Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  Nobrega did not come to the door with me but said goodbye, and walked to the end of the village where she shared a house with other women.

  “This is Paraiu, who baptizes and marries,” said Anninho, pointing to the man.

  I opened my mouth but did not speak.

  “Come inside,” he said, standing away and holding my arm. “Usually these are public ceremonies, Almeyda, but I . . .”

  We stood at the far end of the house in the shadows. Paraiu read from a book that was not the bible, in a language I had not heard for many years.

  Then I knelt with him and bowed as he did and said with him that Allah was the greatest.

  “Now we must have the Christian one,” he said, when we were standing.

  I looked at him but said nothing.

  Paraiu stood in front of us and spoke a language that I understood. Then, when it was completed, Anninho put a necklace of cacao seeds and trumpet shells around my neck. I stared at the necklace but said nothing, and then we walked down to the hut decorated with flowers, palm and banana leaves, and spent the night there.

  “Why did you also have them perform the Christian ceremony?”

  “You refused to tell me what you believe, or whether you are a Christian woman.”

  He got into the hammock and raised me up to lie beside him. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing . . . Nothing.”

  Old Vera moved the serpent over my thighs . . . ‘Whole spirit, whole soul, whole body whole spirit’ . . . She wrapped it around my forehead. She kissed the center of my forehead.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Almeyda,” he said. “You are very beautiful.”

  He spoke of my body and of my spirit. He kissed me and touched my hair. I watched my shadow dancing.

  The Harboring Forest

  I MIXED GREEN PEPPERS, palm oil, and shrimp. It was evening and our first real dinner together. When I finished I handed him a tin plate and sat down with mine.

  “You seem more at ease with me now,” he said. I looked at him but said nothing.

  “We are more at ease,” he said. “But the times are not.” He was silent, then he said, “I would have liked a long courtship with you.”

  He watched me. I tried to act at ease, but had trouble finding my mouth. He laughed and reached out and touched the side of my face, wiped a piece of rice from my jaw. I smiled and stared down at my plate.

  The women sat in a circle. One of them had a baby sucking at her breasts. A white man came and bent over the woman and brushed her hair back from her forehead. She was a pretty woman with black eyes. He kept looking at her and then he touched the baby. ‘No, Almeydita,’ the woman screamed. She moved the baby away from her. There was blood on her nipple. The white man backed away. He kept backing away from her. ‘Oh, no, Almeydita.’

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  I lay with my arm across my forehead, then I leaned over and kissed him.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  He said nothing, then he said, “I have to go into town tomorrow. Into Porto Calvo. I’d like you to come along.”

  I looked at him, fearful. He laughed, touched my side.

  “It’s all right. We’ll be safe. We’ll go at night. There’s trading to do, skins and leather goods to trade for ammunition.”

  I still looked at him.

  “There’s a free black woman who owns a store. We are safe there. She gets weapons for us. We take things she needs.”

  “How does she get weapons?”

  “She has her ways.” He frowned, then raised an eyebrow. I said nothing. He kept his hand on my side.

  “You’ll go with me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I saw myself walking into a heavy forest, standing at the entrance of a small town. I touched Anninho’s shoulders. I stared into the dark corners of his eyes.

  The woman squatted on her toes, and moved the baby to her other breast while she sopped the blood up from that one.

  “Don’t you want me to know you?” the white man asked, still standing away.

  “I have no memory of myself, so why should you have any?”

  He came near, pulled the baby’s hair, and she raised blood on the other nipple.

  “Oh, Almeydita, please. Well, it’ll have to be milk and blood. It’ll have to be milk and blood then.”

  Luiza Cosme

  AND WHAT COULD I DO when the white man take my gold, but go to the courtroom and sit there. I had already say what he had done. I had say it and went there and sit there with them looking at me with accusing eye as if I had done something wrong. As if I were the bad one, the demon. I will tell you what it came to be. It came to be me asking him for not to punish me for the wrong he had done to me. Do you understand? I am a black woman. My mama is a black woman. My papa is a black man. That is what it all come back to. It return to the same thing again and again.”

  She was a beautiful woman with strings of trumpet shells around her neck. Anninho took the skins we had brought into a small back room and brought out large “grain” sacks.

  Luiza stood against the counter. We were in half darkness, the moon shining into a small window near the ceiling at the right side of the counter. She took my arm and I followed her into the back room where there was a tiny whale oil lamp and where sacks of grain and beans and skins lay about.

  “Some thing never change,” she said, sitting on one of the grain sacks. I remained standing.

  She was wearing a white blouse hanging off her broad shoulders, and a full print skirt. She wore a shawl, not around her shoulders, but around her hips.

  “It came down to me asking them not to punish me,” she said, “when it had started with what he had done.”

  Anninho had taken all of the special sacks out and had come back in. He stood looking at her but said nothing.

  “Who is the woman?” she asked him.

  He told her my name was Almeyda. She looked at me, but said nothing. Then she unfastened a leather bracelet she was wearing.

  She handed it to me.

  “Here, wear this. It bring you luck. You need luck in this world.”

  Luiza fastened it to my wrist. A leather bracelet trimmed with cacao seeds and trumpet shells.

