Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

  Padre Eugénio had expressed doubts about ama Rachel’s charms; they were not innocent superstitions, he said, but were based on pagan practices.

  Paulo immediately came to her defense: “Certainly she has faith in her magic roots, but I tell you, when I learned my first prayers, it was from ama Rachel. Again and again, Padre, she recited them to me in Latin. She only means well for Carlos Maria, the simple old thing.”

  Ama Rachel was a great deal more than a “simple old thing,” Paulo knew, though he had no idea what gave her such status among the 160 Africans at the senzala and the slave quarters next to the Casa Grande.

  The engenho slaves were still predominantly Bantu-speaking blacks from the regions beyond Luanda and Benguela. However, after the discovery of gold, increasing numbers of slaves had come from West Africa, since they were experienced in gold mining and smelting. Some of these shipments of Yorubas, Geges, Haussas, Fulás, Mandingas, and other tribes had been delivered to Recife, among them Rachel’s grandmother, who had been bought there to work at the Casa Grande in the time of Senhor Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s father. In those days, there had been four Yoruba slaves at the engenho; today there were thirty, less than one-fifth of the Cavalcanti slaves. But, despite their small number, all at the Cavalcanti senzala held Rachel in veneration for she was a high priestess of the Yoruba, the yalorixá.

  From her mother, Rachel had learned of the supreme being, Olorun, creator of Oxalá and Orixá, who had a son, Aganjú, and a daughter, Yemanjá. Orungun, the son of Yemanjá, had fallen in love with his mother, an uncontrolled passion that led him to rape her. This union produced eleven great gods, the orixás of the Yoruba, among them Xangô, god of lightning and thunder; Ogun, god of war and iron; Oxossi, god of the hunt; Omulú, god of pestilence; and the twins Ibeji, gods of good fortune. Later, as many as four hundred additional divinities were created, including Exú, the mischievous messenger of the orixás.

  Enslaved and duly baptized into the Catholic faith, the Yoruba had not abandoned the gods of their people but had come to liken them to the divinities and saints worshiped by the Portuguese. Thus, they identified Olorun with the Almighty; his son Oxalá, known for his purity, with Jesus Christ; and Yemanjá, whom they had begged to carry them safely across the ocean from Africa, with Our Lady. Xangô, master of the elements, became John the Baptist, for whom the terrors of the wilderness had held no fear. Exú was not entirely deserving of his reputation as mischief-maker, though he had been known to complicate the fortunes of the Yoruba and so he became the devil.

  When ama Rachel sat on the floor next to Carlos Maria’s bassinet, her appearance was not impressive. Her eyes were small and deeply sunken. Her body was thin and angular. But when she was in command of a ceremony for the gods, ama Rachel was transformed into a great mother of the saints, superintending the daughters through whom the Yoruba gods were called down to earth.

  These eleven women and girls, who had been taught by the yalorixá, were summoned by her to dance to the beat of three sacred drums, their movements observed by other slaves crowded into a large room at the senzala, the men to the left, the women to the right.

  The daughters danced with their hands behind their backs, their shoulders thrusting backward and forward, their bodies swaying from the hips upward. Round and round they moved to the pulsating beat until, one by one, they were seized with violent convulsions as their orixá took possession of their bodies.

  Besides being priestess of the orixás, Rachel possessed a knowledge of herbs and roots that gave her a reputation as a curandeira, who was able to prescribe remedies for many ailments, and charms and amulets of a beneficial nature. She had a rival at the engenho, an ‘Ngola woman, who knew nothing about the orixás but was able to read the bones for those who consulted her and to offer concoctions and amulets similar to Rachel’s, except that the ’Ngola’s divinations and prescriptions were those of the feiticeira, a practitioner in black magic. Rachel despised this woman and never permitted her near the rejoicings for the orixás, often remarking that the ‘Ngola belonged outside, there along the path behind the senzala where the polished fetish stone of the devil Exú was hidden.

  At the vila of Rosário on a Friday in the last week of July 1766, the drums rolled in the square to summon the natives to witness the lashing of a thief.

