Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [98]
“I’ve been working here a lot longer than you have. I know the community. You’re not even a Brazilian. You just want a big name for yourself through climbing on the backs of others who’ve worked here for years.” I decided to make no response as my words just seemed to fuel her anger. After about thirty minutes, she hung up on me.
“That didn’t sound good,” Phyllis said from the living room, where she was reading a book on the history of samba. “Good friend of yours?”
“I think we’ll have to screen our calls. I knew I’d offend someone someday doing this. It looks like I’ve done it.”
I sat in a warm bath with a whiskey in my hand. The bottle was on the floor. About two weeks had passed since Alice’s call. I picked up the e-mail again. It was written in a mixture of Portuguese and English. Someone had forwarded to me that afternoon. I took another sip of the whiskey. Phyllis and I had ripped out the filthy pink shag carpet. The linoleum it revealed was burnt orange and avocado. The pink toilet stared at me.
The letter started out asking for information regarding a group in Seattle, which called itself Bahia Street, that was active in raising money. Members of the Brazilian-American community were wondering about this group, the letter stated, since they had never heard of it in Brazil and couldn’t figure out its exact location. They had spoken with Bahia Street people in Seattle, it said, (they had never spoken to me about any issue in the letter, I noted) and had concerns about the group because neither its website nor its people gave any credit to, nor seemed to know about, all the fine work being done in Brazil with children. This was a theme to which the letter returned several times. Bahia Street, the letter said, appeared to be completely the project of an “English anthropologist” who was living in the United States, a First World outsider who had come to Brazil, a Third World country, to tell people there what they should do. The letter sandwiched sections of my last donor letter between critical commentary: the writer found the name of Bahia Street demeaning, my referring to the girls as “adorable” racist and sexist, that rumors of organ stealing came from a misinformation campaign by the KGB whose propaganda I was now repeating, and that the idea of the girls becoming social activists was a foreigner’s agenda forced upon the girls rather than anything that might be good for them.
The letter concluded with a request, in Portuguese, for the readers to let the writer know if Bahia Street was trustworthy, or if they had even heard of it. The insinuation was that the Bahia Street project in Bahia might not exist.
The name at the bottom of the e-mail meant nothing to me. Apparently the letter had been sent to a mailing list of undisclosed recipients—not to me of course—both in the United States and Brazil. I’d already heard from three people that the real author of the letter was Alice, and that she’d convinced someone else to put her name to it.
I took another sip of whiskey and tried to curb my raw anger and humiliation. I kept thinking how unfair and low this attack was, to never contact Bahia Street directly about any concerns, to never make any attempts to talk with me, but then to accuse, and—almost more damning—to insinuate, that Bahia Street was a racist group, lead by one white “English” woman, and very possibly a front that did no work in Bahia at all. And then not to have the decency to even inform me that the letter was being sent. Did she think I wouldn’t hear of it?
But, this issue went far deeper than that, I realized. The Brazilian community in Seattle was fractured into several factions. People of one faction would not speak with the other, and some actively worked to destroy the businesses or success of others. I always trod very carefully and stayed only marginally involved with this community in order to avoid becoming entangled in these destructive fights. Local Brazilians had told me that they felt it unlikely that a Brazilian could have run Bahia