Counternarratives (5 page)

Jurisdiction

T
h
e following day, the Crown's military authorities
captured Zion in an alder wood outside Worcester and placed him in the town garrison
under heavy local guard. But at nightfall he inexplicably slipped away. He then
committed a series of robberies and violent acts throughout the entire span of the
county until his capture on September 17, 1774, again by the military authorities,
who pressed to try him under the statutory laws of Britain, though that country's
influence was now nearly at ebb tide. The colonial judiciary objected, and instead
rushed this particular case along, despite a growing criminal and civil case
backlog. Problems of jurisdiction always mirror much greater crises of authority. At
Worcester, Zion was tried and found guilty of rape by a judge who considered the
slave's affinity for civil disobedience and social disruption to be intolerable in
light of the present state of alarm throughout the region. He ordered a hanging.
Mindful of his rights under the law, Zion implored the court for a “benefit of
clergy.” This the General Court of Worcester County, after half a year's
consideration of his records, with documentation from the neighboring courts and his
former owners, denied.

Confession

T
he night
before he was to be led to the gallows, Zion sang a dirge that brought tears to the
eyes of a townswoman standing nearby. He then gave a short testimony of his life and
self-destruction, which ended with the following admonition, in a keening voice, to
all bondsmen and women of the colony and of New England: “To all fellow Brothers and
Sisters of Africk and other wise in Bondage in this common Wealth of Massachusetts
take heart that ye avoid Drunkenness and Lewdness of the Flesh for the only true
Liberty lies in holding Free—do keep the Faith—”

This confession was duly witnessed and indited by an Anglican minister
from Leominster, who included it among his personal effects when he returned a year
later to his home parish outside London. The account was subsequently lost, however;
he was the only one of those present who later recalled it.

Theory (Outtake)

T
he prevalence
of the doctrine of liberty may be accounted for, from another cause, viz., a false
sensation or seeming experience which we have, or may have, of liberty or
indifference, in many of our actions.”
David Hume

Eclipse

O
n the morning of
April 1, 1775, the authorities did not find the Negro named Zion in his cell. Given
the severity of the crimes and the necessity of preserving the ruling order, another
Negro, whose particular crimes are not recorded, was hanged in the Worcester Town
Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among them the widow
Shaftesbone; and the newly-married Sarah Wantone Fleet and her husband George, of
Worcester, a Lockean and member of a local militia. Also present was Jubal, now
calling himself Mr. John Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a Negro brigade in
Boston.

Of their response there is no record. The rest of the town, absent from
the proceedings, was preparing, one must suppose, for the swiftly approaching
conflagration.

A LETTER ON THE TRIALS
OF THE
COUNTERREFORMATION
IN NEW LISBON

“What is the nature of the recurring irrationality of culture which
precludes a victory of modernizing rationality?”

Aby Warburg

“If I could fly to you on the wings of eagles . . .”

Yehuda HaLevi

“I want the essence. My soul is in a hurry.”

Mário de Andrade

“The disquiet that lurks beneath the placid surface . . .”

Manoel Aries D'Azevedo

June 1630

TO:

Dom Inácio Lisboa Branco

Sacred and Professed House

Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy
Ghost

in care of the Bishopric of Bahia

São Salvador da Bahia dos Todos os Santos

New Lusitânia (Brazil)

DOM FRANCISCO
,

I write you in the expectation that you will soon discover
this missive, concealed, as you regularly instructed the members of the professed
house in Olinda, during the period that you led it, within the binding of this book
that has been sent to you and which you, having discovered the letter, have just set
down. The book is the very
Lives of the Martyrs
you bequeathed to those
remaining before your flight in the spring of last year. The Netherlandish
authorities under Nassau-Siegen persist in demonstrating toleration, and reason, not
only in matters of the Faith, and though they are masters at war, proceed without
cunning concerning our vernacular handiwork; and so it is unlikely that they will
have seized this innocuous volume as contraband or scuttled it on censorious shores
before it moors upon your writing table.

Nor is it likely that they will have laid a finger on the few other and
sundry effects of yours, which include a rosary of colored Italian glass, an
embroidered muslin handkerchief, a chasuble of black silk, embroidered in
resplendant hues of violet, and a tattered and faded red vest of common linen that I
am told you once wore faithfully during your conversions along the upper Capabaribe
River. These effects I have entrusted separately with Amaro (Gaspar) Leite, the
messenger who sails to your city under a letter of safe passage, and who, upon
seeing you, shall pass on the shibboleth that confirms the existence of the very
communication your eyes now feast upon.

