Filipa shared her mother’s privileged position at the farm belonging to the Portuguese man of the cured meats, and assisted only with the work in the kitchen.
The Portuguese farmer wasn’t certain who the girl’s father was, but because it was in his cautious nature to account for all possibilities, he decided to give her a Christian name—a Spanish one at that—just in case, and to treat her as he had Sahy. Except that the Castilian had not appeared once in the last ten years, and the Portuguese farmer soon began to ask what, when it all shook out, sort of obligation did he have to a murderer of priests? It’s quite true that, beyond the good conversation and the praise heaped on his cured meats, deep down, just like everyone else, he harbored a terrible fear of the infamous Castilian. But ten years is a long time to harbor anything, even the most secret of fears, which, if they are not carefully cultivated, fade over time like everything else.
The only bit of news that reached him every now and then was that the Castilian was keeping a distance from the region to avoid any awkward situations, and so the Portuguese farmer thought it wise to consent when a slave trader said he would like to take the plump little daughter of an Indian and a white man. By all means, as money was one of the most welcome things as far as he was concerned. He could take Sahy too, if he wanted, and, if he didn’t want her, he wasn’t the one to blame for separating mother and daughter—and when it came right down to it, what was wrong with separating mother and daughter if they were both Indians? The savages, while he wouldn’t say they had no feelings, for even he could attest they did, were like cattle: their suffering was of a lighter nature and would soon pass.
The fact is that Filipa, accustomed to canning meat and spending hours on her mother’s lap by the bonfire, wasn’t prepared in the least for what she was to find at the mill in Recife.
Things got off to a bad start on the journey north. Bound to the other natives, Filipa, who was unaccustomed to walking long distances, was practically dragged along by the others, her feet soon full of open sores, her legs cramping and pangs shooting up her legs, hunger—which she had never before known—piercing her stomach, and the thirst causing her throat to close up. This hell lasted for days, and she only survived because the slave trader, worried about losing a slave so quickly at the beginning of the journey, sat her on the back of a donkey carrying a load of salt.
When she arrived in Recife, nothing was left of the meaty girl who had departed Bahia three weeks earlier. She now looked more like a skeleton overcome with pain, and with a single thought in her mind: to run away.
On the day she first saw the sugar plantation, she was sure she had witnessed hell on earth as the priest had described it. Inside a cavernous shed, fiery stoves gave birth to fiery tongues that climbed the sides of enormous cauldrons, causing their boiling liquid to scream amid vaporous clouds; there was the deafening grind of wheels and chains, and an acrid smell that seemed to coat mouths and lungs even from miles away. All of this, along with the moans of the slaves forced into labor there, paralyzed the young Filipa with fear. Her job was to help separate the bagasse that the black slaves piled in the field behind the shed where the cauldrons could be found. This did not require her to enter into that devil’s lair, but it did nothing to soothe her terror.
The terror was not hers alone: many of the adult natives were incapable of entering the enormous shed. They would rather be whipped to death than ever set foot in there.
The Portuguese had developed a new technique for sugar production in the Azores, for which the Brazilian climate was ideal and the land spectacular. The Indians, the so-called “native blacks,” excelled at clearing the forest to make way for sugarcane, but they were disastrous at the complex and repetitive work at the sugar mill, whose purpose they could not understand. Armed with the machetes and knives they received from the Europeans, the Indians had taken a great technological leap forward, but the operations of the sugar mill, an example of the most advanced technology of its time, proved too much for them. And so, the additional labor of African slaves was becoming increasingly necessary in order to make the colony productive.
MB’TA, THE SLAVE FROM GUINEA
Mb’ta came from Bantu people, born to family of farmers in a slave-trading village in Africa. He had barely turned eighteen when he was caught in an ambush as he was returning home from his father’s rice fields. Mb’ta hadn’t yet given any thought to marriage, nor had he fallen for any girls in his village. He had a few plans for himself: he intended to ask his father’s permission to go live with an uncle who was a blacksmith in a village a half-day’s walk away, and to learn this highly respected profession. He had simply been waiting for his brother to take his place next to his father, and he was certain that this time would soon come.
