Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  “They told me . . .”

  “How old are you, Almeydita?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “An age where you bind your breasts . . . But me, I’m no interpreter of dreams. I could sound out your future in your voice, in your eyes, when you are older, read it in the lines of your forehead. But I’m no interpreter of dreams. What do you see now?” she asked, looking at me and holding my chin.

  “Nothing?”

  “A man touching the side of my face, my hair, my shoulders.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “What is he telling you?”

  “He says that I still have the dreams of a slave. That now I’m in that place and I’m free.”

  “I knew it. But tell me which place, what place are you in?”

  “He says only ‘that place.’ I look away from him. I feel as if I’ve strings on my thighs. No, they’re scratches.”

  “Like in the Old Country?”

  “No, scratches from branches, from walking through the forests, a great distance. He tells me that my mother and my grandmother . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t understand what he’s saying.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “I don’t understand what he’s saying.”

  “What do you think you understand?”

  I say nothing.

  “What else does he say?”

  “The same thing. He repeats it. That I am in that place and a free woman . . . I look at him, study the side of his face, the marks that have been put there. I don’t know their meaning. These are not scratches. But scarification. Like you said. Like in the Old Country. I want to know their meaning. I ask him, but he won’t tell me.”

  “Do you see the white woman, the branca?”

  “White woman? Which white woman?”

  She waits.

  “Yes, I see her. A black man, a big one, brings her into camp.”

  “What camp? Are you sure it’s a camp?”

  “I don’t know. It looks like a camp. In this part. But over there, there are houses.”

  “Who’s she? Who is the woman? Tell me more about her.”

  “She’s a branca yes, but she’s dressed like an African woman. She’s wearing an African garment.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all. The man again, touching my face. What else? I don’t know. Ah, yes. A black man and woman in a boat facing each other.”

  “Tell me more about the white woman.”

  “Only that I see her walking and she has long hair and is wearing an African garment. And there’s a tall black man beside her.”

  “The one who’s touched you?”

  “No, another one. A ruler. He seems to be a ruler. His hair is long, it sticks up tall on his head.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. Yes, there are many palm trees.”

  She keeps her hand on my chin. “Have you entered the dance with the other women?”

  “I’m running. I enter the dance with the other women. Young women. I have no breasts.”

  “You’re a woman and you have no breasts? Already you are binding them.”

  She touches the cloth around my bosom and puts her hand on my forehead and jaw.

  “I watch their breasts and their round protruding bellies, and the dark between their thighs. I can’t explain what I don’t have. A man follows me into the dance of the women. A young man. On the outside is a naked old man with a white beard. The women, every one of them but me, must touch the beard of the naked old man. I want to run from the place where the women are dancing, but the man won’t let me go. He says he wants to kiss my belly and squeeze my knees. The women shout and dance in a circle.”

  “Where’ve you learned this dance?”

  “From the Dutch and the Portuguese, they say.”

  “What’s the dance for?”

  “The sacrifice of women. Women taken prisoner. I run.”

  “Are you a woman now?”

  “Yes. The man tells me I must leave the new place . . . The women dance in a circle, holding a rope to their shoulders and waists. Now I’m a girl again. My mother braids my hair. She pushes her palm into my back.

  “I’m frightened. She pushes me into a long room full of men waiting to buy us. ‘I want to remember my knees riding on his shoulders, my small hands wrapped around his chin,’ she says. ‘I want to remember the men with shoulders like birds.’“

  “What? What are you saying now?”

  “‘The Indians found us and took us with them on their big march. The white men came, killed the Indian men, took the Indian women. I held my chin against my mother’s head. They didn’t kill us because we’re useful and could be sold for much money. It was the Indians who were no longer of us.’“

  “You’ve taken me from the future to the past, my child. Where are you now?”

  “At a place where they wear the skin of anteaters and wood piercing their lower lips.”

  “You’re still here, my child. You are back here now,” she said, rubbing my arms.

  I opened my eyes. She told me I would soon be leaving that place, Entralgo’s plantation, and taken to a larger place.

  “But still one doesn’t enter or leave any place easily, or from will,” she said, smoking her long pipe. “Not when one is a slave.”

  She grew very silent, then she reached out and took my arm, in anger. I had never seen such silence before, silence with anger at the core of it.

  “So I’m the one you come to when you’ve dreams to tell,” she said. “But soon you’ll go to another woman. Soon you’ll take them elsewhere. Soon you’ll take your dreams to a woman who has a name. A name, yes, but a name which is not her own.”

  She laughed, then she held her arm up. I stood up and left her hut. When I was outside, she called me from the doorway, “Almeyda!”

  I turned.

  But she only wished to say my name, my new name. I was not the little one now, not Almeydita. But Almeyda, the woman.

  Madonna with Child

  I WAS TAKEN TO A LARGE PLACE with three arches over the doorway. The center arch that ran over the door was narrow and there were two wide arches over the windows, on either side of the narrow door. I didn’t notice this until I was sitting. Then I looked up and saw a Madonna with child over the doorway. And there were points of light over the doorway too.

