Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [116]
“You OK?” Jorge asked his girlfriend, holding her protectively under his arm. She nodded. We slowly crawled to the front of the house and looked down the street. Deserted. Then we saw others peeping from windows and doors. Neighbors began softly calling to each other to confirm that no one had been hit.
“I’ll be so glad to leave this place,” Lula said. “It was a reasonable neighborhood when we came here, forty years ago, but now it’s fighting, all the time.”
“It’s drugs,” Zezé said. “Did you hear about the mother, in that house almost next door? She decided that her son had cheated her in a drug deal and ordered him shot. Her own son!”
“What was the gunfire for?” I asked. “Who are the Killers?”
“Drugs,” Zezé said. “Or something like that. One gang upset with someone else. Hired assassins with too much firepower. We’ll find out later. The woman next door, her son was fifteen. He’s dead now.”
Below me, the street had returned to normal. Children picked up their balls and began an impromptu soccer game.
“You want another beer?” Lula asked me.
“But no more for you,” said his wife.
These threads, fragile strings, I thought as I accepted the beer from Lula and watched his wife hand him a soda. These are the weave of our lives. And the threads that most keep us from falling into the abyss are those of friendship, of love. These we must continually care for, mend when they become frayed. I sat on the verandah on the metal folding chair that Jorge offered me. I should go visit Dona Cida, I thought.
Rita and I decided to overtly use Salvador perceptions about our differences in race and class to our advantage for the benefit of Bahia Street. A Rotary group in Seattle had expressed interest in spearheading a project for Bahia Street, but they needed a partner in Salvador for them to get the matching funds from the International Rotary. That meant that Rita and I somehow had to make contact with a Salvador Rotary club. The Rotary clubs in Salvador were almost entirely white and middle- to upper middle-class. They would never invite black, favela-born Rita to one of their meetings. So, I—white, foreign Dr. Willson—rang a club and asked if they would like me to give a talk about an education project in Salvador. They were delighted, and invited me to a dinner meeting in an upper middle-class area of Salvador, miles from the center of town and Rita’s home. I neglected to mention that I would be bringing Rita with me. We took a bus. Brazilian politeness would never allow them to refuse her entrance in such a situation.
When the time came, I introduced myself and then turned the talk over to Rita. Within five minutes she had charmed the entire group, slicing through class and racial barriers with her sharp perception and inclusiveness.
“I have come to talk with you about poverty and inequality,” she said. Everyone looked at her guardedly, waiting for the incrimination. “Poverty in Salvador affects all of us, you as much as me. We all need guards in front of our houses because of robbery and street attacks. For all of us, rich and poor, each day is a dangerous adventure of potential violence, muggings, kidnapping for ransom, and of virtual imprisonment in the secured spaces we call home. The poor, seeing only starvation and death, grow increasingly angry and violent. We cannot place the blame for this on any single person—we are all born into a class and ethnicity—but instead on a status quo in society that directs us to take our places in this hierarchy of inequality, not questioning the distress it brings for us all. Equality in our society will help all of us to live freer and more fruitful lives. We need it for all of our children, yours and mine.” She paused. She had them. “Now,” she said, “let me tell you about the remarkable program we have in our city; it’s called Bahia Street.”
Afterward, the group clustered around Rita, asking her questions and offering their help. When it came time to leave, perceiving that we had not come by car, one of the