1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [213]
So did others. Portuguese euphoria from the destruction of Palmares had been short-lived. Slaves continued to escape and to live in the forest. But they didn’t repeat the mistake of forming big, centralized communities like Palmares. Instead they created ten thousand or more small villages in a flexible, shifting network that spread across much of eastern Brazil and the lower Amazon. They mixed with extant native settlements, collected Indian slave escapees, threw open their doors to Portuguese misfits and criminals. Many Africans had lived in tropical environments before being shipped across the ocean. They were comfortable in hot, wet places where people farmed palms and kept trapfuls of shrimp in the stream. They were happy to learn when Indians showed them how to fish by scattering poison in a tributary or make protective “boots” by melting latex over their feet or squeeze the bitter compounds out of manioc with long, tubular baskets. Ideologically opposed to “going native,” the Portuguese were much less willing to adjust. In consequence, the forest seemed dangerous to them, a place to be ventured into only with an army. Ceding the field to quilombos, the colonists were only partially aware that the escaped slaves were living within a short walk of the plantations, as in Calabar or Liberdade. In consequence, the quilombos were left largely alone—unless they were unlucky enough to be in the path of gold miners, rubber tappers, or other people who sought quick wealth in the forest.
To inexpert eyes, the riverbank across from Maria do Rosario’s home looks like a typical tropical hodgepodge. But almost every plant in this image was sown and tended by Rosario and her family, creating an environment as ecologically rich as it is artificial.
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Brazil has a host of hybrid spiritual regimes—Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba, Santería—often focused on special areas where Afro-Brazilians drum, dance, and practice the ritualized martial art of capoeira. In their isolation, Brazil’s quilombos built their own pageants and festivals atop these spiritual traditions, binding together communities in steel hoops of shared memory. Consider the satirical bumba-meu-boi (loosely, “shake it, ox”), celebrated in quilombos across northeastern Brazil. In the version celebrated by the quilombo of Soledade (Solitude) in the eastern state of Maranhão, villagers pay festive homage to the fable of Pai Francisco, a henpecked African slave whose pregnant wife hankers for a taste of ox tongue. Alas, the only nearby ox is the pride and joy of Francisco’s brutal master. Worse still, Francisco has been entrusted with its care. Nonetheless, he leads the beast into the forest and puts his knife into it. Quickly apprehended, Francisco is threatened with death unless the ox can be resurrected. Dancers representing authorities from the local mayor to the national president haplessly struggle to bring the beast back to life, giving spectators a chance to hoot at their failures. Ultimately, native priests revive the animal with blasts of tobacco, perfumed waters, and the shaking of special rattles: the indigenous arsenal of cure. Crowds cheer as the ox staggers to its feet and exhort it to dance lively—bumba, meu boi! A cheerful mashup of America (tobacco, priests, and forest creatures) and Africa (cows, slaves), bumba-meu-boi is the tale of the quilombo itself: slaves escaping their fate with the help of Brazil’s original inhabitants.
Five hundred miles southwest, the quilombo struggle for freedom is revisited even more overtly at the rite of lambe-sujos (an insulting reference to the red African cloth used for turbans—the equivalent, perhaps, of “towelhead”). Covering their entire bodies with a shimmering, tarry coat of charcoal and oil,