Brazil

by Errol Lincoln Uys

It was after 4:00 P.M. outside the mansion at Itatinga. Firmino Dantas’s customary poise vanished as he stepped back from the overseer, Cesar, who was lying on the ground beside the horse of an agregado, who’d been sent to the clearing to inspect the hardwood set aside for the fazenda’s carpenters; he had found the overseers and released them, riding back immediately with Cesar. The head overseer was moaning with pain from his shoulder wound and innumerable insect bites. He had scarcely been able to whisper a report to the senhor.

  Aristides was standing behind Firmino on the steps up to the fazenda’s main entrance. “How many runaways?” he asked.

  “Every slave at the clearing.”

  “How, for the love of God, did they get away?”

  “Others came to help them.”

  Workers were streaming toward them from the outbuildings as word spread of the flight of the slaves.

  “Were you blind?” Aristides demanded harshly of the man on the ground.

  Cesar was silent, but Firmino responded: “He said the slave women put poison in their food.”

  Running from an outbuilding was a lean, angular agregado, Ulisses Ramos, whose family had served the da Silvas as far back as the time of the monsoon canoe convoys. He was head capanga. His voice trembling with anticipation, he asked: “Your orders, please, Senhor Firmino.”

  “Send men out for the other overseers and slave gangs. Get the slaves back to the barracks. Lock them up.”

  “Yes, senhor. The runaways?”

  “Have two men ride immediately to Capitão Eduardo. When the slaves have been brought in, assemble your men here.”

  When Ramos left, another man stepped forward: “We will help, too, Senhor da Silva.”

  “Thank you, Patrizio. You can guard the barracks.”

  Patrizio Telleni was one of twenty Italian men and their families whom Aristides had brought from Santos in late July. The colonos, as the immigrant community of ninety were known, were now settled in huts two miles from the mansion.

  After the flurry of commands, Cesar was carried off to the infirmary. Firmino Dantas limped slowly up the steps. “Antônio Bento’s caiphazes are responsible. They seek to spread insurrection throughout Tiberica.”

  Aristides shouted to old Cincinnato, who was standing with some of the household slaves: “Saddle my horse quickly!”

  Firmino Dantas continued to talk about the runaways: “They are too many to hide at the quilombo at Tamanduá; they’ll try to reach Santos.”

  “I’m going to Tiberica, Senhor Firmino.”

  “Slave hunting is not your business, Aristides.”

  “I agree, Senhor Firmino. It is only that I fear what Eduardo da Silva may do to them. We want them returned alive, not flogged half dead or full of shot.”

  “Go, then, but for God’s sake, be careful. Take no risks.” Firmino Dantas lowered his eyes. “Go, Ari,” he said. “My leg . . . if I could stay in the saddle for long . . .”

  “No, senhor, there is no need for you to go. I will ride for you, Firmino Dantas.”

  “The train!” Eduardo da Silva said emphatically. Just after 6:00 P.M., he was sitting on the edge of a table at Tiberica’s police barracks, putting on his boots. Aristides Tavares had arrived ten minutes ago. “The runaways know if they hide in the forest I’ll root them out. The train is their only way of escape.”

  The thirty-one-year-old son of Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva was a heavy, thickset man with cold black eyes beneath wiry brows. Eduardo had spent two years at the Escola Militar at Rio de Janeiro, where his record had been dismal. He had joined the Rio de Janeiro police, where he had won a reputation for ruthlessness: “Cockroach Killer,” his colleagues had nicknamed him. Seven years ago, Eduardo’s relatives at Tiberica, the family who owned Silva & Sons, had recommended him for chief of police, a position he had accepted and carried out with vigor, especially where slaves were concerned.

  There was a third man in Capitão Eduardo’s office — tall, slender, with hollow cheeks and a tuft of beard — known to his fellow policemen as “Tex.” Cadmus Rawlings was his name, and he was not from Texas but Alabama. Rawlings had come to Brazil after the Civil War, along with several hundred families of Confederate exiles now scattered from the banks of the Tapajós to the coffee lands of São Paulo. Some of these émigrés struggling in ramshackle dwellings in the jungle of the Tapajós were demoralized but others were making a go of it in their new homeland, especially a group of farmers at Santa Bárbara, eighty miles north of São Paulo, who had achieved particular success growing a succulent watermelon, the “Georgia Rattlesnake.” A few, like Cadmus Rawlings, had abandoned farming for other pursuits. Rawlings, who was forty-four and had buried his first wife at Santa Bárbara, lived in Tiberica with a mulatta and their three dark-skinned children. Rawlings had no trouble reconciling his domestic situation with his abhorrence of Negroes.

