Black Peter started walking toward Paulo. He did not look in the direction of the senhor de engenho’s son, who was crying out and struggling with the men holding him.
Paulo turned his head again. “Oh, my God!”
In that instant, one of the runaways slashed the boy’s throat with his machete, so deep that the head flopped back, blood spurting from the gaping wound.
“Murderers! God curse you!”
“Yes, Senhor Capitão . . . the butchers of Portuguese dogs!” Black Peter gestured toward Paulo’s weapons. “Throw them down!”
The blacks standing near them began to move forward.
“Drop them, Senhor Paulo Cavalcanti.” Black Peter knew the captain of Santo Tomás’s militia. There was the time he had gone to the engenho with Padre Leandro to return Onias, and he had seen Paulo on his visits to Rosário.
Paulo threw down his weapons. “You’ll hang, Black Peter. You’ll hang as surely as God witnesses your bloody murders.”
Black Peter smiled. “I’m ready to die, Cavalcanti,” he said. “I was ready the night I killed Elias Souza Vanderley.”
The mixed breed next to Paulo had stopped his appeals. He was dumbfounded with terror, his mouth hanging open as he looked at Black Peter.
Paulo glanced past Black Peter toward the house. “Where are they? Senhor Mariano and his family?”
Black Peter did not answer. Other blacks laughed, and brandished their machetes. One of them cried out, “Why do we wait?”
Black Peter looked at his men. His lean features hardened. “Kill him!” he commanded. “Kill the Portuguese!”
“O holy God!” Paulo cried. “Jesus!”
The runaways began to move forward.
“Wait!” It was Black Peter. His men stopped.
At this point, the mixed breed tried to run off but was quickly seized and hurled to the ground. Six or seven machetes and clubs rose and fell above him. Other blacks guarded Paulo.
“This is a Cavalcanti,” Black Peter said, when the mixed breed was silenced. “A noble of the land! Let him die like a dog!”
With Black Peter giving commands, the circle of men closed in. Paulo struck out with his fists, but he was quickly overpowered and stripped naked. A length of rope was tied around his neck.
He was forced to his knees and made to crawl along beside the house, where his captors showed him the bodies of the planter and his family. He was kicked and cursed.
Suddenly one of his captors leapt forward, waving a sharpened length of thick cane. “Let the dog have a tail!” he shouted. Paulo screamed hideously as the cane was driven up his anus.
Half of the planter Mariano’s slaves stood with the runaways. Of the other ten, four were dead and six had fled into the fields. But one of the blacks who had joined the renegades was so horrified by the savagery against the senhor capitão that he stormed forward with his machete to drive off Paulo’s tormentors. He was swiftly hacked to death.
Black Peter did not take a direct part in the torment of Paulo. He came toward him now, carrying Paulo’s own sword.
Paulo was still on his knees, mumbling prayers to God and the saints. To the little Santo Tomás, too, the battered image before his eyes. He looked up dazedly.
Black Peter gave a triumphant cry and thrust the blade deep into Paulo’s side.
After the slaying of Paulo Cavalcanti and his companions, Black Peter changed his tactics. Until now he had been constantly on the move, evading capture by hiding during the day and passing through the valleys at night. Now he led the fifty men with him to the densely wooded foothills of the Serra do Barriga, almost one hundred miles south of Engenho Santo Tomás.
They reached the Serra do Barriga on October 9, three days after Paulo’s death, and almost immediately made a discovery that elated Black Peter. Between the palms and trees, they found the ruins of Palmares.
Black Peter went alone to a hill just to the south of the range. Near the summit, he came to a narrow passage formed by a wall of tightly packed stones that followed the contour of the hill. The wall was sixty feet long and had collapsed in several places, and as Black Peter clambered over piles of stone, he saw that the passage opened into an enclosure littered with broken pottery figurines, old tools, and rusty weapons. A toucan had alighted on the stones to his left.
“I am Black Peter,” he addressed the bird. “I have come to the place of Ganga Zumba!”
He gave an exultant cry then, frightening off the bird, but he laughed as it flew down to the trees, for his father had told him that the huge-billed birds always returned to the sanctuary where Nganga Dzimba we Bahwe had worshiped.
In the middle of the night eleven days after Paulo Cavalcanti’s body had been carried to Santo Tomás, Padre Eugênio Viana was awakened from a troubled sleep. He climbed out of bed and put on his cassock, then opened the door to his room, stepped outside, and paused, listening to sounds of lamentations coming from below.
