Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  “Mind what you are doing, girl,” he said. “Here you will learn.”

  The other man looked up at him, but said nothing. I cut roots from the branches. I couldn’t keep my fingers still. I didn’t see when the woman left. I was afraid to ask when she would return. The man in the striped pants stood with his foot on a basket, watching us work.

  I looked back at the man shielding his eyes from the fire, then I looked down at my work.

  The Woman Whose Name She Does Not Know in the Beginning

  WHEN THE LONG DAY WAS OVER, the woman who’d brought me there, came for me. I followed her back to the place I’d first been taken. The house where she lived wasn’t a part of the main house; it was some yards in the back of it, behind a clump of trees. It wasn’t a hut but a square out-building made of plaster, although its floor was packed dirt like any other hut and its roof was made of thatch. The walls inside were clean and white and smooth and she had a little wooden dressing table and mirror.

  Another hammock was strung inside, a multicolored hammock like her own.

  “You’ll sleep there,” she said, “until you’re used to the place, and then you’ll sleep with the other women.”

  Her voice didn’t seem to have the same kindness as it seemed to have before. Still I liked the straight way she stood, the way she stood with her head very high, as if she’d control of her own life, or took responsibility for it. I didn’t think those thoughts in those days, though. I thought merely that she didn’t stand like a slave, but like a free woman, like a senhora from the big house.

  She went to the dresser and began to brush her hair, then she rubbed an oil into it, and into her face as well. There was the heavy smell of incense and coconut.

  Not knowing what to do, I remained standing.

  “Go on and sleep,” she said kindly. “Aren’t you tired? You’re standing there like you’re made of wood. Go on. You won’t have long to rest, before I shake you in the morning.”

  I watched her oil her shoulders and breasts till they were glistening like her face and hair and bright eyes. Then I climbed into the hammock. My stomach growled and rumbled.

  “You’re hungry?” she said. “Didn’t they feed you?”

  “They gave me some cassava bread.”

  She reached under the dresser and came up with a bowlful of dried coconut, which she handed to me. I took a handful.

  “Here,” she said, and gave the bowl to me.

  I didn’t know what to think of her. She moved so easily from a voice and show of kindness to one of anger and impatience, from soft eyes to fierce ones.

  “When you’re finished, put it on the dressing table. That’s imported, from England. I’m going to sleep.”

  I started to tell her that I’d seen a woman from England who looked like a ghost with a red mouth and red cheeks, but she’d climbed into her hammock and turned her long back to me.

  I finished half of the bowl of dried coconut meat and then tiptoed over to the dressing table. I set it down with a louder noise than I’d expected. I waited for her to complain, but she didn’t. I went back and lay down in the hammock, picking little bits of coconut from my teeth.

  “If I wasn’t here, would you live here alone?” I asked, forgetting that she was a woman I didn’t know.

  She said nothing to me at first, so that I thought she must be sleeping, then she said, softly, with her back still to me, “Yes.” Then there was silence. Then she said in an even softer voice, “Until a new young girl is purchased. First they are taken to Old Vera and then brought to me.”

  “Old Vera?”

  “The old woman. Weren’t you taken to the old woman first? The old woman? The healer? He always takes the new ones there first.”

  “No,” I answered.

  She said nothing. For a long time there was silence before she said into the silence and not to me, “Perhaps it’s an ailment of spirit, then. Perhaps it’s that.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. “Do you know of a place called Palmares?” I whispered.

  She didn’t answer at all.

  I turned onto my stomach and soon fell asleep.

  “Is that the girl?” I heard someone ask. “Is that her?”

  “One of Father Tollinare’s experiments,” said another. “And hasn’t yet learned her proper place in the world.”

  I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake. But I fell asleep and I dreamed of Palmares, where one’s true place in the world was said to be the same as any free man’s or woman’s.

  Fazendo and the Indian Woman Who Was Not Touched by Mascarenhas

  WHEN MY HAMMOCK BEGAN TO MOVE back and forth, I woke. It was morning. The woman was standing over me, her face solemn. She was holding a piece of fruit, what is called the mandacaru. I took it and thanked her. Without a word, she went to the mirror to brush her hair. It was very long and thick.

  “Why do you brush your hair so much?” I asked, chewing the mandacaru. Again, I spoke to her as if she were not a stranger.

  “Because I’ve got charms in my hair,” she said with a smile. Her teeth were very white. Her face and shoulders were no longer shiny but very smooth.

  I was silent.

  “Haven’t you heard that?” she asked. “About charms hidden in the hair?”

  I shook my head.

  She turned without smiling and said, “Come on.”

  I followed her to the place I’d been the day before, although today it seemed hotter, the heat from the furnace reaching even over where I sat, yards away. I sat down to cut roots, but there weren’t any branches. Then I realized how strange it seemed, that branches had been picked as well as the roots. I sat watching the woman speak to the man in striped pants, then she left without saying a word to me. What would I do? I watched the woman at the furnace and the man shielding his eyes. I watched the woman standing over the round pot with her arms deep in cassava paste. Then the man in striped pants came over to me.

  “I’m called Mascarenhas,” he declared. I said nothing.