  I was afraid to look up at the people. There were many people. A white man stood in the center of the room with his hair in a braid. He wore a tall white hat and a long white coat. He was the only white man in the room. A mulatto sat at a narrow table counting money. He was not dressed as elegantly as the white man, but he had on trousers and a vest. A black woman dressed like a branca and wearing a long white dress and red shawl sat in a chair near the doorway with a basket of fruit in her lap. I heard people say that she was the woman of the white man who was standing.

  The rest of us sat on mats on the bare floor. I sat beside a woman holding a baby. I watched her. I watched the baby. And there was a woman standing with her hands on her hips. I followed her eyes to a man painting pictures on the wall. In the picture I see the faces of the people around me. Dr. Johann, I wonder. I raise up to peer at him. But even from the back I know it’s not Dr. Johann. And he’d have his canvases. No crude painting on a wall. But I see the face of the woman standing. When she first entered, I saw anger in her face and then she sat down calmly, to wait with the others.

  After a while, I lay on my stomach and watched the baby put his fingers in the woman’s mouth. A man entered. The man in the white hat came over to where we were sitting and lifted a young boy, and brought him to the man who inquired his price. He spoke loudly.

  “How much?”

  He was told a price. “As much as that, eh?”

  He touched the boy’s chin and the place in his pants where his genitals were.

  “As much as that, eh?” he repeated.

  Then he went to the table where the mulatto was counti
ng money.

  He handed gold coins to the white man who then gave money to the mulatto. The man who’d purchased him took the boy and left. I rose from my stomach and sat on my knees. I turned and saw my face among the pictures on the wall and the man who’d painted it turning to watch me. No, not Dr. Johann at all. A wild, scoundrel’s face, but shy eyes.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. No one spoke. The men and women sat watching each other and saying nothing. Resting on my elbows, I was lying between a certain silent man and woman. Every now and then the baby would look at me with his round quiet eyes. He looked as if he knew everything that was going on.

  “I was one of the Ambassadors sent to him from Palmares,” the man said to the woman.

  I looked at him intensely, as I’d heard the name of that place.

  “There were two other Negroes. I stood behind them. I clasped my hands before me, but I didn’t fall on my knees as the men before me did. That’s why I wasn’t killed, but sold into slavery. Do you think that’s why? Me, I think so. Because I didn’t fall on my knees, that’s why. There was a black man dressed in boots and a long coat, a feather in his cap, serving as interpreter. I don’t remember which man was governor then. Perhaps it was de Almeida. I don’t know. My memory’s gone.”

  The woman was silent. She touched the baby’s head and continued to look at the man.

  “There you’d be a free woman,” he said. “There I’d have my memory again.”

  I looked at his black hair and the wrinkles under his eyes. I couldn’t tell his age.

  “I want to feel that place in my bosom,” the woman said. She held the baby against her heart. The man looked at her, his eyes larger, solemn.

  “I’m not the man to ask. Nhouguge is not the one. My memory’s gone. I’ve only the muscles in my back and arms. My arms reach for cane. They don’t reach for a woman anymore. Eh, that would be the place for you, and you’d wear your freedom in your eyes.” He scratched his chin. “Perhaps I was de Almeida. I don’t remember the one who was governor, but the one whose name I don’t remember sent me to this place. Perhaps it was de Almeida.”

  I put my hands to my ears. The baby began to laugh. The woman looked down at him and kissed his head. The man who’d been painting me came and bent down. No, he was not Dr. Johann. Not with his rascal’s face, and his eyes weren’t so shy up close.

  “Come and sit by me,” he asked.

  I got up and walked with him over to the mural.

  “I want to get the lines of the eyes better,” he said. “What were they talking about?”

  But he was as inquisitive as Dr. Johann and he asked a thing instead of demanding it.

  “A place called Palmares,” I answered. “A place where black men and women are free.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

  “Do you know the place?” I asked him, for I realized now that he was not a dark-skinned branco, but a mulatto.

  “It’s near the forest of Alagoas,” he said. “Go into the Mundahu valley and come out again. Do you know the Barriaga mountain range?”

  “I don’t know those places.”

  “Well, maybe they’ll search you out,” he said. He looked at me carefully. “They have spies everywhere. Perhaps one will take note of you.”

  I said nothing.

  “I am Antalaquituxe,” he said.

  It was a Tupi name. Perhaps he was made up of everyone in this New World.

  I told him my name was Almeyda.

  He said nothing. Up close he did not seem like such a scoundrel. And his eyes were shy again. I sat down on the ground and looked up at him as he drew the mural. He was dressed like the other black men, loose white trousers and a shirt open at the front.

  “They look like perfect hieroglyphs,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your eyes.”

  He put his hand to my chin and turned my face to the side. “And from the profile you look like bastet.”

  I frowned, looking at his long nose and chin. It was only his huge eyes that were really handsome.

  “What are you calling me?” I asked meanly.

