Palmares

by Gayl Jones

  “Cozinheiros have their ‘last mystery’—their most secret recipe—and we have ours.”

  We put salve on the back of a man who had been beaten with braided straps of leather rolled in sand. Then he had been cut with a razor and lemon juice, salt and urine had been rubbed into the wounds. We cleansed him with cold water and then applied the sap from the copaiba tree. Luiza claimed that his wounds would be healed by the morning, though he would have some trouble sleeping during the night.

  We gave potions to many who were exhausted from overwork and eating only mush, cane syrup, and rotten dried meat. Coconut milk was the base of it, but I will not give the other ingredients. When it was mixed, however, it took on the color of deep rust. She took out fruit and fish from a basket, leaving it for the old woman, while we ate the mush, salt pork, and pumpkin the woman served us. I watched with surprise when she ate the salt pork, for hadn’t she claimed to eat no meat? Perhaps it was for mere purposes of conviviality with this old escrava.

  At another plantation we visited, a dreadful thing was done. The owner, who had been some kind of magistrate in Rio or Olinda—a man of title—kept a pool of piranha, and whenever one of his slaves was disobedient, or if for some reason he took dislike to what the slave said or did or refused to say or do he would plunge a hand or an arm of that slave into the pool. The slaves who came to us, therefore had different lengths of arms—on some the fingers were missing, others the whole hand, the arm up to the elbow, the whole arm. It was both physical and psychological cures that were administered. One slave had been affected so that her whole system had stopped working, and she was given a purge of Malagueta pepper. It was this woman who Luiza told how she might poison the piranha with an ordinary weed that could be found about the plantation.

  “We’ve poisoned them before, and he simply gets others,” said the distressed woman, whose hand was gone. “And he gets them in greater abundance.”

  “Well, this will prevent him from getting others,” said Luiza.

  The woman did as Luiza instructed her, and we heard of no more trouble there with piranhas. Several months later, however, we saw the woman on the streets of Bahia selling papaya preserves and coconut candy.

  “Aren’t you Iguarita from the Mascarenho plantation?” Luiza had asked the woman.

  “Yes, Madam Zibatra. I’m the same woman.”

  “Why are you here in town selling preserves and candy?”

  “You know why,” said the woman. “It was not the fish that were poisoned but Mascarenho.”

  “Did I not tell you to poison the fish?” asked Luiza-Zibatra.

  “And I poisoned the fish, but it was not the fish the poison took effect on but the master.”

  She was shy of her stub and kept it in the pocket of a full skirt. The basket of preserves and candy was tied by a strap around her neck so that she could work freely with one hand.

  “Well, who has you selling preserves and candy?”

  “His wife, Madam. You know it. After her husband died, she sold all of the men and kept the women—laundresses and cake makers and candy makers and seamstresses, to hire us out and send us into town to sell the sweets we make.”

  “Is that all?” asked Luiza.

  “No, Madam. There’s another thing she has us do that I dare not speak of.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know it. I dare not say its name.”

  “Those who were not mutilated by her husband?” asked Luiza.

  “Yes, Madam, and an even crueler thing it is. She takes the women’s money for doing it and then she laughs at them.”

  “Go back home and watch her stop laughing,” said Luiza.

  The woman obeyed and some days later it was heard that the mistress of the Mascarenho plantation died from a spoiled batch of preserves that she liked to eat in the mornings with manioc toast and butter. The remaining women were purchased by a “foreign” buyer and given their freedom, and could be seen selling their own wares about the streets of Bahia and pocketing their own money. There was one of the unmutilated women, however, who continued in the “profession” that the mistress Mascarenho had started her in. Luiza frowned on her and complained about her. One morning she was found lying in the streets of Bahia, a victim of some thief.

  The Virtue of Plants and a Lecture on the Intellect and Morality; Strange Sounds

  I WAS INSIDE MAKING MASKS and perfumes when Luiza entered from outside. I still wore my “old woman’s” disguise even though it appeared that I was safe in this city with Luiza, and I still had my papers.

  I was making an assortment of perfumes to correspond to different emotions, and arranging colors on the masks to produce a variety of emotions and affections. Each day I would practice increasing the range of feelings my products were capable of producing—moving through love, passion, anger, uncertainty, etc. Luiza had lectured me on the importance of odor, music, color in magic, and medicinal rituals, and I was completing my first assignment—using oils and secretions from plants and animals, and plant and animal dyes. “The more you learn you will see that there is very little magic in magic and at the same time very much,” she said, looking at me with her intense eyes.

  She came and examined the work that I was doing, and nodded approvingly at the first one, frowned disapprovingly at the second.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “This could make some dangerous and immoral feelings. So you know how to make it? But why should you cause people to abuse themselves? Raise them up. Make them fearless, ambitious, proud, strong, intelligent. Create heroic feelings to produce heroic deeds, victories of the spirit. Are you a witch or a doctor of witches?”

  Instead of destroying the bottle, she mixed it with something from another bottle, changing the “wrong” mixture to a right one.

  “I like to work with the range of ‘high’ feelings, not the ‘lowest’ ones,” Luiza said.

