Diamonds are a novelty in the region. Until recently they were used to keep score in card games. When it was discovered what these little crystals were, the king of Portugal presented the first ones to God and the pope and then bought from the Vatican the very costly title of Most Faithful King.
The streets of Ouro Prêto rise and fall steeply like knife blades, its people divided between summits and abysses. The fiestas of those at the top are displays of obligatory celebration, but the fiestas of those at the bottom provoke suspicion and punishment. Dark skins conceal threats of witchcraft and dangers of rebellion. The songs and music of the poor are a sin. The mulatta who likes to laugh risks prison or banishment, and on a Sunday of merriment a black slave can lose his head.
(209)
1736: Saint John’s, Antigua
Flare-ups
They sealed their oath drinking from the same earthenware bowl a mixture of rum, grave dirt, and rooster’s blood, and an earthquake of drums exploded. They had the powder ready to blow up the governor and all the chief gentry of the British island of Antigua. So the prosecutor told it. So the judges believed.
Six black slaves die of hunger, lashed to the stake, and another five are broken to pieces. Seventy-seven are burned alive. Two others save themselves by telling lies that condemn their fathers to the fire.
The conspirators are charcoal or putrid meat, but they wander along the beach at dawn. While the low tide bares marvels in the sand, fishermen cross paths with the dead, who are seeking water and food to continue their journey to the beyond.
(78)
1738: Trelawny Town
Cudjoe
Plants and people stream with sweat in the hairy mountains of western Jamaica. Even the sun hides itself when the long wail of the horn announces that the enemy chief has arrived at the pass.
This time Colonel Guthrie does not come to fight. The English slavers offer peace to the maroons. They promise to respect the freedom they have won in long years of war and recognize their ownership of the lands they live on. In exchange, the maroons turn themselves into gendarmes of their imprisoned brothers: from now on, they will help punish slave rebellions on the sugar plantations and will return fugitives who come here seeking refuge.
Chief Cudjoe goes out to meet Colonel Guthrie. Cudjoe wears a brimless hat and a jacket that once was blue and had sleeves. The red dust of Jamaica imparts one color to skin and clothing, but not even a button is missing on the colonel’s vest and the whiteness of his rolled wig can still be discerned. Cudjoe falls to the ground and kisses his boots.
(78, 86 and 264)
1739: New Nanny Town
Nanny
After dealing with Cudjoe, chief of the Leeward maroons, Colonel Guthrie marches east, but some unknown hand slips a deadly poison into his rum, and he falls like lead from his horse.
Some months later, at the foot of a very high mountain, Captain Adair secures peace in the east. Sporting a ceremonial sword and a silvery hat, Quao, chief of the Windward maroons, accepts his conditions. But on these eastern cliffs Nanny has more power than Quao. The scattered Windward bands obey her, as do the squadrons of mosquitos. Nanny, a large woman of fiery clay, mistress of the gods, wears nothing but a necklace of English soldiers’ teeth.
No one sees her, everyone sees her. They say she is dead, but she hurls herself naked, a black bombshell, into the center of the battle. She squats with her back to the enemy, and her magnificent ass catches the bullets. Sometimes she sends them back with interest and sometimes she turns them into balls of cotton.
(78 and 264)
Pilgrimage in Jamaica
They come from holes in the trees, holes in the ground, chinks between rocks.
Rains and rivers do not hold them back. They cross marshes, ravines, forests. Neither fog nor the fierce sun sidetracks them. Slowly, implacably, they descend from the mountains. They march in profile, on a straight course, without deviations. Their shells gleam in the sun. Battalions of warrior males head the pilgrimage. At any sign of danger they raise their weapons, their claws. Many die or lose an arm opening the way. The soil of Jamaica creaks, covered by this immense army of crabs.
The journey to the sea is long. After two or three months they arrive exhausted—those that arrive. Then the females come forward and let themselves be covered by the waves, and the sea pulls out their eggs.