All these gifts he brings to the new house in which you and those who
departed with you have now settled, in the name of the gentle and good Provost
there, Dom Felix Silva Matos, whose name was passed on by those who knew him well
during his years in the
aldeias
. As a man of the Faith he never once laid
an injurious finger on native or African, nor on any who shared the bloodlines of
the two. Moreover, in sending these treasures, including the book, to you, I am of
the mind that no officials of the Crown, nor the Bishop of Bahia, nor least of all
the Holy Office, if it should make a visitation, will impound them.

The most valuable of all, however, is this written missive, as you
will certainly soon agree. As you also shall see, you will gain full access to it
only by the application of another trick you conveyed to those in your care,
underlining how well your lessons took root, like cuttings, even in distant fields.
Thus the special care I have taken. If you should please see fit, do let the lit
candlewick linger upon this document once you have read it, as that would be in the
utmost order, though it is of no matter to me, for it should be declared that I am
beyond the reach of those laws, earthly or divine, that would condemn you, on the
very fact of possession of the written account I shall shortly begin.

Do know that the one to whom you had intrusted the preservation of the
Faith is in no immediate harm. This letter sails to you, in its clever guise, out of
an abiding desire to convey to you the truth of what occurred at
ALAGOAS
; rather than let the waters of rumor fertilize the vineyards of
discussion in the capital, I have dowsed for you here the spring of truth. I gather
that you already foresaw the calamity, at least from the perspective of the
Lusitanians, that would descend upon this land, which is why you began to employ the
vehicle of the Gospels to arouse a spirit of resistance not only among the members
of the Order, but among the citizens of the Captaincy and the far and nether
regions; for, as you often said, and I have heard many times repeated, while we do
rightly fear the saber and the carbine, it could be a single man's tongue, and the
written record of its issue, that mark the greatest danger.

Yet even knowing this, did you foresee what was to come at Alagoas? Did
you not foresee the implications of sending Joaquim D'Azevedo as your spiritual
agent? Evidently not, and so I shall now recount to you how that absence of
portents, like your Scriptures, failed you. That is, I shall now tell of that series
of events, unforeseeable at least to some of those who lived them, that inverted
worlds, bringing those whom you knew, or thought you knew, intimately, northward in
retreat to Olinda from the south, just as you bore only the clothes on your back and
your Bible in your departure south for the capital city of the Savior. How do I know
these facts, their recounting never having passed any man's lips? This, as with so
many other things, I shall reveal in due time.

To return to the present narrative, I cannot be certain that you have
heard even a single account from any of the other members of the Brotherhood who
were there; no knowledge has revealed itself of where those creatures went who had
long been in residence, or where they are today. Perhaps they too are at Bahia, or,
like the numerous ghosts that haunt the coast of this infernal land, slipped onto a
ship and are now promulgating their vileness in Cape-Verde or among the Luandans.
May even Hell be rid of them. I ask only that you understand given all that has
transpired since you last spoke face to face with any of those at that now accursed
house, that some who have been condemned to the most foul contumely do reside,
nevertheless, in Truth, and so this missive proceeds from that strange and splendid
position.

It was, you will remember, during the period shortly preceding All
Saints' Day, which is to say in late October of that year, 1629, that you sent a
certain priest, Dom Joaquim D'Azevedo, from Olinda to assume the position of provost
of the foundation at Alagoas, in the southern region of the Captaincy of Pernambuco,
of the Professed House of the Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy
Ghost. You made the appointment; the order came from your hand. The Alagoas
monastery had been without a leader since the untimely drowning, under mysterious
circumstances, of the prior Provost, Dom Affonso Travassos, also sent by you, in the
waters just after the Feast of Saint John, in June 1629; and one year before that,
the prior leader, Dom Luiz Duran Carneiro, had succumbed, allegedly, to the
temptations of the Devil himself, and disappeared into the interior. These
occurrences were hardly known by anyone in the order, beyond those remaining at
Alagoas, but you were unsure whether the news had spread throughout the various
precincts of the nearby town and region. Yet either way, without a firm spiritual
base the monastery there, much like its pastorate, risked falling into moral and
mortal decay.

What most knew was that Padre Duran Carneiro and Padre Pero had
constructed the foundation of that House by hand only a decade before, while
D'Azevedo, that obscure figure and youngest son of that family of tax-farmers who
had settled in the distant north, in the city of São Luis, in that former French
colony of Maranhão, that one whom you would soon send as a shepherd to gather the
flock back into the pen, was still engaged in private tutorial at home, and had not
even set sail for studies and ordination in Coimbra. That was all that was well
known.