  “Do you know what these men are doing?” he asked.

  I looked at the two men and the one in the feathered hat looked at me evilly, but continued cutting cassava even when his eyes were raised on mine.

  “Yes,” I said, looking back at Mascarenhas.

  I didn’t feel as shaky as I had the day before. I sat calmly. I tried to keep my eyes expressionless.

  “Can you do what they’re doing without making your hands bleed?”

  “Yes, I can do it,” I boasted and looked evilly at the man in the feathered hat, who returned the evil look, then I turned expressionless eyes to Mascarenhas. I said, “Yes,” again, but the second time I wouldn’t look at the man in the feathered hat.

  Mascarenhas handed me a small knife. The man in the feathered hat began to laugh at this, then he was silent. I wouldn’t look at him. He shoved a basket of cassava under my feet. I began to cut one without looking up at him. I wouldn’t speak to him the next day nor the next, nor would he say a word to me, but when one of my baskets was finished, he’d shove another under my feet.

  Three times a day, Indian women would enter carrying bundles of cassava. They were naked to the waist. One of the women I’d see sitting at the door of her hut with a small light-haired baby at her breast.

  Whenever this woman would enter, as silent as the other women, Mascarenhas would laugh and say in the woman’s presence, “Me? I did not touch the Indian woman.” She wouldn’t look at him and always carried her head down.

  I didn’t know what this meant, but every day the white man in the striped pants would say that. “Me? I did not touch the Indian woman.” But I would see her sitting in front of her hut, her straight black hair against her shoulders, the baby sucking at her breast. I never heard her speak a word to anyone, not even to the other Indian women. I didn’t realize then how strange it was, but there were no Indian men there, only women. Later I learned that the men refused to live there and were scattered in the forests; and at cert
ain times certain ones would return to their women, and it was in that way children were conceived by them. I didn’t know if this was true, because I’d only seen the Indian women there.

  Of the Indian woman that Mascarenhas taunted, it was said, “She has forgotten her language and refuses to learn that of the masters.” But I didn’t feel she’d forgotten her own language. I felt that she simply refused to use either her own or that of the masters.

  Each day I’d feel the man in the feathered cap looking at me with hard eyes, cutting his own cassava without looking at what he was doing.

  After several days, he said, “I am called Fazendo.” He looked at me coldly.

  “I am Almeyda,” I replied, without turning my eyes to him. It was the first time I’d not put the “ita” on the end.

  “Fazendo, she’s too young for the knife,” Mascarenhas said laughing. “I’m afraid she might bleed.”

  I looked at no one. I cut the cassava. I looked down at the ground. I carried my basket to the women when I’d finished. I didn’t want my shoulders to be seen. I wanted to forget the language I had learned. I went back and sat silently, cutting cassava, until the woman entered and came and touched my shoulder. I started out with her still holding the little knife.

  “Give that to me,” Mascarenhas said. “I’ve told you always to give that to me.”

  I handed him the small knife and followed the woman.

  The Wife of Martim Aprigio

  I SAT ON THE HAMMOCK and watched her brush her hair.

  “Have you ever heard of a place called Palmares?” I dared to ask her again.

  She turned and looked at me. She was very still. Her dark eyes looked fierce. Her hair was still swept back from the brushing. I felt afraid of her and yet I waited for her to speak. She began brushing her hair again, and climbed onto the hammock, still brushing it.

  “I’m no longer a free woman because of that place,” she said. She stopped brushing and held the brush tightly in her lap.

  “I thought women became free because of it,” I said, watching her.

  One side of her face remained still, while the other began to move, to twitch, the eye, the jawline.

  “No, I’m no longer free because of it. But there are women there who’re free as long as they stay there.”

  “Did you leave?”

  “No. I was never at that place. I was free outside of it. I had my own house. I’d always been free. I was never a slave. Never. That’s why even now I can hold my head as high as any woman. I was the wife of Martim Aprigio, a respected man, an engineer, and I was a respected woman, and we didn’t always live in this country. After we were married, we lived in Holland for a long time. But after a while, Martim became like a crazy man and said a man wasn’t free if he couldn’t live anywhere. And so we came back here. But here we had to have papers to show our respectability.

  “Martim Aprigio, a man who’d lectured in the Netherlands and Germany and England and France and at Russian courts, and who was even hired for projects by the czar. That Martim Aprigio.

  “But here, we always had to show our papers. Me, I got used to it.

  “He didn’t. The necessary papers and letters of introduction. In a wild country such as this, even noblemen carry letters of introduction. But free papers? No, he wouldn’t get used to that.

  “And then there was this man we helped, whom we gave food and drink. And it turned out that he was a spy for the escaped slaves at Palmares. They have their own spies, you see, everywhere. I didn’t know it. I thought he too was a free man, a friend of my husband’s, and I treated him with every kindness. But my husband knew who he was and what he was doing, and that a man could be executed for such a crime and a woman, and a woman captured and sold into slavery and . . .”

  She did not go on. During her talk, she’d turned away from me, and it was only the still side of her face that I saw as she resumed her talk.