The boards of the choir loft creaked as Viana crossed to the right gallery. Three-quarters of the way along the balcony, he stopped and stood with his hands on the railing, glancing down into the chapel, where several candles had been lit.
Bartolomeu Rodrigues was down on his knees, beside Paulo’s coffin. His sobbing was interrupted by long silences.
“Hear his weeping, O Lord,” Viana whispered. “Console his suffering, I beseech thee.”
Through the eleven days since October 10 when Paulo was brought back to the Casa Grande, a constant stream of relatives and friends had come to pay their respects. Joaquim and Isabel Costa Santos were still here to comfort Luciana and the children. Geraldo, who was now married and living at Recife, was here, too, with his wife. Of the close family, only Graciliano Cavalcanti was absent.
Eight years had passed since Graciliano left Santo Tomás for the sertão. Bartolomeu Rodrigues had steadfastly refused to forgive Graciliano. “He must come to my house, dragging his pride with him!”
The senhor had grown deafer to Viana’s pleas to make peace with Graciliano, as reports of more bastards Graciliano had fathered reached the engenho: There were now five children. Yet Bartolomeu Rodrigues had not had Graciliano evicted from Fazenda da Jurema. “I should have acted while there was a chance to crush his rebellion,” he had told Viana. “I promised the Lord no blood would be shed between father and son. I will keep my promise.”
Viana had seen Graciliano several times the past three years on the young Cavalcanti’s cattle-drive expeditions with the vaqueiros to the coast. Graciliano was as unyielding as his father: “I was thrashed like a peça until my eyes were bloodied and my sides heaving. It’s senhor pai, not me, who must seek peace. Let him call me to his side and offer a few words of regret. I’ll listen. Until then, I stay where I am.”
Viana had seen a change in Graciliano: He was quieter, introspective, and had developed a passion for the backlands. He spoke with admiration of the poderosos, “the great men of the earth,” and made it clear that he saw himself in a similar role. “I can make something of the place,” he had said at their first meeting two years after his flight, and he had spoken of lands north of Riacho Jurema that the Cavalcantis could buy, and of other improvements he would make to the property.
“Will you stay forever in that pitiless wilderness?” Viana had asked him.
“What is there for me here? What has there ever been? I’m not the firstborn heir to these valleys.”
When Bartolomeu Rodrigues did not evict him and Paulo gave support to his plans for the ranch, Graciliano had gone on to increase the holding by a third and to raise the herd to eight thousand animals. Viana had hoped that this success would encourage the senhor to forgiveness, but it did not.
“He will come to me,” Bartolomeu Rodrigues had said resolutely.
Viana was thinking of Graciliano now as he watched the senhor turn away from Paulo’s coffin and begin to move across the stone slabs. When he finally reached the marble altar, he pressed his cheek against it and wept aloud.
Then Bartolomeu Rodrigues spoke, in a voice so low that Viana had to lean forward to hear him: “Please, Padre, ride to the sertão. Go, Eugênio Viana, and fetch Graciliano.”
“Thank God!” Viana said fervently.
“I want my son here,” Bartolomeu Rodrigues said. “I will ask his forgiveness.”
“Bartolomeu, he is sent for.”
The senhor did not grasp what Viana had said. “Now, Eugênio. Go yourself.”
Viana placed a hand on his shoulder. “The day after Paulo was carried home . . . forgive me, Bartolomeu, I didn’t wait for you to ask. Ten days ago I dispatched men to the fazenda.”
The thirty-two men galloped up the hill to the Casa Grande of Santo Tomás, their expressions grim, their eyes blazing with murderous intent. Five days and two hundred miles they had ridden, stopping only to rest their heated mounts and ready their spare ponies.
They wore the vaqueiro’s suit of leather and low wide-brimmed hats, but some had added embellishments: a flaming red waistcoat, a tattered gray coat with flared pleats and enormous cuffs, purple breeches, a wig with two pigtails tied with bows, a three-cornered felt hat trimmed with gold braid and ostrich fronds, a bright green turban. Two-thirds were vaqueiros from Fazenda da Jurema, a mixed group of small, wiry caboclos, three mulattoes, and two blacks. Ten riders were from neighboring ranches, with whom there had long been an alliance. Armed with muskets and wide-mouthed pistols, and with swords and knives as sharp as razors, to a man they had volunteered to hunt the devil in these valleys to the east.