  Director Elias Souza Vanderley stood thirty feet from the pillory, with his hands on his hips. Over the past six years, he had grown huge and bloated. His face was puffy and purple.

  Two assistants accompanied Vanderley: a magistrate, Sampião, and a priest, Pessoa. Vanderley had approached the Cavalcantis with the suggestion that Bartolomeu Rodrigues or Paulo seek the post at Rosário, but they saw the director as a self-serving and rapacious drunkard and had refused. Instead, Vanderley had found Sampião, a mediocre jurist at Recife, and had supported his application for the position. Similarly, he had encouraged Pessoa to serve as vicar of Rosário. Pessoa was incorrigibly venal, his brown eyes gleaming and alert for profit from the barbarians, as he called the natives.

  Rosário’s miserable huts and shacks were still grouped along the paths leading from the square and on the hill behind the church. But facing the square were new houses for thirty Portuguese who had settled here, a group who ignored the decree that their industry serve as an example to the natives. The settlers had been allotted small fields upon which to cultivate legumes, and this they did, standing out in the sun for hours as they observed the natives hired from the director tending their holdings.

  To the right of the church was the solidly built two-story municipal câmara and jail. Vanderley’s zeal in establishing a câmara had brought a commendation from Lisbon, since few aldeias had progressed this far. However, Vanderley’s eagerness to have a câmara derived from a desire less to promote the natives’ participation in colonial society than to increase his control of the vila. The native elders attended the meetings as observers, with only two actually serving the council as standard-bearer and porter. For most of the time, the council room was unused, and Vanderley directed the affairs of Rosário from his place in the shade on the veranda of his house.

  When the natives were assembled and the supervisors had quieted them, Vanderley raised his right hand. He paused, nodding his ginger head slowly at the big mulatto, who stood with his upper body bare. Then Vanderley brought his hand down with a quick motion. The drums banged away. The mulatto swung the chicote.

  Black Peter, the carpenter, received the first of one hundred lashes.

  Black Peter’s hands were tied with one end of a long rope that had been flung over an iron bar at the top of the pillory; he had been forced to raise himself on the balls of his feet. His right cheek was pressed against the wood, and he looked at the tall Cross in front of the church.

  ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . . where is Black Peter who was free?” The knout stung his back. “Jesus, Jesus . . . here I am a peça!” Again the knout. “Sweet Jesus . . . there with Senhor Artemas I was free!” The thongs struck low across his back. The mulatto shifted position. The next blow landed on his right shoulder blade. “I was free with the padres!” Again to the right, closer to the center of his back. “I stayed here. Why?” Lower now, above the top of his buttocks. “Why did Jesus send the padres away?” The thongs raked his right side, now his left. “I was Black Peter, the inspector —” The tenth blow drew the first blood, opening a cut seven inches long. His head jerked back; his eyes were pressed closed. “Jesus?”

  Before reason was lost to pain, recollections from the past six years flashed across his mind:

  Black Peter remembered Director Vanderley lecturing the council of elders and reminding them that when the Portuguese came to Brazil, they found not men but beasts devouring one another. “And never did God set a more daunting task than to tame them,” he said.

  Black Peter remembered Director Vanderley hoisting a pudgy thirteen-year-old Tapuya onto a cart. “Work! Work! Work!” The time for long lectures had passed. The church bell rang a
t dawn for assembly; no morning chants but coarse words from the overseers; no choice for the natives but to tramp to the fields. “Work! Work! Work!” The slow and the lazy to be reformed by hard labor where trees and rocks were to be cleared; malingerers condemned as vagabonds and led to the pelourinho. “Work! Work! Work!” Men and boys on the lands of settlers for six months and longer; some with good masters, but some working like peças and living like pigs.

  Some natives had rolled up their hammocks and walked away with their wives and children, but most stayed at Rosário, for they did not know the sertão. They remembered, too, the teachings of the black robes: “Be obedient.”

  The twenty-fifth blow landed on Black Peter’s bloody back.

  Vanderley had removed him from the council of elders. “They are natural sons of the land and are accepted as equals of the Portuguese,” said the director. “Your presence in the council confuses them. And do not poke around their houses,” he had added. “You are not their inspector.”

