by Amy Ragsdale
Appendixes
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Ana Licia, Keyla, Leila, and Sara (Molly’s friends) have enrolled in universities in Maceió to become nurses, physical therapists, and chemical engineers. When we visited, they returned to Penedo in force to pull Molly out to passear around town and dance till dawn.
Aniete has married Roberto, a man she’d just met when we lived there, and has a baby daughter.
Bazooka killed a man—a vengeance killing for the death of his brother—and is in prison.
Bentinho is teaching capoeira at the Centro Cultural, where I’d gotten him a job before we’d left, and is now employed by the city, teaching capoeira in all the public schools.
Elizia is still there behind the teller bars of her bookkeeper’s office at Imaculada, her seriousness bursting into smiles and engulfing hugs.
Fabio left the sugarcane factory to enroll in the small local university to study tourism.
Giovanni is finishing law school and is hot to become a labor lawyer, defending the worker.
Junior had been arrested again, but when we visited, he was still playing soccer on the ragged field down in the baixa and wanted to see if Peter remembered the victory dance.
Karol has moved south to São Paulo to become an airline attendant, pursuing her dream to travel and speak English.
Katia continues to manage the Pousada Colonial as efficiently as ever.
Robson and Shirley have a new son and continue to run their store down in the baixa.
Zeca is married and has become a professor of English in a language institute in Maceió.
Skyler is a junior in high school in Missoula and has just won several slopestyle ski competitions flipping on skis.
Molly is a junior at Macalester College, double majoring in media and cuture/international studies and interning at the Minnesota AIDS Project. She’s preparing for a junior year abroad to be spent on a sailboat off New Zealand.
Peter sold the new book proposal that he began developing in Brazil, and that book, Astoria, published a few months before our return, is selling better than any before.
I decided, on leaving Brazil, to continue with the dance company, but after several gratifying years, I am finding I have come to the end of that chapter, at least as it was written. I feel sure my next adventure will be a full one and will include more travel. I continue to grapple with balance, but I am lucky to find joy in so many people and in doing so many things.
PORTUGUESE VOCABULARY:
água de coco: coconut water
atabaque: drum played by capoeiristas
baixa: below; often refers to the geographically lower part of a town, which can also be the business center, or downtown, in port towns where shops cluster around harbors
berimbau: the one-stringed instrument played by capoeiristas
cafezinho: demitasse cups of strong, sweetened black coffee
caipirinha: a popular drink made from cachaça (sugar cane alcohol) and usually limes
capoeira: a Brazilian martial art/dance form
capoeirista: a practitioner of capoeira
carnaval: a multi-day pre-Lent festival
empregada: a house cleaner and cook who comes in during the day
equip som car: a car equipped with massive sound speakers
Eskyloh: Portuguese pronunciation of Skyler’s name
favela: urban slum
feijoada: celebratory Brazilian bean stew
fica: to make out
forró (pronounced foho): type of music and social dance found in Northeastern Brazil
frevo: a form of music and dance originating in Pernambuco, Brazil; the form it took most often in Penedo was of a small marching brass band
futebol: field soccer
futsal: small-court soccer
graviola: the green spiky fruit known in English as soursop
lancha: a passenger ferry shaped like a long tube that’s not quite high enough to stand up in
lanchonete: lunch spot with cafeteria-style home cooking
maracujá: passion fruit
Mela-Mela: the flour and food-coloring fight that takes place in Neópolis during carnaval
obrigado(a): thank you; the -o ending is used by males and the -a by females
pandeiro: a tambourine-like instrument played by capoeiristas
pousada: a bed-and-breakfast
praça: a plaza
real (reais): Brazilian currency (singular and plural)
roda: the circle made by capoeiristas within which two players spar
sim: yes
tchau: bye
tudo bem: all is well
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK my writing coaches, Peter Stark and Caroline Patterson, and my many readers along the way: Jane Ragsdale, Noel Ragsdale, Elke Govertson, Jen Ellis, Karen Sandstrom, Caroline Lonski, John Brown, Brian Gerke, Joy Harris, Jennifer Weltz, Lisa Hendricks, and Molly Stark-Ragsdale. I am grateful for the encouragement of friends: Rosalie Cates, Martha Newell, Tom Duffield, Paul Elliott, and Stephanie Daley-Watson. Thank you to Whitney Dreier at Outside Magazine Online for her interest in trying out some of this material for the nascent column Raising Rippers. Thank you to The Break Espresso for offering a warm place to work and keeping me fueled with generras. I want to thank Barrett Briske for her eagle eye as a copyeditor and her rigorous effort to grapple with all the Portuguese language references. I give special thanks to my developmental editor Anne Horowitz for her thoroughness and insight, humor and tact (how am I doing with the dangling modifiers?), and to my executive editor Laura Mazer for her clarity of vision and enthusiasm. I am most grateful to my agent Judy Klein for her astute guidance, her belief in this book, and her willingness to stick with me.
Most of all, I want to thank the people of Penedo for their incredible kindness, generosity, and friendship: Katia for her ongoing support and Suzy for taking us into the Pousada Colonial; Giovanni for his friendship and instruction in Brazilian culture and language; Elizia for her enthusiastic open arms; Iracema for holding my hand through the challenges of my children’s schooling; Mario and Valmir for their quiet bolstering of Molly and Skyler at school; Karol, Leila, Keyla, Ana Licia, Sara, and Larissa for being such wonderful friends to Molly; Victor, Ricardo, Breno, Paulinho, Pedro, and Giovanni for being such great friends to Skyler; Fernando for pulling Molly and me into dance; Aniete, Gel, and Shirley, Aunt Laura, and our landlady Ilda for their support in our home and guidance through Penedo’s daily mysteries; Bentinho, Fabio, Azul, Taciana, and the many capoeiristas, and the soccer players Lu, Manuel, Junior, Frankie, and Dalan, all of whom gave us a community; and, finally, two open-hearted, wonderful families—that of Maria and her children, Victor, Karol, Italo, and Junior, and that of Zeca and his parents, Valter and Vilma, sister Rafaella, and uncle Robson, aunt Shirley, and their children Julia and Mateus. We are eternally grateful for your friendship. My ultimate thanks go to my adventurous parents for setting me on this path; to my two sisters, Noel and Dana Ragsdale, world travelers in their own rights; and to my children, Molly and Skyler, and husband, Peter, for their tremendous courage and willingness to step into the unknown. I feel so blessed to have such a family.
About the Author
AMY RAGSDALE is a writer and choreographer based out of Missoula, Montana, who was born in New York City and raised in Madison, Wisconsin; Asia; and North Africa. She earned a BA in Art History from Harvard College and an MALS from Wesleyan. Her articles on travel and dance have appeared in High Desert Journal, Mamalode, and Outside Magazine Online, where she initiated the column Raising Rippers.
Ragsdale’s dance career included performing with Impulse in Boston, Fred Benjamin, Laughing Stone, and Ze’eva Cohen dance companies in New York, and as a guest with Bill T. Jones and Douglas Dunn. She moved to Missoula to head the dance program at the University of Montana. She has also taught contemporary dance in Spain, Indonesia, Martinique, Mozambique, and Brazil. Her choreographic work has been performed
throughout the Northwest, in New York, and televised on CNN’s World News. She is the founder of Headwaters Dance Co., the recipient of the University of Montana’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and a 2009 Governor’s Arts Award for the State of Montana.
She is married to writer Peter Stark. They have two fabulous children, an ancient imperious cat, and a relentlessly enthusiastic puppy.