Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  Her hands in his hair scratching the lice in both places. He said something about natural impulses of a man. What about a woman? What they were talking about this other time I overheard. He let me come in when his brother was there but that’s family and not a stranger. His brother was talking about social and moral relations because he’s against slavery. But it’s all on account of that Indian woman he’s got, living in the mountains with her the way he does. How could the Lord make two brothers so different? He started talking about how we would be seen in the future.

  Looking just like a backwoodsman. If it wasn’t his brother . . . He was talking about people being spiritually very much alike. What does he know? I didn’t want to listen any longer. If it wasn’t his brother I wouldn’t have stayed. He said social positions had nothing to do with the spirit of a man. Did he add, “Or woman?” When they gave them Holy Communion did that make them have a soul?

  My husband said they hadn’t earned their humanity yet, because when they did the Lord would make changes. He’s a good Catholic. But his brother, how did he get such ideas and talking about what we could learn from their knowledge and experience, ideas, and that they too had a moral and religious nature, but different from ours. Did he say humanity was something you had to earn?

  But those dark women they’ll open it for anyone. And when they first came over here all those Indian women going around naked they would open it for anyone with a bead or a piece of cloth. That’s the story anyway. The tales they used to tell. Even when they’d tell Europeans about the New World. I wouldn’t want to learn from those experiences. So he defends them, the half-souls, while his brother goes on expeditions to hunt them. A threat to the whole country and to civilization he says they were and still he thinks they’re . . . still he brought her back with him.

  His brother said it was the white men that destroyed the spiritual wholeness of those other people. But no I didn’t believe him, but my husband listened with good nature, though I know he didn’t believe it either. He says we can’t know what the truths are. That music someone’s playing? Is that the truth then?

  Anything without all those words to it, and memories in words. But then what about the different people with all the different kinds of music? I wonder if the Russian women have to be pulled apart. That first time with me he had to, that’s why they like those others. But still the same color doesn’t have the same spirit either and different nationalities. That book he’s got on medical history I looked at it and it had pictures about different races and shows where Negroes and Indians are different and those yellow people, those people from the East, and their blood is different too, but still an Indian’s blood isn’t as bad as a Negro’s, and more noble.

  He looked so mysterious. If I were an English woman I could go and see him closer. That English woman. Everyone said she acted like a whore, except in her country they behave differently. She’s a wellborn woman and from a respectable family. Still she wouldn’t have done that with anyone, and white women are the same there, in that regard, no matter what country it is.

  His brother said we had a whole sphere of things to learn from them on religion and medicine and knowledge of water and plants and the stars and other things that we call science and maybe had already learned from them but didn’t know what and gave the knowledge by a different name.

  He has all those crazy ideas. I think he’d journeyed even to the East and knew people from the Oriental world. Or met them here. But even if that happened a long time ago they’re pagans now, and what difference does it make, because that’s all that matters now. Pavel Epiphani. Why do I want to call his name that? Solovetsky, something like that. The “sky” on the end of the name I’m sure about. Why do they call them such names? The English names are short and hard though.

  It brings disorder on a country and disrespect. That’s why they look at us the way they do, the Europeans . . .

  They’re all simplehearted people he says, but what about those rebels? All those attacks on pack trains and sugar mills . . . If that expedition hadn’t destroyed them, we’d see their simple hearts. If his brother had a big house and lands and so many souls to look after and wasn’t isolated with that Indian woman, he wouldn’t have such ideas. If he were bound by all the obligations that his brother has . . . A moralist that’s what he says he is. But wait till one of the pagans does him harm, he’ll change his tune.

  My husband said he’s seen it happen how people can change their political feelings overnight. And we must think of the country as a whole.

  He said, “If I can’t bring the Indian woman in, then I won’t come in,” so he brought her into one of the interior rooms, but not with me, no thank you. Another half-soul . . .

  The Russian’s a nobleman and a member of some council, and the others are some important businessmen, and one’s a maritime trader of some kind. Men get bored with doing nothing. They’d get bored with this.

  I wonder what she’s thinking now. When he was away those fifteen months. But I told him to go to the devil when he returned with that one.

  I wonder if he’s a cruel man, but still he’s a true aristocrat. A big step from those others . . .

  That time he told me of how his friend, on that first expedition, collected the ears of the ones he’d killed, dried them, and carried them in a bag. But they do that to enemies in war and not just in this country.

  There will always be a master class, that’s what the Bible says . . . All those arguments and all that talk . . .

  Bananas and okra I’d like. That’s what I wanted that last time I was pregnant. I wonder if it’s trade in sugar or something else . . .

  I wonder how many months on a ship he spent coming here . . .

  His brother said he wasn’t still Catholic, but he praised the Jesuits except where the Indians were concerned. But they were better than the Franciscans, he said. My husband praised the Jesuits too, and said their plan made greater men from lesser men. Still I like all those Catholic holidays—concerts, festivals, games, processions. That’s where I met him. I told him my husband was away on that expedition. What expedition? He hadn’t heard of Palmares, but then he hadn’t been in the country a long time. If it wasn’t for that festival I wouldn’t have met him.

