by Gayl Jones
“You don’t speak readily?” he asked, with a laugh.
I laughed. I was staring not at him, but at his boots.
“I was wondering why you always seem to be studying my shoes. Aren’t these well-made, the pegs and screw in the right place?” he asked, with a laugh.
“They’re very well made,” I said, staring at the wooden heels. There was silence.
“You tell me you read and write?” he said. “Where did you learn that, at the shoemaker’s shop?”
“No, a long time before that. When I was young we had a Franciscan priest at the plantation who taught all the young ones, not just the master’s children. But everybody at one time.”
“I’ll show you what is necessary in writing passes and letters of introduction. But never write them unless there is authorization from the king. Otherwise you might unwittingly help a deserter.”
I nodded.
“From a Franciscan?” he said and laughed then he said, “When I learned to write I would not even have been allowed to speak to a Franciscan.”
“I used to be afraid of the Jesuits,” I said. “The Indians in our territory used to burn pepper and salt as exorcism when a Jesuit came near, because their ancestors blamed all the new diseases on the Jesuits. I used to be afraid if I saw any Jesuits.”
He laughed. “I meant any Christian. My father only prayed to Allah, and taught me to do the same. I learned to write from him. First in Arabic and then in Portuguese.”
“My grandmother could write in Arabic, but she kept it all to herself and we only heard it when she prayed. But she refused to teach my mother or me.”
He said nothing, then he said, “I think it is an advantage to read and write in any language. The woman Indaya shares my religion, but even here we must read the Koran in secret and not speak the prayers too loudly. But my father refused all his life to be converted, and told me that I must not deny the name of Allah to my own children.”
“You have children?” I asked. I did not add, “And a woman?”
“No. But I’m telling you that I am a Muslim and that I won’t refuse to give Allah’s name to our children.”
I looked at him, then back down at his shoes. “I have not said I would be your woman.”
He went on as if I had not spoken. “My father, he wanted to kill any Christian, black or white. It didn’t matter. They were all the same. He felt that we must conquer this land and abolish the Christian religion in the name of the only God, Allah. Blacks and whites who converted would be spared. Not a black nation, but a Muslim nation. Mulattoes were to be the new servants and slaves. He did not accept this war of black against white. It was only the holy wars that had meaning. It was only in the name of Allah that one killed others . . . Are you a Christian woman?”
I said nothing. I thought of the dark-skinned Jesus on Father Tollinare’s wall, and how it had been put there to attract dark people to the faith. Except then I had only loved to look at the picture. I shrugged my shoulders.
“He believed one fought for the love of Allah, and that it was Allah and only Allah who gave liberty to men. All dignity and worth comes in the name of Allah, and it should only be in Allah’s name that we find dignity and worth, and that we should take part in and progress in this New World only through Allah and always through Allah.”
I said nothing, then I asked, “What do you believe?”
“I believe in Allah always, but I do not fight the same holy wars as my father, not the same ones.”
I was silent.
“Is your father here?” I asked.
“No. My father taught me to feel no kinship with these people. We are the same skin, but because of Allah, we do not share the same spirit.”
“But you are here?”
“Yes,” he said, standing. “I must be going.”
I stood. He kissed my cheek and said yes I was his because Allah had given me to him.
Another Reunion; How One Uses the Long Sword
IN THE MORNING, Nobrega came with fried cassava and berries. “After your bath,” she said. “I’ll show you the field we’re to cultivate together. The soil is rich here and very fertile. We’ll be growing sweet potatoes. It’s a very delicate plant and must be handled carefully.”
I said nothing. She stood near while I ate. Then she threw a cloth about her shoulder and we walked down to the stream, then into a large field that was divided among several women. She showed me what to do to keep certain diseases away from the plants by sprinkling on them the juice of another plant.
“They will be ready to get and store soon,” she said. “Again there are certain things that must be done to prevent spoilage.”
We spent the morning weeding and applying a mixture to the soil.
At lunchtime she baked some of the sweet potatoes over coals and we ate and rested.
“You say you have seen King Zumbi?” I asked. She nodded.
“What is he like?”
“He is a man of great valor and ability. And he has never trusted the Portuguese as his uncle did.”
She told me again how before she came here Zumbi’s uncle Ganga Zumba had been king. He had accepted the governor’s message. That if the quilombo of Palmares would surrender, everyone would be given protection, a new place for houses and fields to cultivate. Their women and children who were prisoners from other wars would be given back to them and they would retain their dignities and their positions, nothing would be lost, they would be like other men and have the protection of their country’s arms and serve their country’s flag as other men and they would be the same as other men.
“Except they added ‘All would remain who had been born free.’“ She spoke as if she were telling me all this for the first time, and I listened as if it were the first time.
“This took most of what they said away. How many had been born free? And would they have respected the freedom of those born free here, as the law of the country says the child of a slave is himself or herself a slave. Zumbi’s uncle accepted it, and would have gone to shake hands with the white men, but Zumbi killed his uncle and himself became leader, to fight for the freedom of everyone here, to fight for more than our lives, saying one does not gain worth or dignity bowing to the flag of another man.”
