Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters

by Maria José Silveira

  Captain Dagoberto was a man of refined tastes and ideas that were ahead of his time.

  In the trunk full of things they had brought with them, there were two packs of cards, a backgammon board, and silver chalice monogrammed with an interlacing D and M. In his first trip to Rio, Dagoberto brought Jacira a wrought-silver snuffbox and two silver cups with a new monogram, now with a J between the D and the M, a monogram that from that moment on Dagoberto would have printed on the leather trunks and everything else on the plantation. On other trips, he brought her a four-foot-long gold chain, an ivory cameo, a silver basin, and a blue-silk mantilla she never let out of her sight and which she took to the grave, wrapped around her head.

  From the beginning, Jacira learned a great deal from her husband. Dagoberto introduced her to life’s three great pleasures: the bedroom, the snuffbox, and the foot-bath. All of them had come as a surprise. He also taught her more useful things. Dagoberto passed on all of his knowledge, his ideas, his enterprises, and his aspirations to Jacira, both through his daily conduct on the plantation and the easy conversations they had around the fire in the copper pot, a custom they maintained even in the new house. When night fell, a slave woman would bring the copper pot and a basket full of corncobs, which she placed at the side of Dagoberto’s high-backed chair on the raised veranda built above the cellar. It was there they would sit and admire the sun setting across their lands, which stretched on and on, and lay out plans and dreams. Jacira would discreetly wonder at the whiteness of Dagoberto’s feet beneath the clear water of the foot-bath.

  Dagoberto also taught Jacira to read and write. This, however, hadn’t been intentional. It hadn’t occurred to him that this ability could be useful to his wife, but rather to his children, whom he made sure knew how to do both. Jacira was always close by during these lessons and easily learned to read and write as she looked on. When he discovered that his wife already knew how to read, Dagoberto nodded approvingly: “Well, well!” he exclaimed and began to make lists of books his foreman was to bring back from Rio.

  Neither Dagoberto nor Jacira had been brought up in the Church. They considered themselves Catholics, however, and over time their religiosity began to grow. Colonial society breathed Catholicism in a rather unorganized yet effective manner. Traveling priests often passed by the plantation to do a bit of proselytizing, and many of the slaves and hired hands were baptized. Slowly, with the increasingly frequent visits from the priest of the nearest village, visits which sometimes carried on for days, the couple ended up constructing a “room of the saints,” where they placed a few statuettes, among them two tiny female saints of blue-green soapstone with wavy white hair flowing to their feet. For some unknown reason, Jacira had been overcome by an unfamiliar emotion when she saw the saints for sale by a cattleman who had passed by the plantation, and she immediately bought them. From that day on, she had considered them the most beautiful pieces on her tiny altar, these almost miniature saints, made, the cattle driver had told her, by an old man, who was by now deceased, in a tiny town the people called Pouso da Capela. At the feet of the two saints, she laid a branch of a blessed palm from Palm Sunday that the priest always brought for protection against thunderbolts, lightning, and storms.

  It was a happy marriage, Jacira and Dagoberto’s. Without great displays of affection, as the era demanded, but nonetheless with great attention and care for each other and the tranquil pleasure of being together. They had nine children, of which only five survived: four boys and a girl.

  Their surviving daughter was named Maria Bárbara, and was born when her mother was thirty-two. But can we really call someone a survivor if she doesn’t make it to the age of eighteen?

  Maria Bárbara was a slender girl, almost frail, like her mother, but she had a sweet and lively temperament. The slave women who helped raise her called her Birdie on account of her voice and persistent cheerfulness. Her story, however, is quite sad, though perhaps a bit banal for her time and circumstances.

