Interlude: Two old women and the yamali, 1922
Salvador, Bahia:
In Salvador, they called Matilde the charm lady. She sold everything in the store she kept on the Liberdade hillside, and people came to buy food and clothes and trinkets, but her fame was the charms: protective amulets, love potions, herbal remedies and a thousand others. Matilde was magic, the people said – they didn’t know why, but there was something about her. She dispensed advice with her charms, and when she did, her voice carried ninety-four years of wisdom, made all the wiser by the hint of foreign lands in her speech.
Matilde was always to be found in the store or just outside it, making her charms in a back room or sitting by the door while one of her grandchildren minded the counter. Stand by the door and call her name, and she would always hear. But today she was not there.
It was hard to climb the hills now, very hard, and she felt her age with every step. But everyone knew her in Liberdade, and they were happy to offer a hand. They respected her almost as they would a
mãe-de-santo, and on a day such as this, wise old women were particularly honored. For it was January twenty-fourth, the day of the
yamali, and who knew them better than the old women did?
The street was a riot of color today – it was always that, with its rows of painted houses, but especially today. The brotherhoods and sisterhoods of the
candomble competed with the buildings, some in the red and white of the orixá Xangô, others in horned hats to honor Yansã of the storm, still others in bright foil armor bearing images of St. George or the archangel Michael. And everywhere were men in white robes and turbans carrying the banners of the
yamali, warriors of burning eyes and flaming swords who were the scourge of slavers everywhere.
Matilde climbed now through a street of whirling
yamali-brothers, their drums beating time as they danced. Their banners showed the warriors mounted on eagles and wielding crescent-shaped swords, appropriating both the crown of the
mães and the symbols of Islam. They took her hand, each in turn, and danced a couple of steps, handing her to the next in line. A
mae in armor of gold leaf led a chain of women in the other direction, cutting and thrusting as a soldier might, and why not, for this was a festival of war.
The charm lady always greeted this day with both wry amusement and a sense of loss. She knew now who the
yamali were – everyone did. They were men, not spirits, and their rebellion had taken place in this very city on this day eighty-seven years before. Their descendants lived in Africa still, and Matilde sometimes wondered if they knew they were worshiped. It was the spirit of the
yamali that the brotherhoods sought to conjure, not the men themselves, but like most points of doctrine, that wasn’t something an outsider might realize. But most of her feeling was because she herself had fought under the
yamali banner – not in a mock war but a real one, and indeed, in one of the wars that the costumes and images of this day were intended to evoke.
That was something no one knew, even her family. Her husband, even, had never known: he’d believed all his life that he was married to a neighborhood charm-maker. The
candomble was tolerated now, even if it was still illegal, but even after all these years, it might still be dangerous if the authorities found out what Matilde’s name had been two generations ago, and what she’d done under that name. She was a
mãe too – more than that, she’d been a prophet – but she didn’t dare become known as one, and when she saw the other
mães in their holy ecstasy, she felt a stab of longing for the communion she had once known.
There was a shrine at the top of the hill, and at last Matilde attained it, pausing to catch her breath and look down on the streets below. She entered –
mãe or not, no one questioned her right to do so – and murmured a prayer at Yansã’s altar, laying an offering of tobacco and plums at its foot.
She had left this offering on the day of the
yamali for forty years and more, and many people wondered who it was for – a family member, surely, or the place of her birth, or a friend dead in some battle. Only she knew that it was none of those, but the Empress Isabel. That too amused her – Isabel’s Catholicism had bordered on the fanatical, and she would have considered Yansã no different from the devil – but had she not finished what the
yamali started? Had the late empress not finished Matilde’s own war, the one she’d fought when she was called Mariana, and which had set the north aflame with the anger of slaves? [1] It was Isabel, in the end, who had ended slavery in Brazil forever, and for that, surely, the
yamali would honor her.
She left the shrine and stood again outside, gazing down at the rows of houses, the harbor, the graveyard where someday soon she would be buried. She’d left instructions to her grandchildren in a secret place: she would be buried not as Matilde or even Mariana, but as Mary Ann from Virginia, the name her mother had given her, the name her Mande grandmother had whispered to her. That was what she truly was, a slave from America sold to work the Pernambuco sugar fields and filled with the
yamali’s power and wrath. [2]
When she went to join them, she hoped they would be there, and that Isabel would be with them.
Columbia, South Carolina:
“Cabinet coming at four o’clock?” asked Harriet Tubman.
“Every day,” Senator Kabbah answered. “You’ve got four hours. Plenty of time to eat and take a nap.”