  “Shouldn’t we try to reproduce the range of affections? And aren’t those others true affections?” I asked.

  She said nothing. She examined the other perfumes, frowned on them.

  “I have a very high reputation,” said the woman. “People don’t fear me for the harm I’ve done to them. People don’t have to expect miracles to reach the states these concoctions could put them in. I’ve never done anything I can’t respect. Get rid of this, and come, let me teach you how to work with sound.”

  Before she started creating the sounds, she explained to me that music/sound like verbal and visual images could affect the body’s rhythms. She explained to me more about the biological aspects of sound—how it could alter the body’s functions and change the affections, and even the intellectual level—one’s understanding and alertness. I was made to listen and tell her what I “felt”—what new energies or what new thoughts. Then the final time she asked me to listen I heard nothing, yet I felt a strange relaxation and inner peace, and then just as suddenly I felt nervous, giddy, restless. She gave me some figures and asked me to calculate them. I confused the figures. She said something to me, asked me to respond and I could not, as her words seemed scrambled. Then I felt the strange calm again.

  “Those are the ranges of inaudible sounds—inaudible to you, but not to me, and not to many of the animals in the forests, though I hear at greater depth than even they—and yet what changes these sounds make. Sounds you can’t even hear, and look at what they’ve done to you. Ah, there’s a lot that can be done with silent sound. Imagine what things?”

  I said nothing. I wondered if such a stratagem could be used against one’s enemies. I looked at her immediately, but she said nothing. She simply replaced the instruments in the trunk.

  “You will practice all of this tomorrow,” she said. “You will practice it until you know it perfectly, and you must be very careful. Imagine what such knowledge could do in corrupt hands?”

  Then she showed me a new medicine she had learned from the Indians—what might be done with the dried and triturated tail of an opossum.

>   I waited nearly the whole of the next day for her to tell me about the “silent sounds” but she did not.

  Finally in the evening I said, “Luiza, you promised to tell me about the sounds. I want to know most about the sounds one cannot hear.”

  “Always,” she said with a smile. “Always you want to know first what’s hidden. First we will begin with the drum playing and then the hand piano. I’ll teach you how to play with skill and energy. We’ll talk first about the effects on the body and then those on the mind and the spirit.”

  It was only after several months that she talked to me about the sounds one could not hear.

  “You’ve been making them all along and didn’t know it,” she said. “In the spaces between what the others call the real sounds. But we both know it’s all real.” She looked at me carefully. “Why are you thinking of the nerve destroying sounds first? Why do you always think immediately of destruction?”

  I was silent.

  “Let’s go outdoors. We’ll start first with the invisible sounds in nature and then we’ll make our own. Invisible did I say? And are sounds ever visible?” She winked at me. “Come along, Jaguara, let’s examine the strange sounds in the air.”

  CURANDEIRA

  The Bushwhacking Captain’s Wife

  THE WOMAN SEEMED ONE OF THOSE QUIET and reserved kinds, as she stood in the “shop.” She was wearing a clean, plain cut tan dress, and a thin cotton shawl was wrapped about her shoulders.

  “This will be for the perfumes,” said Luiza, before the woman even entered.

  “Are you from the Marcgraf plantation?” asked Luiza when the woman entered. Why she asked such a question I don’t know, because this was obviously a free woman with a little property.

  “No, I’m a free woman,” said the woman.

  She had not closed the door and looked as if she did not know whether to enter or go back out.

  “Close the door and come in if you want my help in that matter,” said Luiza.

  The woman closed the door, but still stood with her hands twisted in the shawl. She was a thin, handsome but not pretty woman, though she might have been pretty if she carried herself differently. Her eyes wandered about the shop and came to rest on me, then jumped back to Luiza-Zibatra.

  “You’re Madam Zibatra?” she asked her.

  “Yes. Sit down and let’s talk. I can’t do anything until you tell me your problem.”

  “You spoke as if you already knew,” said the woman. “My apprentice doesn’t know your trouble,” said Zibatra.

  The woman sat down on a bench. Zibatra sat across from her. I remained standing, but drew nearer.

  “My husband’s a bushwhacking captain,” said the woman. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “Explain what you mean.”

  The woman, who had fine dark eyes, looked down at her hands, which were still twisting themselves in the ends of the shawl. I had never seen such a “private” woman.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” asked Zibatra.

  “No thank you,” said the woman. She looked up suddenly. “You’re behaving as if this is an inquisition, or the follow-up of one.”

  “I’m no inquisitor,” said Zibatra. “You came here freely, didn’t you? You must have some confidence in me.”

  “Oh, I have confidence in you,” said the woman, with a sudden aliveness. She twisted on the bench. Suddenly the combination of Scottish whisky and coconut milk came into my head. Why, I didn’t know.

  “Tell me your story,” said Zibatra gently, coaxing the woman. “My grandmother was a fearsome woman, but I’m not. I’m kind and tolerant.”

  “People fear you.”

  “Do you think I’m a devil fixed up like a human woman?” asked Zibatra.