  I said nothing at first, then I said thank you.

  “Anninho would say there is no such thing as luck. It is all Allah,” she said with a smile, looking at him.

  “You have found a silent woman, Anninho. You have found the right one. This man hardly ever speak,” she said to me. “But silence, they say, bring happiness.”

  “They did nothing to the white man?” Anninho asked.

  “No. Nothing. When it was over, I was afraid to go out into the street. He was the same man leaving as he was when he enter there. But me? I leave without dignity. I’m the different woman. He say that my earrings are immoral, immoral, immoral, not suited to my birth. I tell them I do not wear them in public as the law say. I only wear them here on the inside. But they will not make dirty the name of a white man for something to do with a black woman. Oh, no. And he the same man today that he was yesterday. He is the same. I am the one who will not see myself again . . . I am a black woman . . . I am a free black, you say?

  Ah, I have no freedom. You in the quilombos have freedom because you have the freedom to fight. The arms you see are real. The muskets tied across your enemies’ shoulders, they are real, the swords they are real. Every day I must fight what I cannot see. Except sometimes the arms.” Her look was hard. She moved her hair away from her ear. The tip of her ear had been cut off. “You see this?” she asked. “I get this from resisting arms.” She let her hair fall back. “I must go. I promise to go to Aprigio’s house tonight.”

  “Aprigio?” I asked. “Is it Martim Aprigio?” She looked at me, and then at Anninho.

  “His wife,” I explained. “I knew her at the last place I was a slave.”

  “The free blacks
meet at his house,” Anninho said. “They spy for us when it is necessary.”

  The woman looked at him as if there was some secret they had.

  He nodded to her.

  “A black whether he be born free or born in chain does not live without danger or always possibility of it . . . We help our brothers and sisters who wish to escape to you in Palmares, we help others who want to buy freedom, and have opportunity. Some say they will buy they freedom from no man because it is not a thing to buy. All of the one who meet at Aprigio, they are in place like me where they see and hear everything. They see and hear even what cannot be seen and what do not speak. Do I have ordinary eye?” she asked Anninho.

  He shook his head.

  “No, no. But when it become too dangerous we all have a place in quilombo, is not that so, Anninho?” she asked.

  Anninho nodded.

  “I go,” she said. “And you and your woman must go with care and Allah blessing.”

  She nodded to us and went outside. Anninho took my arm and we walked outside into the darkness.

  Going back we did not both ride on horseback. He helped me up and I rode with the “grain” sacks. Anninho walked alongside wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

  “Who is the woman?” I asked when we had entered the road.

  “Luiza Cosme,” he said. “Didn’t I say her name?”

  “No.”

  “She always puts herself into dangerous circumstances, and yet she has stayed free. But she is a woman.”

  I started to say something.

  “Here we must be silent.”

  There were two white men in white shirts coming toward us both on horseback. The brims of their hats were wider than Anninho’s.

  Without a word, they rode past him.

  “Anninho?”

  He kept walking without saying anything.

  Nobrega, or How to Become a Free Woman

  HE IS A FREE MAN,” Nobrega said while she roasted sweet potatoes at the edge of the field. I sat under a cassava tree. I had told her about the two men on horseback and how strange it had been that they had not stopped us on the road, though before we left I had assumed he had forged papers.

  “Perhaps they knew him as he is a free black, or perhaps they were traders.”

  Anninho himself had refused to talk about the men.

  When we got back he had taken me first to the small house and then had gone on with the load of ammunition and then he had returned and sat silently in one of the straight chairs, bending over a book that I recognized as the same book Paraiu had married us from and that was handwritten in letters I did not understand—and what looked more like illegible scribbles of a madman or woman than real words.

  Then as we lay together he had touched my eyelids, tracing the lines upward.

  “Are you tired from the journey?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “So am I. A little. Your eyes look like an Indian woman’s.”

  I said nothing. He kept his hands about my face, touching my cheekbones, my temples, then traced circles around my breasts. We lay together for a long while before he kissed me and we made love.

  “I love you, Almeyda,” he said.

  I said nothing, holding his back and shoulders.

  I dreamed I saw them coming down the mountain wearing feathers on their heads and carrying swords and drums. They came down from the top of the mountain on two sides, all black men, carrying spears, torches, axes, playing flutes, horns, trumpets. I stood behind a fence surrounded with sharp points. I was the only woman there. And then I saw the white men, wearing plumed hats and carrying swords. The black men had sure expressions on their faces but the others, the white men, had puzzled expressions. I could not tell whether it was surprise or fear.

  Nobrega handed me a hot sweet potato on banana leaves.

  “You always act as if you are afraid of me,” I said.

  “I am not afraid. I am a slave here.”

  “You are no different from me,” I said.

  She sat down on the ground setting her sweet potato on the ground between her knees. She watched me but said nothing. Then she said, “I am a slave. You are a free woman.”

  “We are the same,” I said.

  “You do not understand,” she said. “When I was brought here I did not want to take on any man. I am the one who refused. But I did not try to escape like that unfortunate woman, Zeferina. I remained here and I remained a slave.”