  As an adolescent, she fell in love with Jacinto, Captain Dagoberto’s foreman. In reality, he was Dona Jacira’s foreman, since at that time twelve years had passed since the death of Jacira’s husband, though she made a point—as she had done when he was still alive—of referring to him in everything, as though the Captain were still alive. Jacira had been widowed at thirty-six, leaving a hole nothing could fill until one chilly dawn when, after yet another endless night spent opening the bedroom windows and passing the hours peering, hypnotized, into the dark, she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to making her husband’s name the most important in the region. She hadn’t left the bedroom ever since the morning Dagoberto had suddenly fallen dead, practically at her feet, as they were making the rounds of the sugarcane fields four weeks earlier. That is, until the morning she made her decision, when, to everyone’s surprise, she emerged from behind the bedroom door with her customary serenity, her hair done up in a bun, wearing the black mourning clothes she would wear the rest of her life.

  That morning, she had summoned all the men and women on the plantation, those who had been welcomed into the family, the hired help, and slaves, and gathered them in the large yard. Looking down upon them from the veranda, as Dagoberto had always done, she spoke: “All of you know that the Captain is dead. This is a fact that I would give my life to deny, but I cannot. But here on this plantation, which he built and which belongs to him, he is not dead and never will die, not as long I’m still here. Everything will continue on exactly as when he was with us. No one will change anything, not so much as a blade of hay. You will all continue to belong to the estate of Captain Dagoberto, and be the men and women of Captain Dagoberto, until the day I die.”

  And so it was. The plantation still belonged to Captain Dagoberto, the cattle were still his cattle, the sugar mill, the cotton fields, the goods, and the hired hands, all his. The place at the head of the table, where Jacira never allowed anyone else to sit, was his, the chair on the veranda next to the copper pot, the left side of the bed, all of these places were left empty and would never be filled by anyone else; they would always belong to him, her Captain.

  Jacira was careful to ensure everything ran as it should. She replicated her husband’s gestures and his approach; she more than simply replicated them, in fact, she adopted them as her own. She would set out early in the morning, as the Captain had done before her, to make the rounds of the plantation and the innumerable tasks its maintenance required. She did everything as she had learned to do by watching her husband day after day. She used the same hat as her husband, which she had managed with particular deftness to make sit firmly on her smaller head, and off she would go in her widow’s attire, made of lightweight fabric to make riding easier, spending entire days surrounded by the Captain’s men.

  Are you surprised that a woman could exercise such power and authority in that era? Well, you shouldn’t be. In every era, everywhere, there have always been women whose power rivaled that of men. They’ve always existed, and they are anything but rare. By this point, you’ve no doubt noticed that the women who peopled this land during the first two or three hundred years, the ones who traveled to the most remote backlands to live on the frontier, in a country that was just getting its start, couldn’t afford to be weak and submissive the way some people would like to portray them. They had to take care of themselves; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive the inhospitable conditions in which they lived, often passing months without their husbands at home, forced to fend for themselves in many cases, and see to the conditions that would guarantee their survival. Of course, there have always been all kinds of men and women, weak and strong, craven and gullible, intelligent and limited, good and bad, powerful and impotent. But you all can be certain of one thing: the women who lived in the vast, unforgiving, magnificent backlands in the early centuries of this country’s history could be many things—but silly and fragile they were not.

  It fell to Jacira then, with her team of foremen, to wait for v
isitors at the edge of the property to guide them up to the plantation house, per the standards of courtesy and hospitality that Dagoberto had always made a point of observing. If the visitors were important, the meals they were served, as during the time of the Captain, were comparable to real banquets. When it came time for visitors to depart, it was she who once again led the convoy, accompanying them to the edge of the property. When it was neighbors who visited, she would receive them, as Dagoberto had done, taking snuff in her hammock on the porch, where she administered the courtesies her husband often had and gave her opinion on the subject matter at hand.

  She soon found herself busier and busier. In a few years, she became the most powerful plantation owner in the area. What couldn’t be obtained through persuasion she obtained by cunning or force—that was her secret motto, the motto that lent a victorious little smile when, as night neared, she would sit in her chair on the porch, her feet soaking in the warm water of the foot bath a slave woman regularly refreshed. There, next to the empty seat of her late but eternally present Captain, she would toss corncobs into the copper pot and tell him, without uttering a word, about all she had achieved in his name.