“Nap first, I think. I’m not too hungry now.” Harriet turned around sharply at the sound of laughter. “You don’t have to laugh, Otter. When you get my age, you’ll know.”
“I don’t have to, but I want to.” A second later, Harriet dissolved in laughter herself. It was nice to have someone around willing to tease her – too many of the young ones looked at her like she was some kind of tin god. And Missy Kabbah was no spring chicken herself. She was old enough to have known slavery, old enough to remember the rising in ’63 and to have scouted for Harriet’s brigade as an eight-year-old child. They’d called her Otter then because she swam like one, though she and Harriet were probably the only ones who still remembered. [3]
“Fair enough. What’ll they want to talk about today?”
“The state university plan, probably. And the land reform, the one I dropped by to talk to you about.”
“Yes, that.” It was long overdue, taking the collective land away from the Circles and putting it in the hands of the town councils. The townships ran by one person one vote, and they were required by law to have open meetings where anyone could speak: there was no way a few families could buy up most of
their shares and do everything in back rooms. There were a lot of things the Circles could still do, but it was clear now that controlling people’s land and livelihoods wasn’t one of them. “Important, that one.”
“Surely is. And they’ll be ready to go, after how the election came out yesterday.”
Harriet nodded; there had been a special election in the low country to fill the seat of a senator who’d died in a fiacre crash. “Democrat, though. Not sure what I think of
that.”
“You’re the one who started it. Once you break down the door, anyone can walk through.”
That was true enough, certainly, and it wasn’t like the Democrats in South Carolina were much like the ones in Georgia or Alabama. They’d been a black and white party for decades now, and they’d picked up some of the church-and-mosque people, the ones who didn’t like the way the Republican elite had managed things but also didn’t want to vote Independent Republican or Farmer-Labor. The man who’d just won the election for them was the son of slaves. “But still.”
“Can’t do anything about it now, and it looks like he might do some good. The more the low country is cracked loose from the Republicans, the more people’ll think their hides are safe if they vote for the reform. Anyway, let’s get you outside if you want that nap before the meeting.”
“Sure enough,” Harriet said, and then, “Hah! Senator for a nurse!” She stood up herself – that was still a point of honor – but she accepted Kabbah’s arm and leaned on her as they made their way out the door. When you got to be a hundred and two, some things had to give.
It was warm in the garden, and the wicker chair was comfortable and yielding. There was a pitcher of sweet tea on a table by its side, but Harriet left it alone; she settled on the cushions and closed her eyes. She’d want to be fresh when the cabinet came – sure, the lieutenant governor did most of the work, but she made a point of attending the meetings and throwing in her ideas. The land reform was hers, and she’d spent months working out the details with the secretaries and legislators; that state park in the Congaree was hers too, and a few other things.
No need to think about that now, though. The sunlight spotted the insides of her eyelids with red and orange, but she didn’t notice for long. She drifted off, and into the colors of dreams.
It was a jumbled dream at first, South Carolina and New York and Maryland, the governor’s mansion where Harriet lived now and the slave shack she’d lived in as a child. Her old master was throwing that two-pound weight at her head again, and she was slipping into Maryland to rescue her family, and she was leading an ambush during the rising. She was on the floor of Congress, and wading into the sea behind her house on St. Helena Island, and pouring lemonade for the neighbor girl who’d come to clean.
It all seemed to be leading someplace, and she found herself looking up to the sky. It was evening already – how’d
that happen so soon? – and the first stars were coming out, but then she saw they weren’t stars. They were flaming swords, carried by turbaned men and women on the backs of great hawks.
She almost laughed out loud. The
yamali? They were nothing but Brazilian slaves who’d made good their freedom. She’d
met some of them, and she knew damned well that they stood on the ground like anyone else. They didn’t fly through the South Carolina sky as if they were some kind of… some kind of
Valkyries. And why were some of them women, and why did their faces look so much like people who’d fought with her in ’63?
They were coming closer, and Harriet saw that one of them
wasn’t a face from the Rising but her grandmother Modesty. That made a sort of sense, she guessed. The Malê came from somewhere in Guinea, didn’t they, and didn’t the Haitians say souls went there after death? And grandmama always had said that she was Asante, and they didn’t come from all that far away. She’d find out soon enough when the
yamali got there: it seemed grandmama was saying something. It was just that it had been ninety years since she’d last dreamed of her, and she wondered why she’d do so again after all this time.
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[1]
See post 305.
[2]
See post 198.
[3]
See post 1281.