The young man had grown worried with rumors that men and women were being captured to be sold as slaves on the other side of the sea. And so, when one day a shiver ran up his neck and he sensed he was being followed, panic washed over him.
Mb’ta was no warrior. He had not even undergone training to become a warrior. He’d always helped his father in the fields, dreaming of the day when he could join his uncle to learn his way around the foundry and master the art of ironmaking, forging weapons that his brothers, not he, would later take up. When he realized there were two or three men on his trail, he knew that, all alone, he had no chance. He tried to run, but it was no use.
His life underwent an abrupt and irreversible change. Mb’ta wished to die and ever since that moment thought of only one thing: running away.
After the hellish nightmare that was the sea-crossing in the hold of a ship, tossed amid a horde of other Africans speaking Bantu, Yoruba, and Hausa, Mb’ta landed in Brazil at the same sugar plantation where Filipa had been brought.
They spent years without really noticing one another, despite working in close proximity. And perhaps they would never have noticed one another had Mb’ta not lost the iron amulet he had worn around his neck, his last tie to his village in Africa. The same amulet Filipa found and hid, fastened around her waist beneath the thick cotton clothing worn by all the slaves.
Mb’ta found a way to approach the slave women to look for the charm, and soon came to Filipa to inquire, if she would pardon the interruption, whether she had seen an amulet that looked like this or that as she walked along the path that led to the stables. Filipa responded that no, she hadn’t seen anything, because she had liked the tiny, beautiful iron fist even without knowing what it meant. Only later, whenever the opportunity arose, and because she had begun to feel a little guilty, or perhaps for another reason altogether, did she begin to look for the young man with his black skin like that of a shiny, polished fruit.
At night, when the slaves would gather around the fire, she began to notice the infectious rhythm coming from Mb’ta’s drums. She couldn’t take her eyes off him each time he stood up to wriggle his entire body in a frenzied dance that she found so foreign and, at the same time, so familiar. Mb’ta, for his part, had begun to take note of the young mameluca slave’s attentions. There were few women at the sugar plantation, and nearly all were either Indians or the daughters of Indians and white men. The two black Yoruba women from the kitchen were older and already had husbands.
Dancing and beating his drum, he drew closer to Filipa, and suddenly she too was in the middle of the circle, swaying her body along to the beat, as though she had grown up dancing next to the Bantu man.
And so, their meeting was quite natural. Mb’ta savored Filipa’s fragrant smell, an ancestral scent that directed his thoughts back to the meats seasoned for days over open fires in the houses of his village. Filipa liked Mb’ta’s pitch-dark skin, where she would bury her face and once again feel protected as she had in Sahy’s warm lap on those nights spent around the bonfire.
Just as natural was the way they began to obsessively plot their escape. They spoke in Língua Geral, the language of the first inhabitants of this new Brazil, who came from so many different backgrounds.
Filipa would say that she was an Indian, that her mother had taught her everything about the forest, that they would find some place near a river where they could build a camp. “And I know how to hunt,” Mb’ta would reply, “I used to hunt with my father back in my homeland, and once even killed a lion with other men from the village.” “And I know how to can meats,” Filipa would say, “which is a delicious way to preserve game from the hunt. My mother taught me, no one here knows I can do this, but I can, and I know how to plant cassava and make cassava flour.” “And I,” Mb’ta would say, “know how to fish with a spear or a net.” “And I know how to make a net,” Filipa would reply.
Mb’ta would say that they needed to find a good weapon, at least one machete, though rope would also be good. “I can make rope,” Filipa would say, “I’ll work on it at night, in the dark, and hide it during the day. I’ve found a good hiding place.” And she would laugh as she remembered the amulet, which she still hadn’t found a way or the courage to tell Mb’ta about. “And I have a blade that I stole and hid away one day,” Mb’ta would add. “I can make a handle for it, and a wooden spear, I can make these at night, too, and hide them during the day.”
The preparations, however, had to be postponed because, by the time she finally noticed, Filipa had been pregnant for months. She still wanted to run away, she was an Indian, she insisted, and Indians gave birth in the forest. “But how will you run from the men,” Mb’ta would ask, “how will you run from the dogs?” “I can manage,” Filipa responded, “Let’s go, Mb’ta, come.” But Mb’ta, poor Mb’ta, convinced Filipa it was better to wait.