  “He, Martim I mean, never told me how he came to be free and to be educated in foreign countries. He’d never tell me. But me? My mother was what they call ‘a maker of angels,’ an abortionist. All sorts of women came to her, even the wives of wealthy and important men. And there were enough of important men’s wives. It’s a horrible thing. When I was old enough to know what it was that got our freedom, why . . . No, I said nothing. I suppose anything to win one’s freedom. But I walked about the house in silence, only silence.” She turned to face me, both of her eyes very wide. “She stopped it, and began to sell angels. She sold little cakes that they call angels. And one day this black man, unlike any black man I’d ever seen in my whole life . . . He wore a dark suit, but he didn’t wear it as some men, as if it didn’t belong to him. It was his and his own life was his. I hadn’t seen such a man ever, and I still haven’t seen any.

  “When my mother saw him coming, she’d pushed me up to the counter. I sold him a little angel, and he kept coming back and began to court me. He said he wouldn’t be in this country long and wanted to marry me and take me with him. I didn’t even know how he’d got to be the way he was, for he never told me, and then when we were in Holland, in Amsterdam, I saw the honor with which the people treated him. And it was not a false honor, not the false honor I saw him sometimes treated with here, when he’d show his letters of introduction. No, it was not a false honor, but real . . .

  “He said he would be executed for such a crime. They took him one place and me another . . . But all my life I’d been protected from such evils as that and such evils as I’ve experienced here in this place. But I won’t lower my head from it. I’ll walk the same way that I did when I walked in the courtyards of noblemen.”

  She straightened her shoulders and began to brush her hair very hard. I stared at her high smooth forehead.

  The next day I learned the difference between the sweet cassava and the bitter cassava. Wine was made from the juice of the sweet cassava, and bread from the starchy root. The juice of the bitter cassava was poison and every bit of it must be squeezed and baked out. Cassava branches were cut and then replanted for new cassava plants. If the branch of a cassava plant were cut and the roots were kept in the ground, the cassava root would stay whole and good and could be dug up many years later and eaten. I learned to make war flour by toasting dry cassava. War flour would last for a year, but fresh cassava flour would only last for two days.

  Dream of Feathers

  THE WIFE OF MARTIM APRIGIO soon sent me to live with the old woman and the rest of the women who worked at the cassava barn. They lived in a very large hut with rows of hammocks. Although they never spoke of her, I felt the distance there seemed between them and this woman who once had been free. I also wondered what it was she did besides provide a place for the new women (I called myself a woman then) to stay.

  I only remember her taking me to the cassava barn in the mornings.

  And I learned that she was the only black woman who would stand speaking to Mascarenhas. The others met him with silence, although he’d speak to them freely, that is when he didn’t think that they were working properly or fast enough. Mascarenhas’s skin was a dark red, even though he was a white man, or considered himself to be one. It looked as if it had been baked over the furnace like the cassava bread.

  Now I came and went with the rest of the women. It was said to be a large plantation, although it was only a corner of it that I saw, and didn’t feel I could roam freely as I had at Entralgo’s place. In fact, here I’d not even seen the master and learned that the man who’d purchased me was not the master but a man named Sobrieski, a Polish shoemaker who sometimes acted as the master’s agent, and who did most of his business from the master, whose name was Azevedo, but of whom no one ever spoke. No one had ever taken an order from him directly, and he stayed, as far as I could tell, within the thick walls of his mansion and when he ventured outside, he was carried around in a curtained hammock.

  Although I’d heard that some masters would have their slaves carry them about, I’d not grown up with t
hat, as Entralgo strolled about his plantation freely, giving orders and punishments, riding his horse through his cane fields and orchards. It was only the women who he kept sheltered, and it was said that he’d whipped one of his daughters almost to death for letting a stranger see her standing at the window. The girl had only been three or four, and it was said that there were still scars on her body, and they said that he would regret it later when it came time for her to marry, for it would lessen her price. At first, I hadn’t understood it, when they used the word “price,” since the daughters of Entralgo were free.

  “Who is that pacha?” I asked, the first time I saw the curtained hammock.

  A group of women were crowded in the doorway watching. “Pacha?” asked one of the women. “That’s the master himself.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Azevedo it is.”

  “Has no one ever seen him?”

  “The old woman Vera has seen him.”

  “The old woman has seen everybody.”

  “Yes, even when he comes out into the yard he rides in a covered hammock.”

  “I saw his hand once. He was eating grapes and he threw a handful of seeds out from behind the curtain. A very delicate hand too.”

  “Does he have a wife and children?” I asked.

  “No, Vera says he doesn’t,” one of the women said.

  I wondered if I’d ever see him. Vera came to the doorway and there was no more talk of Azevedo. I wondered why none of the women were ever with any of the men I’d seen, for on the Entralgo plantation one often saw men and women together. But I’d only seen three men after all. There were the two men who cut cassava, and the one who threw coal into the furnace. I asked one of the women about this. She said nothing at first. In fact, it was many days before she answered my question. We were returning at night from the cassava barn and I was walking alone. She left the other women, came back and walked with me.

  “There’s something wrong with all the women who work on this part of the plantation,” she whispered.