  Then I went to that one. I was mad at Olinda for not telling me she was a black woman. He’d been away for those fifteen months and he would have known it was not his . . . When it’s some holy day, it’s not the same for a woman. I waited that other time, but on a holy day it’s different . . .

  I like those Catholic ceremonies. They keep dreariness away from a woman. Moraze, looking at me as if she were the queen of Brazil. Olinda should have told me it was a black woman . . . A maker of angels they call them . . .

  He gave me that strange look. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for that festival and the feelings I was having then. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but I’ll tell anyone I was surprised to find myself in his arms.

  That queen of Brazil. Some magic potion for that. She disappeared into some small dark room and then came out to me, then took me back there to make angels . . .

  Now she’s probably pouring them all some wine to drink or strong beer . . .

  A silent husband and now his silent lover. He goes there fighting them all of these years and then he returns with her. But that’s the way things are for a man, what they all do with the conquered women. That’s the story of conquest. That story she told about the Moorish woman and the enemy having the right to see her. But then there’s some way of communicating they have without conversation, because they don’t speak in the way we do anyway. Well, I’ve never learned to communicate with those people anyway, and that one seldom smiles. But then I should have thought of a man’s loneliness those fifteen months, the woods anyway full of Indian women—all those dark women they could want, and even if not, accept that as part of his profession.

  I can’t get out of my mind that woman slashing her mulatto slave girl with gl
ass down there. Now that’s some communication. More than I could say. Still I wouldn’t want to see it afterwards. But they say she laughed after that, like she got a good feeling in that. But what made her crazy was the man stayed with the girl even after that, even after she was mutilated down there, as if he truly loved her, though he had others too. He kept that one and all that time she thought he would discard her, and that it was just for that . . . And that priest who was trying to pretend that woman was his spiritual companion . . . Still I think he kept her to prove something to that woman, and not because of her.

  If he had been in one of the wars with the Dutch I wonder if he would have taken a Dutch woman and brought her home. They used to call them “lead feet”—why I don’t remember, but I heard my father call one of those Dutch “lead feet,” or maybe it was the only Dutch men they called “lead feet” and not also the women.

  But still those friars no matter what they say have a weakness of the flesh the same as any other man. A weakness for the flesh. Because if she was, then we’re all spiritual companions and not companions of the flesh.

  The queen of Brazil. That remedy she gave me to take with me afterwards. I still remember how it tasted. I took some of it and threw the rest out, and took that doctor’s medicine. I let her do what I could see with my eyes and feel, but that other, no telling what she might have put in it.

  They’d all make themselves the queens of Brazil if they could. Like the leader of those renegades called himself a king. I still can’t get those eyes out of my memory either. I like the ones that are trained not to look at you. This one, she doesn’t look at you straight, always out of the corner of her eyes. I prefer the ones with short, matted hair. It’s some magic potion she used and then had it straightened some way. I remember that old slave I had who let me touch her hair. It felt like a sponge. When I was a child it was—not now I wouldn’t have asked to touch one of their heads. But then I did and hid my fingers in there. An old woman I thought she was then, but they had to send her away, they said, because of her dreams of revolution. I didn’t know what they meant. I was a child. And if it was only dreams of revolution and she did nothing?

  Some manioc cake and couscous I always see and remember that old slave. And that feeling I had then with my hand in her hair. Then she went on rubbing my hair and getting the lice out. I guess that’s why I still like it now and always get one of those women to come and rub my head.

  And I remember the first time he pushed my legs open . . .

  That time those other women came and I called all my black slave women and each one had a girl and we all sat there getting our heads rubbed and talking.

  But those men were in the next room talking about their adventures.

  I’d like to have gone back on that ship with him and traveled through Europe and then come back here when he came on other business. And what if there had been women on that expedition?

  Sometimes I’d like to travel through my own country. Those black women get to travel. No one minds them and they come and go anyway. If they aren’t slaves . . . And some of them are free women . . . But a woman is nothing anywhere.

  When I was in the confessional I was thinking if I confess it all to him, why shouldn’t he confess to me too? His weakness for the flesh? Because everyone knows the story about that priest in Porto Calvo, who when those young penitent girls would come in, he’d seduce them right there, and that’s the way he used his confessional. I was thinking of that and trying to see his eyes too. They still whisper about how he received that package of mercury, what they use to cleanse their blood.

  Dried meat and salt cod and mercury they said he received from Portugal, and everyone knows what the mercury is for. I just told him part of it, how my imagination started to work. But Father I did nothing, I told him. Suppose I had told him all of it? Maybe he would have dropped his robe and . . . I tried to see his eyes, but I stared into my palms. It was only a sin of thought, I told him, and described to him how those festivals and ceremonies excite me. He said they’re meant to excite the soul . . . Still I wanted him to know what it was like.