How was he to know that later everything would become much more difficult? How was he to know that the number of slaves who would later attempt to escape would be so great that security measures would be increased or—what was worse—that João Tibiritê was to arrive with his heinous philosophy that a runaway slave was a dead slave, because that was the only way they would learn?
But there was no way to know, and so they delayed their escape.
Maria Mb’ta was born. She had a birthmark, a dark triangle at the base of her neck, its peak slanted left. Filipa would gaze at the birthmark and remember the stories of her people that her mother had told by the bonfire, her with eyes closed. She thought about her people, whom she’d never known, and thought about the tranquil brook where she and Mb’ta would build their home.
Mb’ta made Filipa a necklace of tiny stones he’d found in the river and cut crudely with a nail he’d hidden among his belongings. Filipa returned the amulet to him without a word, as though she had just found it. Smiling, he tied it around young Maria’s neck.
Life at the sugar plantation had become more and more difficult. The nights filled with drumming, music, and dancing were now only permitted on specific days of the week, holy days, or when some important white man made a visit. The work had grown more intense: the number of cauldrons had increased along with the number of slaves, who now worked in shifts so that production never ceased. Many times Filipa worked a different shift than Mb’ta, and days would pass without the couple seeing one another.
The plantation owner was an ambitious nobleman who’d left Portugal in the 1550s to start life anew in the land that was being built up from nothing. With a bit of luck and a great deal of cunning, he’d managed to build his sugar mill and, after production and a client base had stabilized, he sent for his wife and children. The house became more lively, and Filipa, having just given birth to her daughter, was assigned to help with the household chores.
It was the wrong job for the wrong person: how could she resist such temptation as, day after day, she visited the bedroom of the lady of the house?
With the fascination for new objects she’d inherited from her people, Filipa had accumulated various little trinkets over the year, which she stored in a hiding place whose location only she knew. Some things she had found, as she paid close attention everywhere she walked, but others she had carefully and artfully stolen from here and there. They were always things of little value, like hairpins that were bent out of shape, hairpins that had fallen on the floor, or rusty nails.
But no one escapes the inevitable. The day arrived when Filipa took a fancy to a cameo fastened to a bright-red velvet ribbon that the lady of the house sometimes wore around her neck when receiving guests. When the lady of the house took off the necklace, she would place it in a small jewelry box decorated with mother-of-pearl, a tiny box that made Filipa sick with the desire to stash it in her hiding place. When she found herself alone cleaning the bedroom, she always stopped to touch the box and open it. She didn’t know what fanned the flames of her desire more: the cameo with the most beautiful red ribbon she’d ever seen, or the box with tiny, white, inlaid stones—which she wanted to show Mb’ta so that, who knows, he might make her one just like it.
Consumed by her desire, she decided one day to steal both. She hid the jewelry box between her breasts and walked out of the house, breathing a sigh of relief as she reached the yard, believing the worst was over.
You can imagine what the consequences were for her actions.
But what you have no way of knowing is that João Tibiritê had already been hired by this time as a slave-catcher to bring order to that “pack of lawless savages,” and it was he who tied Filipa to the tree stump and tore at her skin with his whip, proclaiming at the top of his lungs for all to hear that, as far as he was concerned, whoever strayed once could very well stray again, but no one would do so a third time because he would be killed first, killed right and killed slowly, and he was of the opinion that the longer it took to learn a lesson, the deeper the branding iron would sear into the malfeasant’s subsconscious.
Filipa listened to all of this until she understood—and Mb’ta, too. All the slaves had been summoned to witness the punishment of that mameluca thief. Mb’ta had been bound and tied inches from his wife so he could watch the blood run down her back. But was there any reflection on what had been said—and I’m not even talking just about Filipa, whose bold temperament wasn’t given to patience and who thought everything had been the last straw on her haystack of suffering; but Mb’ta, too, who was always so sensible and cautious—did they reflect on João Tibiritê’s words, did they study his character to see whether he made good on his threats? Not a chance! In one of these inexplicable and illogical bursts of temerity, the two slaves decided they could no longer delay their escape.
One week later, on a night with neither stars nor moonlight, they grabbed Maria Mb’ta and set off into the darkness.