  “Bastet. The Egyptian goddess. The goddess of love and joy. Or would you rather be Oshun, Shango’s wife?”

  My frown softened, but I still looked at the ugly man with suspicion.

  I’d heard of the Yorubaland warrior Shango from my grandmother, and though he’d been a brave and generous and loving man, his end had been tragic. I thought of the saints in Father Tollinare’s stories, who dreamed and prayed for martyrdom. Their heroic dreams, their dreams of prophecy delighted me, but their dreams of martyrdom frightened me. I thought them silly.

  Antalaquituxe painted my eyes larger than they were in reality and my eyes stared out into the room of people.

  “Why’ve the white men made you do this? Paint all of us?” I asked.

  “Why’s it always the white men?” he asked with anger. “Why do you think it’s the white man’s idea?”

  I was silent. I looked at him. He looked at me. No, not a scoundrel’s face. His expression softened. He continued painting.

  “Are you a spy of Palmares?” I asked.

  “I’m waiting to be sold the same as you,” he replied.

  He drew the dark lines out until they touched my temples.

  “I’m just passing the time doing this,” he said. “Someone will buy you quickly, but this frog-faced man will be here a while.”

  I saw a shadow on the mural and turned. The man in the white hat was standing over me. Behind him was a white man waiting to examine me, and to offer a price.

  “This is the one that I was told about?” he inquired.

  “There’ve been others who’ve inquired of her, even Corricao, the breeder, but I’ve explained to them the situation . . .” He winked at the man.

  The man waved his hands in the air, looking disgusted. “I grow cassava, and if she has good hands, that’s all I need.”

  “Hold out your hands,” said the man in the white hat. I held out my hands.

  “It’s too bad, because this one is such a beauty.”

  The man who grew cassava said nothing as he examined my palms and the backs of my hands.

  He didn’t even ask my price, but when he was told it, he gave money at the table and I was taken out of that place.

  “What is your name?” he asked when we were outside.

  “Almeyda,” I told him.

  “Like the governor,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Not with an ‘i,’ with a ‘y,’” I said.

  He looked at me. I’d forgotten that most slaves did not even know how to spell their own names and that it was best that they shouldn’t. I looked down at my hands.

  “I grow cassava,” he repeated, and climbed onto his horse.

  For a moment I thought that he would reach down and pull me up behind him, and I started to lift up my hand, but his horse pranced forward, and I trotted along after.

  “I see you are one of Father Tollinare’s experiments,” he said quietly. “I see you will have to learn your proper place in the world.”

  Cassava

  HE TOOK ME TO A BLACK WOMAN who dressed me in a long skirt and white blouse and tied a white rag around my head. She fixed the blouse so that it hung off my shoulders. Then she stood back and looked at me. She looked at my eyes and my shoulders.

  “You’re very pretty,” she said.

  Then she went to a corner of the small room and took from a box a string of beads with many different colors on them: yellow, red, black, blue, green, turquoise, white. She put them carefully around my neck. They hung down below my waist. She put them around my neck again, so that they doubled. She looked at me.

  “There,” she said, smiling.

  She was tall with a thin waist and pretty eyes and her white blouse fell lower off her shoulders, showing the tips of her breasts. At that moment she was the woman I wanted to be when I became one.

  I looked down at the floor that
was not tile but ground packed hard together. I looked back up at her and smiled. She didn’t give me shoes as she herself was not wearing any. She touched my shoulder and told me to come with her. I followed her to a barn with a wheel and a hot furnace.

  There were rollers connected to the wheel. Standing over a white stone pot were two young women dressed like the woman I’d followed, and there was an old woman in a long dress that did not show her breasts but came high on her shoulders. On the other side, a woman was baking bread over the fire, while a man knelt beside her, feeding coal into the furnace, and shielding his eyes. He was bare to the waist and had only a cloth around his loins. A man in striped pants and vest and a big white hat came to us when we entered. The woman stood looking at him without smiling. He pointed to two men who were sitting on baskets cutting cassava. The woman nodded. Both men were dressed in white loincloths, but one was wearing a feathered hat. The woman took me over to them and sat me down on a basket.

  “Watch how they do it,” she instructed.

  “She’s too young for the knife,” the man with the feathered hat said.

  He looked at me with hard eyes. The other men went on cutting.

  The woman gave me a bundle of branches and told me to cut the roots from them. She wasn’t smiling now; her eyes were very solemn. I thought I’d angered her. I looked down at the ground.

  “When they need more hands, they’ll show you how to do it,” she said.

  “Take her over with the women,” said the man in the feathered hat.

  I didn’t look at him. I cut the roots from the branches with shaking hands. He shoved a basket in front of me. I put the thick starchy roots in.

  “When it is full, give it to me,” he said. I nodded, but didn’t look up at him.

  When I finally looked up, the woman who’d brought me there was over by the door getting ready to leave. The man in the striped pants touched her bare shoulder and she waited. And they stood talking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I watched her long back, where the blouse fell from her shoulders almost to her waist. The man with the feathered cap slapped my fingers and pushed my head down.