  Dona Jacira’s manner and imposing attitude were well known and were a topic of conversation miles away, together with the wealth of Captain Dagoberto’s plantation. Even in the regional capital, Vila Boa de Goiás.

  Everyone knew of the absolute loyalty Dona Jacira demanded of her employees, but they also knew that she didn’t hesitate to do her own part whenever necessary. The story of what happened with one of her cowhands, Manuel Damasceno, who killed a man over a gambling dispute and was immediately arrested by an officer of the civil guard, quickly became a legend. As soon as she learned about what had happened, Jacira set off at a gallop, trailed by her troops to the village of São Francisco. São Francisco was the closest village to her lands, and though it was small, it boasted a church and a jail.

  They entered the village kicking up dust and causing a commotion with their combination of horses, spurs, whips, dogs, and men. Within seconds, they filled the small open field that served as the town square, and Jacira ordered one of her men to dismount from his horse to call the officer to the jailhouse door. A good man, the officer had a peaceful and calm manner.

  “Good afternoon, Officer,” Jacira said.

  “Good afternoon, Dona Jacira,” he responded.

  “I’ve been informed, Officer, that Your Honor mistakenly arrested one of Captain Dagoberto’s men.”

  “You’ve been informed correctly, Dona Jacira, but there was no mistake about it. I had every intention of arresting him.”

  “Oh, is that so, Officer? May I know your reasons?”

  “Manuel Damasceno killed a man over a card game, Dona Jacira, and this I cannot permit in my village.”

  “If he killed him, the other man is already dead, Officer. It’s not by arresting one man that one brings another back to life.”

  “I may not bring him back, Dona Jacira. But I will bring him justice.”

  “Justice is for God to decide, Officer. And when it comes to my men and my things, that’s up to me and my husband. But, to make this brief, Your Honor must know I’ve come to fetch Manuel, since he is one of Captain Dagoberto’s men and is sorely missed.”

  “That I cannot permit, Dona Jacira. The lady will forgive me, but with all those arriving here in the village, how much can a single man be missed?”

  “A great deal, Officer. And all these people you see here with me came for no other reason than to bring him back with us.”

  “Only if you kill me first, Dona Jacira.”

  “My dear man, why this stubbornness?”

  “It’s not stubbornness, Dona Jacira. It’s authority. I’m here to arrest anyone who disturbs the order and send him to trial in the capital. And that’s what I’m doing.”

  “I see, Officer, that the gentleman is a man of authority. But the greatest authority in this region is Captain Dagoberto. Perhaps Your Honor hasn’t yet heard.”

  “This comes as news to me, Dona Jacira.”

  “Well, that’s no fault of ours, Officer. If you’re in need of a lesson, we’re only too happy to provide it. You need only wait.”

  Maintaining her elegance, Jacira circled her horse around and ordered her men to retreat, but the officer knew his fate was sealed. Distressed, he thought over his next move. From the very beginning of his conversation with Dona Jacira, he had seen he’d reached a dead end. He stood still, his thoughts fading away and leaving a void in their place. For a moment, he had the sensation that he had left his body and was looking down from a distance on some rooftop at his solitary figure standing at the jailhouse door, watching as the widow and her men departed, kicking up so much dust it seemed a twister had blown through town.

  The officer was unmarried and had no children. He had arrived there a little more than two years earlier, sent by the Civil Guard’s provincial command to oversee the region along with five soldiers. Just think about it: five soldiers against the Captain’s band of rough- and-tumble men.

  What a mess he’d gotten himself into! A cold sweat ran down his face as the adrenaline remaining from his confrontation with the Captain’s widow began to fade.

  When he slowly regained his thoughts, he became convinced that he had no other option than to release Manuel Damasceno. His decision made, he walked back to the cell, unlocked the door, and muttered: “Get out of here already, you miserable wretch, and I don’t ever want to see you here again. I’m warning you.”