Of the millions that began the journey to the sea, few return. But the sea incubates, beneath the sand, a new crab people. And before long this new people sets out for the mountains whence came their mothers; and there is no one to stop them.
The crabs have no heads. They arrived late at the distribution of heads that was made by the god king in his cotton and copper palace back in Africa. Crabs have no heads, but they dream and know.
(86)
1742: Juan Fernández Islands
Anson
The Chileans believe that the waves of this ocean are horses with foaming mouths that witches ride with reins of gulfweed. The waves hurl their assault upon the boulders which do not believe in witches, and the rocky castles submit to the beating with remote disdain. High above, dignified as a king, a billy goat with venerable beard contemplates the spray. Few goats remain on the Juan Fernández Islands. Years ago the Spaniards brought from Chile a pack of dogs to seize this easy food, thus denying it to the pirates.
Commander Anson’s men vainly hunt the shadows of horns among rocks and precipices, and think they recognize the mark of Alexander Selkirk on the ears of a goat they catch. The English flag flies intact from the ships’ masts. Lord George Anson’s fleet will return to London devastated by hunger and scurvy, but the booty will be so splendid that forty ox-carts will not suffice to haul it from the port. In the name of perfecting Cartography, Geography, Astronomy, Geometry and the Art of Navigation, scientist Anson has hunted down various Spanish ships with his guns and set fire to several towns, taking everything, down to wigs and embroidered underwear.
In these years the British Empire is coming to birth in the translation from piracy to contraband; but Anson is a pirate of the old school.
(10)
1753: Sierra Leone River
Let Us Praise the Lord
The revelation of God came in the flashes of lightning. Captain John Newton was converted to Christianity on a night of blasphemy and drunkenness when a sudden storm was on the point of sending his ship to the bottom of the ocean.
Since then he is one of the Lord’s elect. Every evening he preaches a sermon. He says grace before each meal and starts every day singing psalms which the crew hoarsely repeat in chorus. In Liverpool, at the end of each voyage, he pays for a special ceremony of thanksgiving to the All-Highest.
While awaiting a cargo at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, Captain Newton puts fears and mosquitos to flight and beseeches God to protect the ship African and all her crew, and to ensure that the merchandise he is about to load reaches Jamaica intact.
Captain Newton and his numerous colleagues are engaged in a triangular trade between England, Africa, and the Antilles. At Liverpool they load cloth, rum, rifles, and knives which they exchange for men, women, and children on the African coast. The ships steer a course for the Caribbean islands, and there exchange the slaves for sugar, molasses, cotton, and tobacco which they take to Liverpool to start the cycle again.
In his leisure hours the captain contributes to the sacred liturgy by composing hymns. On this night, shut up in his cabin, he begins to write a new one as he waits for the slave caravan, delayed because a few slaves tried to kill themselves by eating clay on the way. He already has the title. The hymn will be called “How Sweet the Sound of Jesus’ Name.” The first verses are done, and the captain hums possible melodies beneath the accomplice lamp that swings from the upper deck.
(193)
1758: Cap Français
Macandal
Before a large assembly of runaway slaves, François Macandal pulls a yellow handkerchief out of a glass of water.
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“First it was the Indians.”
Then a white handkerchief.
“Now, whites are the masters.”
He shakes a black handkerchief before the maroons’ eyes. The hour of those who came from Africa has arrived, he announces. He shakes the handkerchief with his only hand, because he has left the other between the iron teeth of the sugar mill.
On the plains of northern Haiti, one-handed Macandal is the master of fire and poison. At his order cane fields burn; and by his spells the lords of sugar collapse in the middle of supper, drooling spit and blood.
He knows how to turn himself into an iguana, an ant, or a fly, equipped with gills, antennae, or wings; but they catch him anyway, and condemn him; and now they are burning him alive. Through the flames the multitude see his body twist and shake. All of a sudden, a shriek splits the ground, a fierce cry of pain and exultation, and Macandal breaks free of the stake and of death: howling, flaming, he pierces the smoke and is lost in the air.