  “The train was due to leave at 6:00 P.M.,” Aristides said.

  “Yes, Aristides. And when did the São Paulo train ever leave on time?” Eduardo finished putting on his boots and stood up. “They’ll be there, cousin, waiting for their precious consignment.”

  Rawlings’s Portuguese was poor: “I hope you’re right, Capitay. Jesus, I hope so.”

  “Sergeant Tex has his own ideas on how to handle the runaway problem,” Eduardo da Silva said. He knew his cousin favored abolition. “He thinks we’re too soft on them.”

  “Day by day, your people are retreating from these black cowards,” said Cadmus Rawlings. “As there’s a God above, the free nigger will be the ruin of your land. Just as it was with us.”

  “Let’s ride for the train,” Aristides said. “I hear your men outside.”

  Rawlings stepped toward the door with his arms laden with cartons of shells to distribute to the twelve men in the police unit. “I’ve told the capitay: Hang a few of the bastards. String ’em up along the Tiberica road. That’ll put God’s fear into the rest!” He strode past Aristides, used one boot to pull open the door that stood ajar, and stepped outside.

  “You have your fancy French ideas, Aristides,” Eduardo remarked. “There are others — Brasileiros, my cousin — who think Tex Rawlings is right.”

  “And you’re one of them?”

  Eduardo da Silva didn’t answer this. “Perhaps, Aristides, it’s better for you to stay here, no?”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Mmmmp! . . . ” Suddenly he grinned. “Ride with my sergeant, then, Aristides!”

  “Are you trying to goad me?”

  “No, cousin. I’m only thinking Sergeant Tex will be there to save your skin if there’s a fight.” He laughed loudly, and did not hear Aristides swear at him.

  They reached the railhead in the dark an hour later, and learned from a railway worker that the train had left twenty minutes ago. He swore no runaways had got aboard.

  “Ride on!” Eduardo da Silva ordered, galloping alongside the tracks. “The swine are sure to be waiting up ahead.”

  Half an hour later they saw the train stopped on a straight section of track. The capitão raced at the head of his men toward the locomotive, ignoring the possibility of attack from caiphazes and runaways if they were already aboard.

  “You, there!” Eduardo da Silva cried, with a long-barreled revolver leveled at two men gaping at him from the cab of the engine. “Get down!”

  The two men obeyed. Da Silva and three of his men dismounted.

  “Now, you bastards: Why are you stopped here?”

  “Broken valve,” the engineer said. He made a sound suggesting escaping steam.

  Da Silva struck him a crushing blow to the side of his head with his revolver. “Why are you stopped here?”

  Two policemen were interrogating the fireman, slamming him against the side of the tender, beating him with their fists.

  “All right! All right! I’ll tell you,” the engineer said.

  “Speak!”

  “We were waiting for a few slaves.”

  “Liar!” Edu
ardo da Silva looked for Aristides, but didn’t see him. “Their owner is here. More than a hundred ran from Itatinga.”

  “O good Jesus! Mercy!”

  Da Silva threw the man to the ground and kicked him until he lay silent.

  Babá Epifánia and her family were in the third of five coaches. She saw the front riders storm past the windows; moments later, there were orders for everyone to get off the train.

  Basilio Pedrosa, babá Epifánia’s husband, was a little soft in the head. He had been capable of molding clay for tens of thousands of seedling pots at Itatinga, but not much else. At Itatinga he had often been pushed into another room when babá Epifánia was consulted by slaves and men like Nô Gonzaga, who had been there for the harvest, but Basilio had had sense enough to realize his mate was offering them more than her magical medicines. When she told him a day ago that they were leaving for Santos, he had surprised her by asking if they were marching with the slaves. Epifánia had got very angry at first, raising her big hands to strike him, but he promised he had told no one.

  “Babá, what will we do?” he asked now.

  “Listen to me, Basilio. Why are we here?”

  “Why, babá?”

  “We’re going to São Paulo” — she thought a moment — “to visit your brother.”

  “I have no brother, babá.”

