At 4:00 A.M. on April 10, thirteen hundred Paraguayans launched a counterattack by canoe from Itapiru to dislodge the men on the low spit of land opposite the battery. Within a quarter of an hour, immense flashes broke the blackness of predawn as the Brazilian ships opened fire, the booming guns adding to the din of battle rising from the sandbank.
Only sixty of the ninety-two men who had left Tiberica in February 1865 were present to see the first action since departing their town: The rest had contracted dysentery, smallpox, and other diseases, and of these, fourteen had died, eight were in the hospital at Corrientes, and ten had been sent home unfit for service. Firmino Dantas da Silva himself had spent two weeks in the hospital with measles. He was serving as liaison officer between the battalion and the headquarters of General Manuel Luís Osório, commander of the Brazilian First Corps.
Two Tiberica voluntários watching the flashes of cannon and musketry stood together yelling encouragement to the unseen gunners aboard the Brazilian ships. The enemy’s cannon blazed in the dark line of jungle opposite, and shells intended for the warships roared through the air above them, but the two men greeted the Paraguayan shot with derisive laughter. When it began to grow light, they climbed the hillside to reach a better vantage point, though they found the sandbank obscured by thick smoke, the gun flashes less distinct as dawn broke.
The early light showed one of these voluntários to be much older: The man had not yet fought a skirmish with the enemy, but he bore a scar so terrible that soldiers thinking of the battles they must soon face were reluctant to gaze upon it. The old wound lay across his skull, from above his left temple to the back of his head. He had gone completely bald after suffering this awful blow.
This voluntário was Policarpo, one of the slaves bought for Itatinga from the trader Saturnino Rabelo by Ulisses Tavares in January 1856. Policarpo, twenty-nine at the time, had assured the senhor barão that he was a Mossambe whom the lash had taught obedience and hard work.
In truth, Policarpo was lazy, and had resented the regimen of the plantation, particularly at harvest time, when the slave bell rang at 5:00 A.M. for assembly and prayers in front of the mansion before work in the coffee groves until dusk. One morning four years ago, when Policarpo did not respond to the bell, an overseer had rushed to the dormitory, but Policarpo was not there. A search had been mounted immediately for the runaway; with the soaring prices for slaves after the abolition of imports from Africa, even idle Policarpo was a valued possession of the senhor barão.
Policarpo had not run from Itatinga. When the search party set out, he had been less than five miles from the senzala, snoring loudly in a patch of forest beside the road from Tiberica. He had collapsed there in the early hours gloriously drunk, a jar of cachaça and a package of the best Bahiana tobacco beside him. Policarpo detested the work of the harvest, but there had been a consolation: He would occasionally steal a sack of coffee beans from where they were stored in the old fazenda, and trade them to the squatter Gonzaga for a supply of cachaça and tabak and trinkets.
Policarpo had still been befuddled when they found him. His captors tied his hands and made him run back toward the fazenda at the end of a length of rope attached to one man’s saddle pommel; when the horse had suddenly jerked forward, the rope flew loose and Policarpo sprang away toward a hill covered with coffee trees. Dashing between the trees, he had eluded his mounted pursuers for a few minutes until their shouts alerted the overseers of a slave gang working on the next hillside. An overseer had arrested Policarpo’s flight by striking him over the head with a seven-foot iron bar used for driving holes into the earth to plant seedlings. Unconscious and with his skull indented by the blow, Policarpo had not been expected to survive.
But he had recovered, and had been led to Ulisses Tavares, who closely inspected his wound and questioned him at length. (The squatter Gonzaga had fled Itatinga immediately upon hearing what had happened to Policarpo.) Policarpo had been placed in the stocks, the tronco diabo, and had also been flogged with one hundred lashes. Returned to the coffee groves, he had suffered fainting spells and sudden ravings and was unable to meet his daily quota. The overseers had finally confined him to the terreiro to rake the berries as they dried in the sun.