Graciliano Cavalcanti led this rustic cavalry to the open ground in front of the Casa Grande, reining in his pony at the last moment, so that the lead horses halted at the edge of the long veranda. The vaqueiro Estevão Ribeiro Adorno, fifty-nine now, his skin wrinkled and dry, his hair gray, drew up beside Graciliano and acknowledged the order to have the men dismount and wait.
Graciliano was leaner, and the loss of weight made him seem taller. He wore tanned breeches and high boots, a red silk waistcoat, and a long leather coat that hung below his knees. He carried two knives, one long, one short; a pistol; and the sword with which, twelve years ago at the age of nineteen, he had killed a man at Recife and which was engraved with the words “Justice Lives.” His favorite weapon was borne with other equipment on a spare mount — a nine-foot cattle goad fitted with a steel blade.
Eugênio Viana came hurrying along the veranda as Graciliano swung down from his saddle. “Thanks to God you’re here, Graciliano!”
“Jesus Christ knows, when they told me, I heard Paulo cry out in that wilderness. I listened in the caatinga to his cry for the last drop of the murderer’s blood. What word of the devil’s legion?”
“Nothing. Three hundred men search for them. Nothing.”
“How is it possible?”
“At first they kept on the move. Now they are said to be in the sertão.”
“We’ll find them, Viana,” he said.
“Your father prayed that you would come.”
“I’ll go to him now,” Graciliano said.
They met in Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s bedroom. The senhor de engenho sat on a shabby brocaded sofa in his underclothes and a gown. When Graciliano stepped toward him, Bartolomeu Rodrigues spoke as if a third person was in the room: “This is my son. God in heaven, my son.”
“Senhor Pai, I came as soon as I heard.” Graciliano was shocked at the frail appearance of his father.
“I asked God to send you back to me. He took my Paulo. An old man who lived his life should have been taken, but no, it was Paulo.” His voice faded, then suddenly gained volume: “God broke me. God humbled me. He took one son, I saw. And I, with pride and vanity, lost another. Forgive me, Graciliano. Forgive me.”
“Oh, Father, I was the one who left Santo Tomás. I was responsible!”
Tears streamed down Bartolomeu Rodrigues’s sunken cheeks. He clutched the top of the sofa with one hand and started to get to his feet. Graciliano went to help him, and in that moment he embraced his father. “Oh, Senhor Pai . . . why did we wait so long?”
The senhor de engenho pressed his head against the dusty leather of the long coat. “Meu filho! Meu filho! My son, it is over,” he said. “You are back at Santo Tomás, at last!”
Graciliano broke from the embrace but kept his hands on his father’s shoulders. “Lord God in heaven!” he cried. “Hear this son now, Bartolomeu Rodrigues! Upon my most solemn oath, I swear to avenge Paulo. I won’t rest until the butchers congregate at the gates of hell!”
“Paulo lies in the chapel,” Bartolomeu Rodrigues said. “Go softly, Graciliano. Make your vow to him.”
Captain-Major Francisco Andrade da Cruz was in overall command of the troops searching for Black Peter. An additional two hundred men had been sent into the field after Paulo’s death, including the Henrique Dias regiment, a unit of black soldiers named for the hero of the wars against the Dutch. Andrade da Cruz had made his headquarters at Rosário and occupied the late director’s house.
A small, rotund man, the captain-major stood beneath the covered veranda this morning of October 27 wearing white breeches, blue coat with gold-worked epaulets, scarlet sash, spotless white stockings, and half-boots.
Three vaqueiros at the creek to fetch water this dawn had espied a young black creeping toward the settlement. Alerted by his suspicious behavior, they had captured him and sent for Graciliano, who met them at the creek with a Portuguese settler. This man identified the black as João, the son of Tobias, who was in league with Black Peter. A soldier who had come down to the stream while João was being tortured was chased away, and when he reported the incident to the captain-major, Andrade da Cruz sent men to investigate. But, when they got to the site, they found Graciliano and his men gone, and João with his neck broken. Andrade da Cruz asked that Graciliano share what had been learned from the black. Graciliano refused.