  “Basilio!”

  “Yes, babá. My brother . . .” He looked puzzled.

  “Get out!” A policeman stood in the doorway at the end of the coach.

  Babá Epifánia dragged Basilio to his feet. She ushered the children forward, too. “Why must we get off?” she asked belligerently.

  “Shut up! Get your fat backside off the train!”

  The babá gave the policeman a malignant scowl, but as she stepped off behind Basilio and the children, her defiance wavered: Aristides da Silva sat on his horse ten feet away.

  He recognized her in the light of a lantern held by one of the dismounted policemen. “What are you doing here, babá Epifánia?” And then he saw the potter trying to creep behind his wife’s immense body. “Pedrosa!”

  Basilio appeared to leap six feet into the air at mention of his name.

  “Why are you here?” Aristides repeated.

  “Answer the senhor, nigger!” Tex Rawlings had ridden up beside Aristides when he saw him talking to the big black woman and the mulatto.

  Babá Epifánia’s chest heaved as she struggled to be calm. “To Pedrosa’s brother at São Paulo, senhorzinho,” she said awkwardly.

  “What the hell is she talking about?” Rawlings asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Aristides said. “Pedrosa!”

  Basilio was next to Epifánia now, staring down at the ground, swinging his head from side to side.

  “When did you leave Itatinga, Pedrosa?”

  Basilio mumbled an unintelligible reply.

  “This morning, senhorzinho,” the babá said.

  Rawlings stepped his horse up to Basilio. “The senhor spoke to you!”

  “Oh, babá! Babá!” Basilio bawled.

  Rawlings’s boot was out of the stirrup. He slammed it into Basilio’s back, sending the mulatto stumbling toward Aristides. The daughter of Pedrosa and Epifánia began to cry at the top of her lungs.

  “Answer me, Pedrosa, or it will only be worse,” Aristides said.

  “I’ll kill the bastard,” Rawlings threatened.

  “Babá said we must leave.”

  “Because of the runaways?”

  Basilio repeated what he’d just said.

  “Is it true, babá Epifánia?” Aristides asked, turning to his old wet nurse.

  The babá’s daughter had moved to her side and was clinging to her skirt. Epifánia held a protective arm around the girl. The boy, too, was near her. She raised her big, square face to look at Aristides Tavares, the little master whom she had once held lovingly to her breast. “Yes, Senhorzinho Aristides, it’s true. Babá Epifánia did what she had to do for her people.”

  “Nigger bitch!” Rawlings yelled, slashing at Epifánia with his riding whip.

  “Rawlings!” Aristides shouted. “Stop! Stop!” He had just started forward when suddenly Nô Gonzaga and his men and the ten armed slaves showed themselves, standing up on the roofs of the coaches, stepping across the rails at the front and back of the train. Another body of slaves, armed with axes and other weapons, rose up in the long grass behind the police and passengers. The caiphazes and slaves had been half a mile from the train when they saw the mounted police racing beside the railbed. While Eduardo da Silva had been interrogating the train crew and other police were inspecting the passengers, Nô Gonzaga and his men had circled around to the opposite side of the train, climbing up silently to the positions they now held.

  Nô Gonzaga wanted to avoid a battle. At his orders, the guns of the caiphazes and runaways roared with a volley fired into the air above the heads of the police.

  “There are many more of us,” Nô called down.

  Eduardo da Silva fired first, killing a slave at the front of the locomotive.

  Tex Rawlings yanked the reins of his horse, wheeling away from the side of the train, and opened fire on the men above him. “Kill the bastards!” he shouted.

  Nô Gonzaga’s men began to fire back at the police. There was pandemonium among the passengers standing beside the train: Some ran wildly toward the slaves advancing in the grass; others, including babá Epifánia and her children, dove under the coaches for protection; and a few, like Basilio, dashed blindly into the night.

  The battle lasted only as long as it took Tex Rawlings to empty his six-shooter. Abruptly, Tiberica’s policemen were dumping their weapons and running away — all but their capitão, Eduardo da Silva, the Cockroach Killer, who lay dead on the ground with a bullet in his heart.

  “Cowards! Come back!” Rawlings shouted, but he was alone. Then he noticed Aristides Tavares crumpled over the neck of his horse. “Da Silva?” Rawlings grabbed the reins of Aristides’s horse.