Policarpo had become tractable, and apart from overindulgence in cachaça, gave little trouble at Itatinga. But other slaves working on the terreiro grumbled about him: It seemed to them that whenever the sun blazed down on the drying terrace and it became unbearably hot, Policarpo would have one of his spells, shaking his head and moaning until he was compelled to seek the shade for a recuperative nap.
There were slaves, too, who wondered about Policarpo, the Mozambican: Wasn’t it true that after his head had been broken, Policarpo had risen higher than any man in the eyes of the mãe de santo, the mother of the daughters of the saints? When the drums played, wasn’t it extraordinary what energy came to Policarpo Mossambe as he danced for the African deities? And when the spirits descended, wasn’t it the feebleminded Policarpo whose lips spoke with the greatest strength?
The young man with Policarpo this morning watching the fight for the sandbank near the Paraguayan shore was the mulatto Antônio Paciência. Patient Anthony, nineteen years old now, was tall and lean, with a tough, spare frame and iron muscles. His nose was slightly aquiline; the look in his brown eyes suggested inner strength; his dark-skinned countenance was frank, an expression often misconstrued as insolent. A good worker, slaver Saturnino Rabelo had predicted, and this was correct: Antônio Paciência had given no cause for complaint about the quality of his labor. Still, he had been a thoroughly bad slave.
Antônio Paciência could remember the delight of the iaiá — the slaves’ corruption of “Sinhazinha” — when he had been given to her. Teodora Rita couldn’t wait to show him off when visitors came to Itatinga.
Except for his behavior during inspection by the iaiá’s relatives and friends, however, Antônio Paciência had seemed incapable of pleasing the baronesa. Teodora Rita’s tongue wagged incessantly with complaints about Antônio Paciência and the difficulty she had training him.
There had been the time the iaiá’s silver shoehorn disappeared. Iaiá Teodora Rita said she had left it in a boot given to Antônio for cleaning. The iaiá and Dona Feliciana, wife of Eusébio Magalhães, insisted on watching Cincinnato, the carriage driver, cane him, ordering that the punishment continue, until Antônio Paciência had finally admitted stealing the shoehorn: “Oh, iaiá, forgive me! I put it in my pocket . . . Oh, iaiá, I lost it, I do not know where!” (Months after the caning, the iaiá told Antônio to clean a pair of shoes she hadn’t worn for a long time, and as he was carrying them to the fazenda’s kitchen, something dropped with a clink to the stone floor. His terror was absolute when he saw that it was the silver shoehorn! Pausing just long enough to pick it up, he crept out of the house and buried the shoehorn far down the slope toward the Rio Tietê.)
Two and a half years after arriving at Itatinga, Antônio Paciência had been ordered to the senzala. He was genuinely puzzled, for there had been no recent clash with the iaiá, certainly nothing as grim as the loss of her shoehorn.
“I’m the slave of Iaiá Teodora Rita,” Antônio Paciência protested to the overseer who had been sent to fetch him from the fazenda’s kitchen. “I work in the big house.”
The overseer, a mulatto like Antônio, had grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “The senhor barão’s wife herself gave the order!”
It took a long time for Patient Anthony to understand that Teodora Rita simply had lost interest in her birthday gift from the senhor barão.
The move to the senzala had been almost as traumatic as being sold away from Mãe Mônica. Cast among the mass of Itatinga’s 220 slaves, Antônio had experienced a deprivation that went far beyond being stripped of the nice clothes he had worn on parade in front of the iaiá’s guests or denied the food from the fazenda’s kitchen.
Chigger Man was the first to bring Antônio Paciência c
lose to understanding the loss of dignity.
Chigger Man, who was said to be more than ninety years old and had served the senhor barão’s father in the canoes of the monsoons, was expert in prying loose the tiny mites that attacked the slaves’ feet, burrowing under the skin to lay their eggs. Chigger Man performed his crude surgery outside one of the slave dormitories, and Antônio himself had submitted to Chigger Man’s knife. Watching the old slave probe and scratch for chiggers had left Antônio with a feeling of revulsion and sharpened his sense of loss at leaving the fazenda.
