Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

He set down a candle and lit it, and everyone’s attention turned to the flame. If the candle remained lit, the disturbed woman could come into our home—but if, succumbing to the energy around it, the flame were to go out, it meant there was no cure.

But it wasn’t my father standing there; it was the encantado Velho Nagô, an old acquaintance of the people of Água Negra. He was the master of my father’s body and spirit, the giver of blessings and cures to the needy and to the land itself. And it was Velho Nagô, according to my father, who had assigned the role of midwife to Salustiana Nicolau. When a woman was in labor, the hands and even the mind of comadre Salu would be guided by Velho Nagô’s power. At least, that’s how my father explained it when a stranger once asked him.

We continued collecting buriti and palm fruit to take to the public market in town on Mondays. My mother and her comadres, alongside Belonísia, Domingas, and myself, would gather the buriti in the marshes. My father Zeca, Zezé, and the other men would grab the palm fruit that grew in clusters, high above our heads, and we’d turn it into dendê, our palm oil. The buriti trees were tall, too, but the fruit wasn’t edible if we picked the bunches from the trees. It was necessary to wait for them to fall to the ground, that’s when they were ready to eat. We stored the buriti in large barrels of water to soften their husks. We’d peel each globe with our fingers, very gently, to keep the pulp intact, then carry as much as we could in burlap sacks balanced on our heads, traveling down the road to sell it to the women who made sweets and juices from buriti for their own customers. On that road, under the unforgiving sun, the buriti pulp would heat up and drip through the burlap, covering us with greasy, orange liquid. Our black skin turned almost copper-colored. We’d arrive in town embarrassed by our stained hair and clothes. We’d place rings of cloth on our heads, beneath our loads, to help us balance the weight, reducing the amount of liquid that would drip down our necks. But there were days when the sun was a bonfire burning us up from head to toe, and our bodies would be drenched in buriti juice. Once, I even slipped from the oily fluid oozing all the way down to my feet. We al...

He was born from the earth. I found it peculiar, the way he expressed it. I never thought of myself that way, born from the earth. The earth gave birth to plants and rocks, yes. To the food we ate, to the worms. Sometimes, I’d heard it said, the earth even gave birth to diamonds.

With Zeca Chapéu Grande, however, I immersed myself in the woods, walking up and down the trails, learning all about herbs and roots. I learned about clouds, too, how they’d foretell rain, all the secret changes of sky and earth. I learned that everything is in motion—quite different from the lifeless things taught to us in school. My father would turn to me and say, “the wind doesn’t blow, the wind is the blowing,” and this made sense to me. “If the air doesn’t move, there’s no wind, and if we don’t keep moving, there’s no life.” He was trying to teach me. Attentive to the movement of animals, insects, and plants, he lit up my horizon, and these lessons that nature had taught to him I began understanding deep in my bones.

He didn’t thank me. He was a man, after all, why should he be grateful? That’s what went through my mind. But his eyes betrayed a deep satisfaction, for he’d come out way ahead in this deal, bringing a woman to live with him in that dump of a house.

He laid me down on the bed and began kissing my neck, then lifted my dress. What happened next didn’t justify my fears. It was like cooking or sweeping the floor, just another chore, albeit an unfamiliar one. I was a woman living with a man now, so I understood this was something I’d have to do. As he entered and exited my body with a back-and-forth motion that brought farm animals to mind, I felt something uncomfortable deep in my womb; it was the same feeling that had invaded me on leaving home that morning, when I felt the trotting of his horse. I turned my head toward the window.

I wondered if it would have been better to have died the day I left my parents’ house. To have fallen off that horse, to have broken my neck. Because no good ever came of my lamenting. I knew I’d always bear the shame of having been so naive, falling for Tobias’s flattering sweet talk, no different from that of so many other cunning men who’d carry young women away from their parents’ houses to turn them into slaves. Making their lives hell, hitting them till their blood, or their very lives, poured out, leaving a trail of hatred on their bodies. Complaining about the food, the mess, the poorly behaved children, the weather, the house falling apart. Introducing us to the hell that so often is a woman’s life.

“Being a tenant farmer means you got nowhere else to go. It’s your only chance to find work, to survive.” He squinted, looking into the ditch at his feet. “So, you go ask someone who’s hiring, ‘Will you let me stay, sir?’ ” Then my father looked straight into my brother’s eyes. “Work more, think less. Don’t set your eyes on things that don’t belong to you.” He stuck his hoe into the ground and rested his elbow on the handle. “A deed to the land isn’t going to give you more corn, more beans. That’s not what puts food on our table.” He took out some tobacco and rolling paper. “See all this land around you? A man’s eyes can get too big. He wants more. Are your hands strong enough to work all that land? Do the work that’s in front of you. From this land a forest grows, and the scrub, and the buriti, and the palm fruit, but without our hard work, it’s nothing. Worthless. Now, maybe it’s worth something to those folks over there who don’t do any of the work. Who don’t dig with their hands, who don’t know how to sow or reap. But for folks like us, it’s work that gives land its value. Without our hard work, the land is nothing.”

I went back to work in the fields because I wanted everything to go back to how it used to be. I reckoned that farming was the only way to remember my father without feeling so much pain. I followed my brother down the trails to the fields, and sure enough, plowing the land, planting and harvesting, mending fences, all that hard work began healing me of the pain of my father’s absence, just as it had healed me of my sadness after I moved in with Tobias. The same way it had healed me when I became a widow and lived by myself by the Santo Antônio: work is what kept me alive.

Suffering: it’s something difficult to express, a feeling shunned by everyone, but it tied you, irreversibly, to your people. Suffering was the secret blood running through the veins of Água Negra.

And the sounds, the sounds of animals, of rustling leaves, of flowing water, those sounds kept reverberating inside of you. During your daytime duties. During your light sleep at night. You felt that the sound of the world had always been your voice.