Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

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...