By the time he was fourteen, Antônio Paciência was doing the work of an adult, for which he was praised by the senhor barão himself. “I was not wrong in listening to Rabelo. You are a good worker. God willing, Antônio, when you are older, you may be an overseer at Itatinga.”
Seven months later, Antônio Paciência was given fifty lashes for running away from Itatinga. Eighteen months later he was a fugitive for forty-seven days until he was caught at São Paulo.
Antônio’s second flight had been planned with two other slaves. He had wanted Policarpo to go with them, but the Mozambican refused: “The risk is too great.”
“We’ll go to São Paulo; perhaps to Rio de Janeiro. We won’t be found among thousands in the cities.”
“Perhaps you’ll be lucky.”
“Come with us, Mossambe!”
“And lead them to you?”
“We won’t be caught.”
Policarpo had lowered his head, exposing the deep scar. “Like the mark on a beast,” he had said. “Any man who sees it will know: ‘Mossambe-with-the-broken-head’ — the property of the barão de Itatinga. I cannot go with you, Antônio.”
The three slaves had fled Itatinga at the onset of winter 1863. One of Antônio’s companions died of pneumonia in a crude shelter they had erected in a forest seventy-five miles southwest of Itatinga. The other had been caught at a senzala. Antônio had been waiting in trees on a hill behind the slave quarters of a fazenda thirty miles from São Paulo. He had heard a commotion as the fugitive was seized by those from whom he sought food. Without waiting to learn what happened, Antônio had run from the hill. He was the only one of the three to reach São Paulo, but he had been in the city only three days when he was arrested as a vagrant.
The senhor barão himself had stood on the far side of the senzala to witness the lashes given the young mulatto under the supervision of head overseer Eduardo, whom the slaves called “Setenta” (Seventy) for the number of lashes he most favored: “Neither too many nor too few” were Setenta’s sentiments. “I should sell you to another fazendeiro, Antônio Paciência,” Ulisses Tavares had said, “but I’m not a man to pass on my mistakes to others. You came to me as a child and your bad ways were learned at Itatinga. However long it takes, here, too, we will teach you to be a good slave.”
But Ulisses Tavares had changed his mind about keeping Patient Anthony. One morning in February 1865, Antônio and five others condemned as lazy or rebellious by the overseers had been lined up in front of the mansion to be told by the senhor barão that they were leaving Itatinga.
“You have not served me well,” Ulisses Tavares had said. “You’ve earned more lashes than the rest of the slaves together. May Jesus Christ, who forgives all, help each one of you! Be loyal! Be trustworthy! Be proud of the service for which you are chosen! Above all, slaves — be brave!”
Ulisses Tavares was donating the six slaves to Emperor Dom Pedro’s army. Though careful to select a group of malefactors whom he considered incorrigible, the senhor barão had made this gesture out of noblest patriotism. Many other slave owners picked out a few blacks or browns for the war against Paraguay, but only because these were accepted as substitutes in lieu of service by themselves or their sons. The senhor barão had a mighty contempt for cowards unwilling to fight for Brazil, and in this he was justified, for when the ninety-two voluntários of Tiberica had left the town square, his grandson had ridden at the head of the column.
Included in the column, marching three abreast, had been twenty-seven slaves from fazendas in the district. Some had tramped along with bewildered looks, for they feared this service for which their masters had volunteered them; some had stepped forward elatedly as the townsfolk cheered them. Antônio Paciência had been among the latter, and beside him marched Policarpo Mossambe, one of the six chosen from Itatinga as voluntários da patria.
As the sun rose on the Upper Paraná on the morning of April 10, 1866, Antônio and Policarpo had started down the hill toward their camp. They could hear the sounds of battle from the sandbank opposite the Paraguayan battery at Itapiru. Through the thin tree cover, to the left and right of them, were others who had climbed up for a view of the battle. As in the camp below, and wherever the Brazilian army was gathering for the invasion of Paraguay, the scene held a certain incongruity.