  Aristides was shot in the shoulder. “I’ll be all right,” he said.

  All along the top of the train, Nô Gonzaga and his men held their fire.

  “Bastards!” Rawlings shook his empty revolver at them.

  “We wanted no bloodshed,” Gonzaga said. “Your men fired first. Now take your wounded.” His gun was on Rawlings. “Leave!”

  As Cadmus Rawlings, veteran of the Twentieth Alabama Infantry and Union prisoner after Vicksburg, rode off with Aristides Tavares, a cheer rose from Nô Gonzaga and his irregular troop.

  Aristides was taken to the house of Jolanta dos Santos, where Tiberica’s doctor came to treat his wound. August Laubner also went to the house as soon as he heard what had happened. Firmino Dantas was summoned by a messenger sent to Itatinga and arrived at Tiberica in the early hours of the morning. He found Jolanta watching over Aristides, who was weak from a loss of blood but, August Laubner assured him, in no danger. Aristides was awake when Firmino got to the house.

  “Thank God, Ari, you’re safe.”

  “Eduardo da Silva —”

  “I heard.”

  “We were trapped, senhor. Outnumbered. We couldn’t stop them.”

  “You’re not to worry about it, Ari. We can only thank God you were spared.”

  “São Paulo has been told?”

  “São Paulo has been asked to send a detachment of troops to Tiberica, for what that may be worth.” Many army units were known to be close to mutinying against service as slave hunters.

  Jolanta, who had gone out of the room while they spoke, returned with a damp towel to wipe Aristides’s brow.

  “Senhor Firmino . . .”

  “Yes, Ari?”

  “Eduardo da Silva gave his life for a hopeless cause. God help us all if we fail to see this.”

  On October 19, the São Paulo authorities dispatched fifty troops to block the roads and trails down the Serra do Mar, with orders to bring in the Tiberica runaways dead or alive. Twenty-three slave
s, including two men wounded in the brief skirmish outside Tiberica, were caught and taken to São Paulo in irons. But, one by one, the rest of the groups began to reach sanctuary at Santos.

  On October 24, 4,500 runaways now living in Jabaquara witnessed a unique procession through the narrow streets of the quilombo. First came a company of thirty drummers, some thumping war drums. Behind the drummers were musicians with the berimbau and xaque-xaque. A troop of agile young men pivoted and cartwheeled as they played capoeira, the slaves’ now-dreaded form of unarmed combat, and groups of gaily dressed women sang and danced joyously.

  Highlight of the procession was a huge cart decorated with colored paper and flowers and drawn by two oxen.

  Solemnly seated in the cart, under a canopy of royal blue cloth, wearing a massive crown fashioned of cardboard and silver paper, a bright yellow dress, and long train of crimson cloth was the “Queen of Liberty,” weighed down with bracelets, rings, and necklaces given to her by admirers.

  “Viva! Viva! Viva Regina!” the crowd saluted her.

  It was babá Epifánia, beaming from cheek to cheek, thrashing the air with her fly whisk to bestow a blessing on her free subjects, reveling in her hour of glory.

  On the same day, Eduardo da Silva was buried at Tiberica. Colonel Clóvis Lima da Silva and his second son, Honôrio, had traveled from Rio de Janeiro for the funeral. After the service, Clóvis and Honôrio rode out to Itatinga with the family of Firmino Dantas, who had invited them to stay at the fazenda.

  The morning after the funeral, Clóvis and Firmino Dantas were strolling on the paths behind the mansion. At fifty-eight, Clóvis Lima still walked ramrod straight, an alert look in his eyes, an undiminished sharpness, the same as when he had directed the guns at Acosta Ñu and a dozen barrages before that final battle in Paraguay.

  “I saw the expressions on the faces of some at the funeral,” Clóvis said. “ ‘Eduardo da Silva would be alive if the army had been there to help his men,’ ”they said. It’s probably true. I find this difficult to say, Firmino, but I wouldn’t want to have been responsible for sending men to catch your slaves. And even if they had all been caught, what good would it do? If the army were to stand against abolition, what could we do, I ask you: twelve thousand men to suppress six hundred thousand who remain in the senzalas? Our ranks are depleted; our requests for equipment are denied. Good God, do they believe that we’re no better than capangas? That we can best serve our nation by rusticating in the sertão? Do they consider us duty-bound to accept every insult in silence?”