  I wanted to see what his eyes were saying.

  Alcantara. He said my name then. He must have known that it was a memory and accumulation of fantasies. But that’s what memory is, an accumulation of fantasies, because you never know what reality really is.

  And history too could be an accumulation of collective fantasies, our own and everyone’s . . .

  But he said if things kept up the way they were it would be better if the country did not have memories . . .

  He said that one day they’d free all the slaves, that was his dream . . . How could a sane man dream that?

  That look made me feel strange inside and I wonder what it would have been if I had told him about what had really happened with that man who kept changing, whose eyes looked like they kept changing from one moment to the next. It wasn’t just my imagination, my fantasy . . .

  I remember that bare room mostly. A stove, a low hammock, some mats. The stove for brewing potions. That plant she had growing, the way she went to it, touched it, and stood there as if she were communicating with it without any words. Yes, she was talking to it, silently some way, and then she looked at me again with those eyes like she thought she was the queen of the country, or what I thought that she was thinking.

  Then she was talking out loud to it, saying its name. Ipecacuanha, she said. Softly she kept saying it, looking at the plant as if it had some soul, and not caring who would laugh at her. She would do it, even knowing someone might laugh. But I didn’t. I kept looking at her and that strange plant she treated with such affection, as if there were some sort of bond between them. Some mystery and affection. Then she did tell me that it was a mystical plant and had much power. Then she started telling me about the power most plants have generally, a grander range of power than most people do or think, and about the power that God gave them, and what they can do for and to human beings. How they can heal or destroy, how they can get into the mind, how they can affect a man or woman’s spirit. Over and over she talked about the power God gave them and how they can communicate in all those ways with a man’s or woman’s spirit.

  Something she said about one’s perceptions and possibilities. And this Ipecacuanha she said was her spiritual companion. I didn’t laugh because I was in her hands then, but I’ll laugh now at that silliness. And when she was done she gave me some magic plant, toasted it and crushed it and mixed it with something and put it in a bottle. I took a little of it but no telling what it could have done if I’d done what she said. Her spiritual companion. Ha!

  Those young boys some of them have their first sex with a mandacaru. Their spiritual companions? Ha! Like what that priest said about that woman. I wondered if it was a man or woman plant. Did she speak to it as if it were a man or a woman? Her hands caressing it.

  Ipecacuanha.

  She spoke like she could call it across time and space.

  Ha! And she wore a leaf of it in her hair for a charm. I listened to that silliness then, because I was in her hands. She stood very straight, like her position was a dignified one, speaking with such seriousness, like she was a queen. Singing a praise song for that plant.

  Ipecacuanha, she said, and maybe it was some Bantu language she was speaking then. Some Guinea language. Some pagan speech. If I’d been in the mood I’m in now, I might have asked her how many languages she knows and understands. Could she speak to it in any language, like it had its own voice and its own spirit? Perhaps women of all sorts and languages come to her to make angels . . .

  Still I wouldn’t be thinking of those dark women all the time if he hadn’t brought that one here. And someone taught her to avoid a white woman’s eyes. I wonder if she looks at him.

  I’d like to have some view of the sea. They always make the women sleep in rooms without windows. Ever since I was a girl. Always they put you in the inner rooms. I’d like a window by the sea and the smell of o
range trees and lemons. A room without windows. That sounds like the title of a book.

  That English woman was talking about having a home near the sea, a room full of windows, and walking about the seashore, gathering sea-shells, and how she liked the wide veranda. She laughed when I scattered the cinnamon leaves about, and when that girl began to rub my hair. She laughed until she’d been here long enough to get lice in her own hair. It wasn’t funny then.

  When we went out I rode in the covered hammock and she walked along beside me. She wanted to taste the guava and jackfruit. I remember her hard way of speaking Portuguese, the opposite way the Negroes speak it. I couldn’t understand her half the time. She spoke like all the words were coming through her nose. She called herself an independent woman. But here that’s just another name for a whore. Still she was more interesting than any I know. And in her own country she’s considered respectable.

  Except she said that the mulattoes have such magnificent eyes and how attractive they were. “They have such an aesthetic sense,” she said. Or sensibility? Nonsense.

  “It was performed by all mulatto actors,” she was telling Olinda about some play.

  “All the mulattoes here are drawn to acting and literature and aesthetic things—the free ones,” Olinda proclaimed, showing off how well she knew them. Trying to impress that English woman.

  I didn’t join in the conversation.

  That’s when she noticed it, the English woman. “This room doesn’t have any windows,” she said.

  And that’s when I truly noticed it, and knew I’d always all my life been in rooms without windows, all the respectable girls had. That’s when she started talking about all her windows and that precious view of the sea.

  I don’t trust a woman that talks like a man and talks to men so freely. Then I found out she was writing about us, writing about her views of all the countries she’d been in, even Africa she’s traveled to. I didn’t want to be in her tales of some wild and savage country, because that’s the way she probably saw us. In this new world.