She said the last thing as if she had not spoken before of her servitude on any ground, or perhaps there was something in the way she said it that I did not detect.
I thought about the white woman and mentioned her.
“Ah, the Reina Blanca. They say she is the daughter of one of the families who live in the forests near Porto Calvo. But women, women are never considered in these matters. Women are not the same. Men look at them and do not see nations in their eyes.”
“But you are afraid of her,” I said. “You said so.”
“I am afraid of her.” Then she laughed. “But she receives the protection of arms.” She laughed again.
I said nothing. Even he had said that the women were always captured. And I thought again of the strange black woman, the captain’s wife.
“And women, when they desert, are they punished by death?”
“I have not known a woman to desert,” she said. “Not in the time I have been here. But once they said there was such a woman, a Zerifina. But she had refused any man here. She was tracked down and brought back and hanged. They crushed her legs the same as any man’s. And she cursed them but she did not ask them to have mercy in the name of anyone. Instead she asked for a smoke, a cigarette, and she sang songs, and laughed and joked with the women. They crushed her legs in the morning and hanged her in the evening.”
“Why did she desert?”
She said nothing, then she said, “She refused a very important man here, to be his wife, and so he made her his slave. That is why she deserted, because she could not be a woman alone here and free.”
I said nothing, looking at her.
I asked, after a silence, “Were you in love with that man you freed from torture?”
She frowne
d, then said, “I cared for him, but I was not the woman he chose. He chose me then. He saw his doom and he chose me then when he cried, ‘Have mercy.’“
Again she was silent. We ate the sweet potatoes in silence and then walked back. She took me to the house Anninho had pointed out, where the woman they called Indaya lived.
“Here is where you learn acts of combat,” she said, taking me to the door and leaving me there.
The woman in the shadows said, “Come in, Almeyda.”
“Do you have any memory of me?” she asked, standing and moving out of the shadows.
“Yes, Grandmother,” I said and embraced her.
She hugged me and called me a Palmarista woman.
Indaya and the Old Ghost That Never Leaves
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE, Grandmother, and how did you come?”
She sat down in a chair made of wicker. I sat on a large pillow. “Ah, it is the same time they took me away. I escaped and wandered into the woods here. They found me wandering in Rio Mundahu valley. They know I am crazy, but in a hard fight I know how to wield a sword well. The first time, it was not from experience but from imagination . . . They say I wandered into this camp, my eyes wild and my hair wild.”
“Grandmother.”
“What?”
“You said they found you wandering in Rio Mundahu valley, and now you say that you wandered into the camp.”
“Did I? Well, who knows what’s true? I have been to the little Palmares and the big one. I have been in the mountains of Cubatão, São Paulo, Lellon, Rio de Ianeira—is that how it is named, I can’t remember—Maranhão, Matto Grosso. I said I must see all of the quilombos, every place where the black man is free. But free only if he takes weapons up and defends it. That is the sadness, Almeydita; that is the sad part. And they, they are defending their freedom by taking weapons against us, by destroying these quilombos. As if white men cannot exist when black men are free. They need our slavery to exist. But there are some who trade with us in skins, in gold, in ammunitions, foodstuffs. There are always some who trade and some who fight; isn’t that so, Rugendas?” she asked, looking over her shoulder. Still I did not see him—the white man, the mapmaker. “Some who hate and some who love. Isn’t that so? But I have known some who love the night before and murder the next day. Isn’t that so? Rugendas, even you told me of your friend Tovor who took an Indian woman into his hut one night and the next morning tossed her dead body into Rio de Ianeira. Is that the name? Even you told me that. But it does not matter. Is it every river and any one? We’ve all been through it, riding in the same boat. Ha. Ha.”
“Were you here when the woman they call Zerifina was hanged?”
“Ah, poor woman, it was not freedom of the body but freedom of the spirit she wanted. ‘Ah, Indaya, laugh and sing with me. Laugh and sing with me before I die.’“
“Why did you change your name from Teodora?”
“Because here I picked it and I could call myself any number of names. Names without end. Acutirena, Taboca, Subupira, Osenga, Amara, Antalaquituxe. Ha ha. Isn’t that so, Old Map Maker? I’ll take the name Luiza Mahin in the next hundred years if it pleases me. Won’t I, old soul? If it pleases me?”
“Is he a man who pleases you?” she asked. “That one they call Anninho?”
“Yes,” I said.
She said nothing.
“He speaks your language,” I said. She nodded, but again said nothing.
“Why did you refuse to teach my mother and me?”
She said nothing. Then she said, “Don’t you like these enormous streets? There are one thousand houses, a Catholic church, and a council chamber.”
I looked at her without speaking.
“I came here with nothing except my old tongue,” she said.
“Your old tongue?”
“My old language. That is all I brought with me.”
“That is more reason to give it.”
She was silent, then she said, “Ah, I could have told you stories in that one. But another time we’ll be walking together and I’ll tell you of the loves of Boabdil and Vendaraja. ‘For of all the Moorish ladies Vendaraja he loves best.’ Isn’t that so, old ghost who always returns?
“Or is it that you never leave, Rugendas? It’s not the task of slavery that brought me fear. I too know how to hold a thousand years in a second. Ha ha. Or to chain one soul to another?”