  “Why did you tell me it was no man wanted you?”

  “I won’t explain.”

  I looked at her, frowning.

  “You seem very lonely,” I said.

  “So do you.”

  I frowned, looked at her, lifted a piece of hot potato to my mouth.

  “We are the same,” I said. “There is no difference.” Then I asked, “If you accepted someone, then would you be free?”

  “I know the ways to make myself free,” she said with anger.

  I said nothing. We stared into each other’s eyes. “But you said, you told me you loved that man?”

  When they brought him back and tortured him so he forgot who he was and forgot who she was and thought she was another woman. She had walked by him like that day and he thought she was someone else and started speaking to her as if she were that woman and he sang to her a little love song and in the next breath he cursed her and said she must have mercy on him.

  “Don’t abandon me. I’ve loved you as well as any man.”

  “But you said it was because you had mercy on him that you put him out of his torture that they made you a slave. Now you say it is because you refused the men here. Tell me, Nobrega, which is true?”

  “They are both true. One story is no different from the other one,” she said with a smile, tearing the skin from the sweet potato, and eating it.

  A Woman Hanged for Adultery

  THEY BOUND THE WOMAN‘S HANDS behind her and branded the letter A on her forehead and someone had pulled the gold earrings from her ears so that there was blood on her earlobes and running down her neck. I had not seen them do any of this but before she was to be hanged, she was paraded through the streets of the quilombo. I watched her from my grandmother’s house. My grandmother did not come to the doorway.

  “What has she done?” I asked.

  “Adultera,” my grandmother said.

  I watched her from the beginning to the end of the street. I kept waiting for her to cast her eyes down, but she did not. She walked with her head high and her back was as straight as an arrow. She did not hold it as a haughty woman or even as one who felt that she had been wrong, but—how should I put it?—as if even in this she would keep her dignity and some decorum.

  “What is her name?” I asked.

  “Ambrosia. But what is your concern?”

  I said nothing. Her voice seemed harsh in a way I could not explain, but one that made me afraid to turn and see how her eyes were looking.

  “Do you want to go see what is done to a woman whom a man marries in good faith and she betrays him?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “She is hanged as a traitor.”

  I still said nothing. Her voice seemed so strange. Even when the woman was out of sight, I still stood in the doorway with my back to her.

  “Why are they hard on such a woman?”

  “Hard?”

  “To be killed for it.”

  She laughed. I turned staring into eyes I had not seen before. “He married her in good faith,” she said.

  “Did she have her choice? Perhaps she would have chosen another man?”

  “That any man should have any choices?” she said. “That any black man should have any choices in such a country.”

  “But the woman?”

  She looked at me with the same eyes. “In my country if such a man as Acutirene had chosen me . . .”

  “But this is another country.”

  “Well out there,” she said, shooting her arm in the direction of
Porto Calvo. “Out there, there are none. No choices for a man or woman.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you displeased with your man?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Is he the one you would have chosen if you had had some choice?”

  “Yes.”

  She said nothing else as if that were the end of it.

  I remained standing in the doorway. There were some who had gone out into the streets now and were walking in the direction they had taken the woman.

  “Such a woman won’t put her head down for anything,” she said as if she’d read my thoughts. “Even when her neck is broken it won’t fall.”

  I had not chosen to follow, but found myself walking in the direction they had taken the woman. I stood at the edge of a small clearing. Sunlight shown on the woman’s shiny dark face. She remained silent and solemn.

  Once I thought that her eyes stared straight at me and I looked down. There was a woman who stood beside me, rubbing her toes back and forth in the dust. She kept rubbing her toes back and forth until she was swinging her leg, one hand on her hip. Then she gave a sharp laugh. I looked over at her and it was almost like I was looking at the woman’s sister. She had the same almond shaped, slanted eyes.

  “Suppose she’s a virtuous woman?” she asked.

  I looked at her again. Her face was very dark and shiny and her cheekbones very high.

  “I’ll bet she’s one of the virtuous ones. Look at her, she’s not making any sound. Well, maybe that’s the spirit of truth. I sang, yes I did. I sang at them, and laughed in their faces. She seems to be looking for something. What makes a woman look for something? See the way she’s looking around like that? But still no sound. The rope finds her neck now. How do you find a virtuous woman? Her throat’s full of saliva and the prick of a knife. She sways her head to the side, looking for something. But still no sound. And still those eyes, those beautiful eyes. I snapped my fingers to music, and sang them a dirty song and laughed in their faces. That’s what they do to a woman who betrays a man. But me, I had no one. I wanted to find all the wonders of the New World, not just this place. And me? I laughed in their faces and sang them a dirty little song and snapped my fingers, and scratched my armpits at them. But now she looks at us as if we weren’t the same blood, as if we didn’t share the blood of this continent and hold it in our eyelids. I laughed at them showing my gold tooth. I swear to God that’s what I did. The whole earth around here is full of dead men’s bones. A land dancing in a circle dripping blood from its teeth. Now she can’t hold her shoulders up, and look how her slender neck is broken, and look how her pretty head falls over, her eyes shining like black almonds. This is how Americans create themselves . . . You are quiet even for you.”