  Later that day, Jacira was surprised to see Manuel Damasceno walking toward the plantation, kneeling at her feet and kissing her hand, thanking her and invoking all the saints that they might protect her. But Jacira was not satisfied.

  That very night, a group of ten men, each of them carrying in his saddlebags a large bundle of dry sugarcane, entered the town, this time without kicking up dust or making any noise as you’d expect from a group of their size, or even from a single man—they were trained for this after all, and could slip undetected through the cool night air as they carried out their orders. They circled the jail with the dried sugarcane, kicked down the door to check whether anyone was in the cell. There was no one, and since there was no one in the cells, even the soldier who acted as night watchman had gone home to sleep. Lucky him! The Captain’s men threw more of the dried sugarcane inside the cells, lit them on fire, and left as quietly as they’d arrived.

  The first people in the village to wake with the crackling fire and the smell of smoke could do nothing but keep the fire from spreading to other homes. The jail was already consumed by the furious flames, their rage redoubled at being called to work on such a peaceful, easy night.

  Many miles from there, from her chair on the porch, Jacira finally allowed a tiny victorious smile to form on her lips.

  “That officer has likely learned that you’re the one in charge here, Dagoberto.”

  This was Dona Jacira’s life after her husband’s death: to command, to plot, to emerge victorious. Which, nevertheless, did not diminish the attention and love she lavished on her children. She wanted to raise them, the boys, in the image of the Captain. And Maria Bárbara, in that of a little queen.

  It was not, therefore, out of cruelty that I’m about to tell you what happened. Rather, it was an error so common to so many mothers who think they know what’s best for their children, better even than the children themselves do. Hers was a tragic error that she would bitterly regret for the rest of her life.

  JACINTO, THE FOREMAN

  Strong, good-looking, and intelligent, Jacinto was also what one called a “pardo” at the time, a mulatto who was born free. On account of his skills and the affection the Captain’s family had for him, he earned the post of deputy foreman when he was still a young man. The son of a cattle driver from Bahia, a man who was neither rich nor poor, Jacinto’s family had settled down along the road to Goiás. From a young age, he liked to linger at the Jatoba Plantat
ion each time he and his father would pass by, and many times his father left him there to pick him up on his way back. Jacinto became best friends with the Captain’s sons and the love of Maria Bárbara’s life.

  Ever since they were young, the couple would go off on long walks, or on horseback, their eyes bright, their faces tanned by the sun, their bodies exuding vitality with each step.

  But Jacira had other plans for her daughter. She wanted to marry her to someone as kind and as important as Dagoberto. Let’s be fair: it wasn’t out of pure material interests that she intended to choose her daughter’s husband for her; it was because she wanted to see her daughter as happy as she had been. Love had come to her in a way so natural and so sure that she thought it ought to be the same for everyone, especially for her Maria. Which would no doubt happen were she to find a husband worthy of her, like Dagoberto. A clear thinker, learned, kind—qualities that for some reason, whether for his lack of education or his poverty, or perhaps even the color of his skin, she thought Jacinto seemed to lack.

  As soon as she noticed the friendship between the two transform into something more, she did not hesitate to transfer the foreman. First, she sent him to oversee the most distant pastures, which meant he was rarely present on the plantation. When she noticed that the distance only left her daughter more excited and happy each time she saw him, she called him aside and informed him she would no longer be needing his services. Since he had been welcomed to the plantation with Dagoberto’s blessing, she told him she would accord him the respect of speaking frankly: he was to leave the plantation, once and for all, and forget Maria Bárbara.

  Jacinto obeyed the first of her orders, but the second and third he ignored. It wasn’t difficult for him to find work at a neighboring plantation, and since he would be caught by day, he began to secretly visit Maria Bárbara at night. The young woman could barely wait to hear his soft tapping on her blue bedroom window, asking her to open it and let him in for the night.