  Black Peter had avoided the director as much as possible, but the animosity between them from that very first interview remained intense. Black Peter managed to hide his resentments. In one instance, however, he did show his hatred of the director: He forbade his two daughters to go near Vanderley, who had been casting longing glances at the girls. Their avoidance of Vanderley was so obvious as to leave no doubt in his mind that the girls were acting on their father’s instructions.

  Black Peter now had few coherent memories. But there was one flash, like lightning, as the chicote tore his flesh for the thirty-seventh time: trees. Brazilwood trees. A wagonload of logs.

  Tapuya had found a stand of brazilwood three days’ journey from Rosario upon lands without an owner. Black Peter had been sent to fell and trim the trees. Five loads were delivered to Rosário, and he had been waiting for the wagon to return, when a peddler came by. The peddler’s wagon was empty after a journey among the vaqueiros in the sertão. “Fill it, Black Peter! Fill it!” said the peddler, and he offered payment in silver. Seven great dyewood logs from land that did not belong to the director, but when Vanderley learned from a native about the sale of the wood, he had flung Black Peter into jail.

  Early in the evening three days after the punishment of Black Peter, Director Vanderley was lazing in his chair on the veranda of his house. His hands rested on his belly, and through the slits of his hooded eyes, he watched the natives drift back from the fields of Rosário.

  Little George sat on the ground twenty feet from the director, leaning against a veranda support. Little George supervised the mulattoes and mamelucos who directed the work of the natives. After reporting to Vanderley on progress at a new clearing for cotton, he had gone to sit at the end of the veranda, a place he liked to occupy to remind others of his authority.

  Vanderley had lived alone at Rosário these past years. His wife and three children were still at Recife, and he saw them perhaps two or three times a year. He had silenced his wife’s complaints about this arrangement, insisting that he was not going to have his children raised among savages. Of course, the absence of Senhora Vanderley facilitated the director’s adultery with natives and blacks: He had taken a prodigious number of lovers, and he had fathered at least six children.

  Now, as he sat outside at sunset, the director saw Black Peter’s daughters coming from the direction of the carpenter’s house, which was down a lane on the opposite side of the square. Jovita, the fifteen-year-old, and Vera, the thirteen-year-old, both tall and slender like their father, were carrying water containers and were heading toward the church to reach a path that led to a creek three-quarters of a mile away.

  “Little George . . .”

  “Yes, senhor Director?” The mulatto turned to look at Vanderley and started to get to his feet.

  “Are the thief’s daughters without shame?” Vanderley asked. “Black Peter was degraded in public and yet they strut like peacocks across the square.”

  The mulatto knew that the director’s interest in Black Peter’s girls went beyond their behavior. “Shall I bring them to the senhor Director . . . to lecture them on their father’s disgrace?” he asked, his eyes alight.

  The girls reached the church and after a few moments were out of sight. “Yes,” Vanderley said. “Yes.” But when the mulatto started to go after them, Vanderley beckoned him to wait. “Not here, Little George.” He rose from the chair. “There.” He pointed in the direction the girls had taken. “At the coffee trees,” he said. “Go after them. I’ll follow.”

  Vanderley stood up and strode slowly to the small grove of trees that had been planted by Padre Leandro. The director was not interested in a crop that took from three to five years to produce a profitable yield, but the trees had been cultivated by a native elder and his sons and were now more than six feet high and laden with berries.

  Little George was waiting along the path as the girls returned from the creek, the earthen water containers balanced on their heads. At the sight of Little George, Vera grew so alarmed she dropped her water jar, which shattered at her feet. Jovita’s hands flew to grasp her own container and she took it off her head, swearing at Little George and then comforting her sister, who had started to cry.

  No sooner had Jovita put down her jar than the big mulatto seized them both. Vera shrieked for help; Jovita struggled in Little George’s iron grip, and was still resisting when Vanderley came running along the path. Jovita froze and stopped fighting to free herself.

