Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [43]
In front of me, I saw a group of five men. One of them held a sixth man up by the scruff of his neck, a man who, from appearances, was a street person. The other men spat at the street man and laughed. “We can kill you,” one said with a slightly drunken slur to his voice. “No one will care.” The other four echoed his laughter.
I felt a surge of anger so fierce it surprised me. How dare these five healthy men threaten this half-starving fellow who had likely been sleeping on the sidewalk when they accosted him?
I walked up to the group and stared at them. I said nothing but my thoughts were so strong I think they reflected in my eyes. “Don’t you dare touch him. You will not harm him as long as I’m here. I am his witness.” I could almost hear my thoughts they were so loud. Fear or anxiety never entered my head. Nor did I think how strange it must have been for all six in the group to see a white, obvious foreigner, walking alone in the middle of the night on one of Salvador’s dangerous streets, confronting them with such anger.
The man holding the street man dropped him. “Fuck!” he said. The street man made some small joke and ran. I walked straight through the group, down the block, and turned the corner up a side street. I did not look back.
Only after I had reached the relative safety of the more populated hilltop, did I begin to shake. The insanity of my actions crept through my fingertips and spread out from my shoulders. I stumbled twice on the ten flight climb to our floor and could hardly get the key in the lock.
“Are you drunk?” Luzia asked when I got inside. I shook my head, lay on my bed in the room we shared, and stared into the dark. It was a hot tropical night, but the sweat on my arms was icy.
Even after the research funding ran out and I was teaching at the university and doing various consulting jobs, I kept Rita on part-time as a research assistant. She knew every favela in the region and knew every capoeira mestre. Her knowledge of local history and her analytical abilities continued to stun me. She also clearly loved interviewing, spending long hours discussing theoretical issues related to race, class, and gender. I could hardly have had a better teacher.
One day we decided to interview the famous capoeira mestre, Paulo dos Anjos, Paul of the Angels, at his home in Malvinas, at the time considered the most dangerous and violent favela of the city. When we met at Salvador’s central bus station, Rita looked me over.
“No watch?” she said. “No earrings? Good. You should probably give all your money to me to carry since you’ll more likely be robbed than me.”
I handed over my wallet. “You inspire such confidence, Rita. How badly do we need this interview? I mean, if even you’re this nervous.”
“Here’s our bus!” We ran for the bus, paid our fare, and settled in for the long ride. “You can’t write about capoeira without interviewing Paulo dos Anjos. And he’s agreed to meet with us. He doesn’t often do that.”
“For you, he’s agreed.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“And so it was intended.”
We sat and watched the mixture of high-rise buildings and vast tracts of shacks that was Salvador pass; then we turned onto the central highway that led out of the city. After about an hour, the bus turned off the highway onto a dirt track. Then it stopped. Everyone got off.
“Doesn’t the bus go into Malvinas?” Rita asked the fare collector.
“Only this far,” he said. “We’ve been held up too many times. When you want to leave, you can