This was South America, but here were thousands of Africans massed for battle. The number of African slaves enlisted in Dom Pedro’s army by April 1866 was no fewer than ten thousand; mulattoes and other mixed breeds swelled the number of slave soldiers to fifteen thousand. And as popular enthusiasm for the war waned with the dimming prospect of swift victory, another group of voluntários had had to be compelled to serve their emperor: In the sertão of Pernambuco, the Bahia, and other provinces, recruiters were rounding up the landless class, chaining them together and marching them down to the coast for shipment to the Plata.
This morning, shortly after Antônio and Policarpo reached the camp, the guns at Itapiru fell silent. Firmino Dantas was away at the headquarters of First Corps commander General Manuel Luís Osório, and his two camp attendants had the morning to themselves. They had gone to the riverbank above the assembly point of the invasion flotilla when the first news came of the fight on the sandbank.
“The Paraguayans are defeated!” a boatman had shouted. “The island is ours!”
“Viva! Viva! Viva! Viva Dom Pedro Segundo! Viva Brasil!” A tremendous cheer rose from the men on the bank.
Policarpo seized Patient Anthony in a fierce embrace. “At last, the battle can begin! We can cross the Paraná to drive the Paraguayans to Asunción! We can cross the river, Antônio Paciência, to freedom. Freedom!” Policarpo believed the circulating rumors that slaves who fought for the emperor in Paraguay were to be freed.
“It’s only a rumor, Policarpo — the hope of all slaves,” Antônio Paciência cautioned.
“Remember, Antônio, I have seen the emperor riding in his carriage at Rio de Janeiro. A great monarch! A wise man! When we defeat his enemies, he will say to us, ‘From this day, you are free, my Brasileiros.’”
On April 15, 1866, ten thousand men of the Brazilian First Corps under Manuel Luís Osório boarded eleven steamers and canoes and floating piers towed by the ships. Another force of seven thousand Allies, mostly Argentinians, was assembled for embarkation immediately news came of a successful landing by the Brazilians. A Brazilian fleet of seventeen ships in three squadrons rode off the Paraguayan banks, along three points from Tres Bocas to a position fifteen miles away, close to the town of Paso la Patria, the headquarters of Marshal López.
The company of Tiberica volunteers were being transported on one of the three floating piers towed by the steamer carrying General Osório. By 7:00 A.M. on April 16, this vessel was heading directly toward a channel between Itapiru and the sandbank where the Brazilians had been victorious five days ago. “Isle of Redemption,” the spit of land had been called, though there had been no deliverance for eight hundred men killed there.
Firmino Dantas da Silva was aboard the steamer with Osório and his staff. He stood at the starboard bulwarks with other officers of the voluntários, feeling an intense nervous excitement as explosions from shells fired by the heavy guns of the naval escort tore up the riverbank, knocking trees to splinters and setting the forest ablaze. The Itapiru battery responded with a continuous grumble, the water rising like a geyser when the Paraguayan shot burst in the river.
At last, the company had been sent to the northwest of Rio Grande do Sul, and Firmino had discovered an unoccupied ranch beside a tributary of the Rio Uruguay where they could camp during the bitterly cold, wet winter. Daily patrols scoured the riverbank, as much to look for Paraguayans as to forage for food. Slave soldiers like Antônio Paciência and Policarpo were set to planting corn, manioc, and other crops.
Firmino dispatched regular reports to the Bagé garrison, but, though he received routine acknowledgments, it seemed that the Tiberica company had been forgotten.
Some of the voluntários resented the inactivity and blamed Firmino Dantas, who could have appealed to Bagé to have the company transferred but seemed perfectly content to stay at the old ranch house reading books he had brought with him. O Pensador, thinking, dreaming, waiting for the war to come to him! Inevitably, others had another explanation for Firmino’s apparent willingness to sit out the war far from the battlefront: “The barão de Itatinga’s grandson is frightened.”
Finally ordered south, the company headed for the camp near the port of Corrientes; there Firmino Dantas found his cousin, the artillery captain Clóvis da Silva, at Lagoa Brava. Clóvis, who had already fought against the Paraguayans in Corrientes province, was also critical of Firmino Dantas’s inaction since leaving Tiberica.
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