  Black Peter’s daughters were dragged into the grove of coffee trees. Little George assaulted Vera. Vanderley raped and sodomized Jovita. When it was over, Vanderley stood above Jovita. “Go to the carpenter, my little black one,” he said. “Tell him that you have a new lover!”

  Black Peter heard a soft weeping. He was naked and lying face down. His flesh was lacerated from his shoulders to below his thin buttocks, but his wounds had been cleaned and dressed by a Tapuya elder who knew the methods of the pagés. For twenty-four hours after the lashing, Black Peter had been delirious; by this third night, he was deeply exhausted and in constant pain.

  He picked up a length of cloth that had been spread over the straw and covered his nakedness. With his first steps, his legs were unsteady.

  There was light from an oil lamp. His wife sat in a hammock with Vera, who was crying convulsively, her head buried in her mother’s lap. Jovita, her face bruised and swollen, her clothes torn and bloodstained, lay on a blanket on the floor. Black Peter’s oldest son, a boy of twelve, sat with his back to the wall; a younger boy was asleep near him. Two men who worked in the woodshop and were Black Peter’s closest friends sat at his table: Tobias and João, a father and son. The older man got up as Black Peter entered the room. The son, to whom Jovita had been promised, remained seated.

  In that instant, Black Peter knew. “Van . . . der . . . ley?” His mouth moved stiffly.

  “Father!” It was Jovita. “Oh, my Father!” Black Peter’s wife stared at him, her eyes filled with alarm.

  “Van . . . der . . . ley?”

  Tobias left the table and reached out a hand.

  Black Peter shook his head dazedly. His eyes were wide and unblinking. He started toward Jovita. “It was Van . . . der . . .” A demented wail escaped his lips as he lurched forward and crashed against the side of the table.

  They carried him back to his resting place. When he awoke in the middle of the night, Tobias was sitting near him on the floor, puffing at a thin roll of tabak. Tobias offered him the tabak; mixed with the holy herb smoked by the natives were the leaves and flowers of a plant introduced by slaves from Africa, maconha, a variety of hemp. Black Peter moved onto his side, and Tobias held the tabak for him to inhale.

  “What did my girls tell their mother?”

  “Tomorrow, Pedro. Rest.”

  “Now, Tobias.”

  In the glow as he puffed at the tabak, Black Peter’s face was impassive, a hardness more alarming to Tobias than his friend’s earlier frenzy. Soon Black
Peter refused the tabak and dozed.

  When he awoke a second time, he was aware of having had a vision: “Follow me, Pedro,” he had heard his father say, here in this room at his resting place. “Follow me, my son, to where we are men of men.”

  And Black Peter had gone with his father to a distant place, the settlement of Nganga Dzimba we Bahwe, where his great-grandfather Santiago Prêto — Nhungaza — had been captain of the royal regiment.

  His father had taken him into the Serra do Barriga, high up on the sacred mount of Ganga Zumba. He watched as 150 young men climbed to the Place of Stones and, turning their faces toward Africa, leapt from the heights one by one, to die not like dogs but like men of men.

  Black Peter looked at Tobias, asleep on the floor. He thought of Tobias’s son, João, and of Jovita. Hatred of Elias Souza Vanderley consumed him. He stood up slowly, not waking Tobias; taking a pair of breeches, he crept from the room.

  It was 3:00 A.M. Cold, with a hint of rain in the air. At his workshop, he pulled on his breeches and sat down on a bench. He rolled some maconha and tabak together, his hands shaking violently, ignited a small fire of shavings, lit the roll, and sat puffing it for a while. He grew calm and began his next task: As quietly as possible, with even strokes, he honed an oilstone on the head of a double-bladed ax.

  He stopped at the edge of the plaza. His gaze rested on the pelourinho. His eyes moved slowly to the Cross and the church. He suddenly recalled the day the Jesuits left, and his own words to Padre Leandro, who had walked to Recife: “Jesus walk with the padre!”

  Sweet Jesus! he thought. Jesus walk with Black Peter!

  Now he crossed the deserted square, heading directly to the veranda that he had built and that was so pleasing to the senhor director.

  Vanderley lay on his back in bed, his barrel chest rising and falling, his snores vibrating through the air.