For the slaves, it is no cause for wonder. They knew he would remain in Haiti, the color of all shadows, the prowler of the night.
(63 and 115)
1761: Cisteil
Canek
The Maya Indians proclaim the independence of Yucatán and announce the forthcoming independence of America.
“Spanish power has brought us nothing but troubles. Nothing but troubles.”
Jacinto Uc, who makes trumpets sound by caressing the leaves of trees, crowns himself king. Canek, black snake, is his chosen name. The king of Yucatán ties around his neck the mantle of Our Lady of the Conception and harangues the other Indians. They have rolled grains of corn on the ground and sung the war chant. The prophets, the men with warm breasts enlightened by the gods, have said that he who dies fighting will reawaken. Canek says he is not king for love of power, that power craves more and more power, and that when the jug is full the water spills out. He says he is king against the power of the powerful, and announces the end of serfdom and whipping posts and of Indians lining up to kiss the master’s hand.
“They won’t be able to tie us up: they’ll run out of rope.”
In Cisteil and other villages the echoes multiply, words become screams; and monks and captains roll in blood.
(67 and 144)
1761: Merida
Fragments
After much killing, they have taken him prisoner. Saint Joseph has been the patron saint of this colonial victory. They accuse Canek of scourging Christ and of stuffing Christ’s mouth with grass. He is convicted. He is to be broken alive with iron bars in the main square of Merida.
Canek enters the square on muleback, his face almost hidden by an enormous paper crown. On the crown his infamy is spelled out: Risen against God and against the King.
They chop him up bit by bit, without permitting him the relief of death, worse than an animal’s fate in a slaughterhouse; then they throw the fragments of him into the bonfire. A prolonged ovation punctuates the ceremony. Beneath the ovation, it is whispered that the serfs will put ground glass in the masters’ bread.
(67 and 144)
1761: Cisteil
Sacred Corn
The executioners throw Canek’s ashes into the air, so that he won’t revive on the day of the Last Judgement. Eight of his chiefs die by garroting and two hundred Indians have an ear cut off. Hurting what is most sacred, soldiers burn the rebel communities’ seedcorn plantings.
The corn is alive. It suffers if it is burned; its dignity is hurt if it is trodden on. Perhaps the corn dreams about the Indians, as the Indians dream about the corn. It organizes space and time and history for the people made of corn flesh.
When Canek was born, they cut his navel cord over a corncob. In the name of the newly born, grains of corn stained with his blood were planted. From this cornfield he fed, and drank clear water containing the light of an evening star, and so grew up.
(1, 67, 144, and 228)
1763: Buraco de Tatú
The Subversives Set a Bad Example
The guides, who can see as well on a moonless night as by day, elude the traps. Thanks to them, the soldiers are able to cross the labyrinth of treacherous sharpened stakes, and swoop down at dawn on the free blacks’ village.
Smoke of gunpowder, smoke of flames: the air is thick and sour down by the beach at Itapoā. By midday nothing remains of the Buraco de Tatú, the fugitive slaves’ refuge which for twenty years has been such an offense to the nearby city of Sāo Salvador de Bahia.
The viceroy has sworn to cleanse Brazil of runaway slaves, but they sprout up on all sides. In vain Captain Bartolomeu Bueno lops off four thousand pairs of ears in Minas Gerais.
Rifle butts force into line those who did not fall in defense of the Buraco de Tatú. All are branded on the chest with the letter F for fugitive, and returned to their owners. Captain Joaquim da Costa Cardoso, who is short of cash, is selling children at bargain prices.
(264 and 284)
Communion
History, the pink-veiled lady offering her lips to those who win, will have much to hide. She will feign absent-mindedness or sicken with fake amnesia; she will lie that the black slaves of Brazil were meek and resigned, even happy.
