando de enxada, ou aqui pregada na roda, desde que amanhece até nove, dez horas da noite.
'And to tell the truth, I don't know which is better,' another slave-woman remarked, 'to be in the fields working a hoe, or pinned here to the wheel from daybreak till nine or ten at night.'
A second woman weighs the choice honestly, and there is no good side: the hoe in the sun or the wheel from dawn to ten at night. 'Pinned to the wheel' — pregada, nailed — turns the workroom into its own kind of cross. Guimarães lets the debate be real, because either answer is a life consumed.
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