“You forget, senhor” — Andrade da Cruz regarded the roguish leather-clad man opposite him as anything but a senhor — “I’m camp master and hold the written orders of our governor.”
“And I the brother of Paulo Cavalcanti. I, too, Andrade da Cruz, have a letter of patent, written in my brother’s blood.”
A huge fly pestered Andrade da Cruz; he gave a slow, majestic swipe in its direction. “In the sertão, senhor, you may make your own laws. Here the king’s administrators and judges rule.” He slashed at the air with his hand and then hopped off the veranda and walked stiff-leggedly to where Ribeiro Adorno and two other vaqueiros stood glancing sheepishly in his direction as he approached.
A group of soldiers was observing the confrontation. Some Portuguese settlers and mulattoes and a few of the natives were also present. The rest of the vaqueiros and ten men from Santo Tomás who rode with Graciliano sat in their saddles fifty yards away from the soldiers.
Now Andrade da Cruz turned his head toward Graciliano. “I understand your longing for vengeance, but we march with one purpose: to find Black Peter. Share the information!”
Ribeiro Adorno cleared his throat. “Nothing was said, Captain-Major,” he responded. “Lies. Stupid things. Nothing important.”
“You lie, vaqueiro.” Andrade da Cruz raised one of his black half-boots a few inches off the ground, and with the tip of the boot he poked the body of João, crumpled in a heap at the vaqueiro’s feet. “Tell me what you learned from him.”
João’s flesh was punctured with small knife wounds.
“Perhaps, Cavalcanti, a few days in jail with my other guest and you’ll tell me what this one said?” Andrade da Cruz’s “guest” was the renegade Jesuit Antunes Machado, who had been flushed out of his hiding place by soldiers patrolling those hills. Machado now lay in chains in Rosário’s jail awaiting transport to Recife and expulsion from the colony.
“Yes, Captain-Major. Yes.” Graciliano gazed pointedly in the direction of the vaqueiros and the men from
Santo Tomás. “Shall I walk across to the prison now?”
Andrade da Cruz looked at the riders and his expression soured. “Your assassins can be held for this killing.”
Graciliano nodded. “Perhaps my brother would be alive this day if your soldiers had shown the same eagerness.”
“The troops are in the saddle day and night.”
“And the fourth month approaches with no sign of the runaways. Listen, we won’t interfere with your patrols. If the soldiers find them before I do, God grant them a quick victory — and a strong rope!”
“Go, then, damn you! But you’ll do no better with these caboclos and cutthroats!”
Graciliano laughed. “We shall see, Captain-Major.”
Half an hour later, Graciliano led his men from Rosário.
“Why didn’t you tell the captain-major?” asked an engenho worker who was riding beside him. “Wouldn’t it be better to ride with a force of hundreds?”
“He’s mine! Mine!” Graciliano shook a fist in the air. “With this hand upon my brother’s cold brow, I swore to kill Black Peter!” Graciliano gave a mighty shout then: “Palmares. Ride for the devils at Palmares!”
Black Peter had made a serious mistake. Secure in the remote Serra do Barriga, and with a growing vision of the restoration of Ganga Zumba’s stronghold and himself as “Great Pillager” of the Portuguese, Black Peter had called João to his side: “The Portuguese seek fifty runaways, not one man by himself. Go to Rosário, João, and lead the women and children to Palmares.” Captured, João had broken down after the vaqueiros smashed his teeth and punctured his flesh in a dozen places, and had revealed that Black Peter was at the Serra do Barriga.
On November 1, 1766, the forty-two riders reached the Barriga hills. They had stopped the previous day at a settled district to the northeast, where a plantation owner offered as guides two slaves, the descendants of runaways at Palmares. Graciliano and Jacinto Adorno took these men to reconnoiter the area, leaving the force to prepare for battle.
The slaves led them through a forest to the site of Ganga Zumba’s capital, Shoko. Beyond the parade ground, they came to a field of wild manioc, a section of which had been recently harvested. Leaving Jacinto and one of the slaves here, Graciliano and the other man scouted ahead to within 150 feet of the former royal enclosure. Graciliano lay behind a clump of ferns. Directly opposite him, a section of the six-foot-high earth embankment had been cleared and a group of blacks were sealing a breach with rocks and sand. Moving to the right, Graciliano got a partial view inside the enclosure through another breach, but observed little activity at the crude shelters that had been erected by the runaways.
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