But plantation owners oblige the cook to sample each dish before their eyes. Among the delights of the table lurk poisons that promise long agonies. Slaves kill; and they also kill themselves or flee, which are their ways of robbing the master of his chief wealth. Or they rise up, believing and dancing and singing, which is their way of redemption and resurrection.
The smell of cut sugarcane inebriates the plantation air, and fires burn in the earth and in human breasts: the fire tempers the whips, drums rumble. The drums invoke the ancient gods, who fly to this land of exile in response to the voices of their lost children, enter them, make love to them, and, pulling music and howls from their mouths, give them back their broken life intact.
In Nigeria or Dahomey, the drums ask fecundity for the women and the fields. Not here. Here the women bear slaves and the fields crush them. The drums do not ask for fecundity, but vengeance; and Ogum, the god of iron, sharpens daggers instead of plows.
(27)
Bahia Portrait
Those in command in Bahia say that the black man does not go to Heaven, pray as he might, because he has rough hair that pricks Our Lord. They say he does not sleep: he snores. That he does not eat: he swallows. That he does not talk: he mumbles. That he does not die: he comes to an end. They say that God made the white man and painted the mulatto. The black man, the Devil shat.
Any black fiesta is suspect of homage to Satan, that atrocious black with tail, claws, and trident, but those in command know that if the slaves amuse themselves from time to time, they do more work, live more years and have more children. Just as the capoeira—ritual and mortal hand-to-hand combat—purports to be a colorful game, the candomblé pretends to be nothing but dance and noise. Furthermore, Virgins or saints to lend a disguise are never lacking. No one stops Ogum from turning into Saint George, the blond cavalier, and the mischievous black gods even conceal themselves in the wounds of Christ.
In the slaves’ Holy Week, it is a black that administers justice to the traitor, blowing up the white Judas, a puppet painted with lime; and when the slaves parade the Virgin in procession, the black Saint Benedict is at the center of all homage. The Church does not recognize this saint. According to the slaves, Saint Benedict was a slave like themselves, a cook in a monastery, and angels would stir the pot while he said his prayers.
Anthony is the saint preferred by the masters. Saint Anthony sports military stripes, draws a salary, and specializes in policing blacks. When a slave escapes, the master throws the saint into the corner with the trash. Saint Anthony remains in penitence, face down, until the dogs catch the runaway.
(27 and 65)
Your Other Head, Your Other Memory
From the sundial of the San Francisco monastery, a lugubrious inscription reminds passersby how
time flies: Every hour that passes wounds thee and the last will kill thee.
The words are written in Latin. The black slaves of Bahia do not know Latin or how to read. From Africa they brought happy and scrappy gods: the blacks are with them, to them they go. Whoever dies, enters. The drums beat so that the deceased will not get lost and will arrive safely in Oxalá. There, in the house of the creator of creators, awaits his other head, the immortal head. We all have two heads and two memories. A head of clay, which will turn to dust; and another, forever invulnerable to the gnawings of time and of passion. One memory that death kills, a compass that expires with the journey; and another memory, the collective memory, which will live as long as the human adventure in the world lives.
When the air of the universe first stirred and breathed, and the god of gods was born, there was no separation between earth and heaven. Now they seem to be divorced; but heaven and earth join again each time someone dies, each time someone is born, and each time someone receives the gods in a throbbing body.
(361)
1763: Rio de Janeiro
Here
A quarter of a century ago, Luis da Cunha proposed to the king of Portugal that he move with all his court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, and that in this city he proclaim himself Emperor of the West. The capital of the empire should be here, at the center of abundance, because Portugal could not live without the riches of Brazil but Brazil, Luis da Cunha warned, could easily live without Portugal.
For the time being the throne remains in Lisbon, but the center of the colony is displaced from north to south. Bahia, the sugar port, yields to Rio de Janeiro, port of gold and diamonds. Brazil is growing southward and westward, beating against Spanish frontiers.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 40