Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [13]
At the center of the circle, Gato and Faísca (Spark) played together in a pair, rolling from their hands to their feet, swaying apart only to come together again, each with a devilish smile, balancing his play with the concentration of a chess game.
As I entered the roda, I thought about the rock that didn’t hit my head, about the hand that threw it, and about how much I had to learn.
The next week, Jorge and Gato invited me to accompany them to one of the roughest rodas in Salvador, where players had been known in recent times to break each others’ ribs in supposed play and where one person had reportedly been killed the year before. The single light bulb that lit the dark basement room there dimmed and brightened on an uneven pulse of electric current. It took a particular skill to keep track of the moving legs and heads in the spurts of this ill-timed strobe.
It was here that I saw Rita play for the first time away from our group. The only other women I had seen at these outside rodas merely watched the play from the back on the visitors’ benches. Rita stood at the front of the roda holding the lead berimbau. The men standing beside her towered above her as she took up her bow and gave the beginning cry that drew the roda energy to her. As she began to play, the men fell in beside her. Her dreadlocks fell past her waist, a solid mass that, when she played, became a third, lethal leg that confused the eyes and the soul of the person who played with her. She played with a huge, wide smile.
Although Rita trained with the same teacher as I did, she had also studied for many years with other teachers before him. None of the men, including our teacher, dared cross Rita. They never mocked, flirted, or made passes at her as they did with all the other female players. She was the only woman I had seen who could (and would) lead the capoeira angola chants outside the safety of her own group. These chants were passed down orally and Rita had learned them in the shantytown where she was born. She knew chants dating from the time of slavery and she knew chants dating from the time of the military dictatorship from the 1960s to the 1980s. Her chants made a clear connection between the oppression of the past, the oppression of ten years ago, and the oppression she understood that day.
Rita had grown up in a Salvador shantytown and somehow managed to get though university to become a sociologist and professional photographer. She was the only Brazilian I met who, after completing the education that gave her a way out of her shantytown, chose to stay.
“If all of us who get educated leave,” she said to me one day, “how are things to change? It has to start somewhere.” Then she laughed, as though what she was doing was a perfectly ordinary choice that required no courage at all.
After a few months, I began to notice that in Salvador, everyone was into religion. Not that it was a spiritual city—quite the opposite in fact—but the presence of religion, the smell of it, was everywhere.
One afternoon, I was drinking a beer with Rita in a small praça that was really just a wide space where the street divided. An enterprising entrepreneur had filled the middle section of the street with tables and served beer to passersby. At one end of this praça was a kind of obelisk, a baroque blue and white spear with a wrought iron fence