  “No,” said the woman with fine dark eyes. Zibatra looked at her but said nothing.

  “Well, you wanted me to explain what a bushwhacking captain is,” said the woman. “You see, he’s a soldier of a kind.”

  “Is he independent or does he work in a small band?”

  “Independent. Is that important? He’s not an evil man. I know he doesn’t do what some of the others do.”

  “Why do you insist that you know it?”

  “He did keep a man once, beyond the time he was supposed to turn him in to his master. He made him work for him, and then when he returned him, he pretended he had just caught him, and took the full reward. But he doesn’t mistreat or torture anyone.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “He would tell me if he did so.”

  “What kinds of things have the others done?”

  “Oh, they’ve abused the men they’ve captured. They’ve abused them as much as the English or the Portuguese. A woman doesn’t understand.

  “Or rather, I don’t understand it. He himself was captured by a bushwhacking captain, and brought back to slavery, and now he becomes one himself.”

  “In exchange for his freedom?” I asked, thinking of Pedro who had gained his freedom in a similar manner except he had been a soldier, and had even fought against the Palmaristas. I thought of the first time I met him when we were both slaves of the Polish shoemaker, our capture by the Palmaristas. I thought of the whole story of Pedro while I looked at the woman. I thought of my mixed feelings, of harshness and compassion. Or was it tenderness I felt. Was tenderness the same as compassion?

  The woman nodded, but looked at me as if it were an obvious and therefore foolish thing to ask.

  “He himself was captured and abused horribly.”

  “You say he captures but does not abuse?” asked Zibatra.

  “No, he captures the runaway slaves and returns them, that’s all. There was only one man he kept and made work for him. It wasn’t for a very long time. And there is no cruelty.”

  “How is he paid for this, besides his freedom?”

  “They pay him in gold depending on how much time it takes him and how much distance he has to travel.”

  “What else does he do besides capture runaways?”

  “He . . . well, he helps them sometimes to find and destroy quilombos.”

  “Palmares,” I asked. “Did he help them to destroy Palmares?”

  “Keep your feelings,” said Zibatra, looking at me and raising her hand and frowning. I started to say something. “Keep them,” she repeated.

  “He wasn’t the only one,” said the woman in defense of him. “There were other black soldiers along.”

  Zibatra was still looking at me with her hand raised.

  “There were quilombos everywhere,” said the woman. “They say they are all in the mountains. Smaller ones than Palmares.”

  “Yes,” said Zibatra. “You said he does his job and only necessary cruelty.”

  “He doesn’t mistreat anyone.”

  “What do you want from me?” asked Zibatra.

  “That he stop being a bushwhacking captain. He has his freedom now but he keeps working for them.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “Yes, but he continues.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He won’t say anything. He just continues to do it.”

  “Perhaps he feels . . .”

  “What?”

  Zibatra was silent. She looked as if she were in a trance.

  The woman continued talking. “He thinks he’s damned whether he turns back or goes on.”

  “I thought he didn’t speak to you about it,” I said, when Zibatra had said nothing.

  The woman looked at me as one looks at an intruder. I was silent. “I heard him once at night talking in a dream. A nightmare. He said that and then he said they were all looking for him to kill. I didn’t know if it meant for him to kill someone. Or if he were the object of it. Do you know? It was a nightmare. I brought him Scotch whiskey and coconut milk. It always calms him when he’s like that.”

  My eyes lit up.

  Zibatra was silent for a long time, then she said, “Is his name Queiroz?”

>   “Yes,” said the woman, looking at her with amazement.

  It might as well be Pedro, I was thinking, but I didn’t say it.

  “Go home,” said Zibatra. “Queiroz is incapable of metamorphosis. I understand him because I can see history. I can see his whole story. Go home.”

  The woman stood up, but kept looking at her.

  “But I . . . I thought you could help me.”

  “Go home,” said Zibatra. “I try to avoid deceits. There is nothing I can do.”

  “But I’ve told you the truth,” said the woman, deeply distressed.

  “I know it,” said Zibatra. “Now go. Go home and stay his wife!”

  The woman hurried out. I felt as if I could see her, from that time, even more “private,” and sober and silent, waiting for her husband to return from his bushwhacking expeditions.

  I started to say something to Zibatra, reminding her that she had spoken to the woman of her “kindness and tolerance,” and hadn’t she caused harm that time?

  As if she’d heard me, Zibatra said, “I can see history and you can’t. Do you think I can change the number of the Beast, just because I want to?” Then she looked at me fiercely. “Could you have saved Pedro?”

  I stood there, looking bewildered.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” she asked. “She’s the bushwhacker’s beloved wife, and you, go look closely and you’ll see more of them.”

  She was speaking of the “experiment” she had taught me, of staring into a glass of water, with several drops of a special oil on top—to induce supernatural visions. Thus far it had not “worked” for me. I had my thoughts and dreams, but no supernatural visions.

  “You can’t get sick just because it’s the fashion of epidemics,” she said lightly and went out, wrapping her own shawl about her shoulders. I went into the next room and stared into the glass of oil and water.