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By Root 1963 0

They had no battle plan. The rare travelers who met them on the road were amazed to learn that they were marching to war. They looked like a crowd heading for a fiesta; a number of them were dressed in their fanciest clothes. They were carrying weapons and shouted, “Death to the Devil and to the Republic,” but even at such moments the joyous expression on their faces softened the effect of the hatred in their voices. The cross and the banner headed the procession, carried respectively by the ex-bandit Pedrão and the ex-slave Big João, and behind them came Maria Quadrado and Alexandrinha Correa carrying the glass case with the image of the Good Lord Jesus painted on cloth by the Little Blessed One, and behind that, ghostly apparitions enveloped in a cloud of dust, came the elect. Many accompanied the litanies by blowing on lengths of sugarcane that in bygone days had served as pipes for smoking tobacco; with holes pierced in them, they could also be made into shepherd’s pipes.

In the course of the march, imperceptibly, obeying a call of the blood, the column gradually regrouped, so that those who had belonged to the same band of brigands, people from the same hamlet, the same slave quarters, the same district of a town, members of the same family were now grouped together, as if, as the crucial hour drew near, each person felt the need to be as close as possible to what had been the tried and true in other decisive hours. Those who had killed gradually worked their way to the front of the line and now, as they approached the town of Uauá, named that because of the many fireflies that set it aglow at night, Abbot João, Pajeú, Taramela, José Venâncio, the Macambiras, and other rebels and outlaws surrounded the cross and the banner at the head of the procession or army, knowing without having to be told that because of their experience and their sins they were called to set the example when the hour came to attack.

Past midnight, a sharecropper came to meet them to warn them that a hundred and four soldiers were camped in Uauá, having arrived from Juazeiro the evening before. A strange war cry—“Long live the Counselor! Long live the Blessed Jesus!”—stirred the hearts of the elect; excited and jubilant, they picked up the pace. As dawn broke, they sighted Uauá, a handful of little huts that was the obligatory stopping-off place for the night for cattle drivers going from Monte Santo to Curaçá. The marchers began to recite litanies to St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the town. The column was soon spotted by the drowsy soldiers posted as sentinels on the banks of a lagoon on the outskirts. After staring for a few seconds, not believing their eyes, they headed for the town on the run. Praying, singing, blowing on their canudos, the elect entered Uauá, arousing from their sleep and plunging into a nightmarish reality the hundred-odd soldiers whom it had taken twelve days to get there and who hadn’t the least idea where the prayers that had suddenly awakened them were coming from. They were the only living souls in Uauá, since all the inhabitants had fled during the night. But there they all were now, along with the crusaders, circling round the tamarinds in the public square, watching the soldiers’ faces as they peered out the doors and windows, registering their surprise, their hesitation as to whether to shoot or run or tumble back into their hammocks and rickety beds to sleep.

A bellowed command, which caused a rooster to break off his cock-a-doodle-doo right in the middle, set off the shooting. The soldiers fired, supporting their muskets on the low partition walls of the huts, and the elect began to fall to the ground, drenched in blood. The column gradually broke up; intrepid groups following after Abbot João, José Venâncio, Pajeú launched an attack on the dwellings, and others ran to shield themselves in dead angles or curl up in a ball among the tamarinds as the rest advanced. The elect also did some shooting: those, that is to say, who had carbines and blunderbusses and those who managed to load their long-barreled