She jerked at her hair.
“When he was first alone with me, he grabbed my hair. ‘Is this your own hair?’ he asked. I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yes,’ I told him. He kept his hand on my hair all the time. Every time we were alone. He had just come to this country. He had not seen women like us. ‘What are you, an old Dutchman or an old Portuguese?’ I asked him what kind of man he was and he said, ‘I’m a Dutchman’ or was it Portuguese? Oh, if I could have told him what kind of woman I was in just one word without him linking every horror with it. Should I say ‘I’m a Sudanese’ and say it with my head up? And what would he have seen? A sensual demon? But he had just come to this country and he’d stare at my dark arms and shoulders. But now I belong to no one. Ha ha. Now I’m no one’s woman. What are you doing touching my old shoulders? Keep your hands in your own hair.”
She pulled away from the man she saw.
“This is my granddaughter. Yours? No. Always mine. I stood in the doorway. She didn’t see me. I watched her walking with him. Did you see them too? I watched his tallness, his broad back, his deep eyes. I watched them drawing shadows across the ground. Don’t look sad because you can’t make shadows anymore. You’ve made one across my heart. I watched them enter the hut together. Are you pleased with the man?”
I answered, “Yes.”
“Do you remember,” she asked, looking over her shoulders, “when you’d hold me, I’d watch my shadow dancing on your cheekbones. Don’t look sad, old ghost, take mine. Share mine. They call me the crazy woman. It is the same in every generation. Do you remember the time I dressed you up like a little angel?” she asked me.
“Yes, there was a little boy too dressed up like an angel and an old man playing a guitar. It was the fiesta da rainha.”
“He tried to kiss you. I said no. I said no, old spirit. He thought he had some right to love you. I said fine, but don’t do that, you can’t do that.”
I remembered she had grabbed me up and snatched the wings off me and took me to my mother’s hut. They had called it the act of a crazy woman.
“When did he die?”
“Who?”
“Rugendas?”
“Who? Rugendas, dead?” she asked, looking around, and starring behind her. Then seeing someone there, she seemed to smile with reassurance.
She rose and went into a corner and brought out two long swords, handing me one.
“Straighten up.”
“No, like this. And if you are in the field when it happens, your hoe becomes the sword, like this. Toss it up this way, from the crook in the elbow.”
My back and arms were sore, and there were two small cuts on my arm when we sat down to cassava, rice, cacao seeds, nuts, and bananas. She had poured rum over everything.
“Anninho gave me this good rum,” she said.
We ate bits of pineapple and drank cups of water. “You have grown to be a beautiful woman,” she said.
I said nothing. Her skin was still as dark and smooth as I remembered, except for tiny lines around the eyes, sticking out of the corners like points on a star.
I scratched a mosquito bite on the inside of my elbow. She pulled my arm away and looked at it. She went out and came back with a leaf, poured salt on it, rubbed it across my arm, gave me the leaf to chew. We were silent.
“Rugendas, aren’t you a Dutchman?” she asked suddenly. “It’s a Portuguese name, but you came from the Dutch, didn’t you?
“Someone came into camp yesterday wearing Dutch trousers. A black man. Where did he get them? I looked at him again and again and then I went out to speak to him. ‘W
here did you get those Dutch trousers? Where did you get those Dutch trousers?’ He wouldn’t answer. ‘Did you kill a Dutchman?’ I told him to give them to me. I said I could wear them. I said I used to wear Dutch trousers, in the old days when the Dutchmen were everywhere and I was a young woman and smoked tobacco. He wouldn’t answer me because somebody told him I was crazy and he didn’t have to answer me. But then they had that little war, and didn’t I wield my sword well?
“Rugendas, aren’t you a Dutchman?” She looked over her shoulder. “Did you kiss a Dutchman? Let me stare at your eyes. There were many women of spirit of my generation who would have killed a man for that. Don’t you think I wanted my own spirit and would have it back? There were many women who would have killed a man for that.”
“Charcoal, sulfur, niter. It tends to pick up moisture so I keep it here . . . But me myself I prefer the long sword or a good hoe.”
“Where is your mother? I have been afraid to ask.”
“She was sold to another plantation,” I said sadly. “I have not seen nor heard of her in many years.”
“Well, we have had one miracle,” she said, touching my shoulder. “We have found each other again in this lifetime . . . And Tempo?”
I frowned and stared at her.
“Well, he went away when she did, but some say he followed her, that they’re together.”
She laughed. “Don’t you think an old African knows how to join one soul to another? Don’t you think an old African knows?”
Paraiu Baptizes and Marries
I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY, watching them at the edge of the palm grove decorating a small palm tree hut with palm and banana leaves and flowers.
When Nobrega came I asked her what it was the men were doing.
“It is preparations for a wedding. There will be a marriage ceremony.”
“Who is getting married?”
She shrugged as if she did not know, and I went to the river.
She gave me a very strong smelling oil to put on my body. I dressed and we walked back to the house. As we neared, Anninho stood in the doorway, with a man they called Paraiu, who was part Indian and part Negro.