This, then, is where it begins. At some point between Padre Travassos's
death and that fateful time in the spring of 1629, you, with the counsel of the
Vice-Provost and several senior members of the Olinda House, decided that D'Azevedo
would be the emissary of renewal in Alagoas. You selected him for what you took to
be his scriptural acumen, his meticulousness with whatever task he undertook, his
pecuniary skills, and literary gifts. There was also his youth, and his personal
probity. You expected that he would right the Alagoas house like an overturned raft,
and at every stage write you of how he did it and would next proceed.

Indeed this is what you would tell him once one of the
novices—having beckoned him as he re-inspected for a third time the casks of wine in
the house's cellar to insure a correct count, his gift for precision and detail
having already gained note—led him to your office. There you also delivered a brief
speech about the importance of the house to the Faith in Alagoas and the priests'
role in establishing it, about which D'Azevedo was only dimly aware. You presented
him with his letters of commission, written out and signed and sealed by you, as
there was no time to gain the approval of the authorities in Bahia, let alone
Lisbon. You told him that there were at Alagoas two priests, the said Pero and
another, Padre Barbosa Pires, and one brother, Dom Gaspar Leite, sent from Olinda
half a year before, whom D'Azevedo had just missed upon his return from Europe, as
well as a peck of servants, all of them Africans and mulattos. Of the entire menage
he heard only the essentials. You did not speak even obliquely of the malevolence
lurking in that small outpost on the Atlantic Coast.

Padre D'Azevedo, cognizant of his oath and the necessity of duty,
accepted willingly. He returned to the wine cellar, finished his inventory and
handed it to a slave to submit to the Brother Procurator, then went and packed his
trunk. Maybe he prayed, read several passages from Ezekiel or another book of
Scripture which he thought might cast a light before him. He had not a single map of
the plans or full estate, no contacts in the town, no specific orders written in
your hand or any others, nor any guide but what what might have suddenly taken root
in his head. The next morning he boarded the skiff to Recife, to catch the ship to
Alagoas.

D'Azevedo arrived at the port of his chief destination as evening was
falling. The voyage, not far, but over unusually turbulent seas, spent him. The
heat, heightened by the approach of summer and the shoreline humidity, drained him
more. He had vowed, however, to launch, like an arrow aiming for its target, into
the heart of his new position as soon as he touched upon land. Though you had
ostensibly sent word of his imminent arrival, it apparently had not reached Alagoas,
so the house there had not dispatched an emissary to meet him. Rather than lodging
at an inn, as was the custom for people arriving so late in the day, he hired a
driver and cart and, after explaining his destination they headed there, climbing an
undulant escarpment along the bend of the river, along whose southern banks spread a
town of indeterminable size, bracketed by pockets of forests and, to the north and
east, the immense lagoon, at this hour dark as mourning cloth, from which the city
took its name, and then further west, inland and upland until the landscape bowled
into pasture, amidst which stood the monastery's main gate as the wall of the nearby
forest and the moonless night's utter blackness, from all sides, enfolded them.

The Brotherhood's House in Olinda, which D'Azevedo had just left, rose
up in two windowed rows with bracketed latticed balconies, its walls white, its
rooms commodious, its doors hewn of the finest Brazil wood, a vision of order, with
a church of estimable beauty at one end, and a dining hall and kitchen at the other,
with a library, a balneary, and comfortable lodgings for guests, all ringed by
ample, well-tended fields, as well as a number of smaller, skillfully constructed
structures. The structure that D'Azevedo now faced, presumably the monastery, lit by
a single lantern suspended from a pole midway between the gate and the façade, down
a curving, rutted, sandy path, leaned mean and squat, a single long storey. It was
impossible at that hour to discern its color, though it hardly looked as if it could
even under the brightest light be considered white. Its shutters, the ones he could
make out, listed from their hinges; bushes and small trees bowed, trailed by
monstrous shadows, away from its walls; its large battered wooden front door
appeared to have been cut by someone little acquainted with doormaking. Almost
invisible in the black cloak spreading from the lantern's penumbra, what he took to
be buildings shimmered like foxfires in the landscape round it. He could not,
however, spot the monastery gate's farther rims. Though he had not initially noticed
it, when he looked around and up to take it all in, he spotted a crucifix, barely
lit by the lantern's dim light, which tilted off one end of the main building's
roof. A heavy sea breeze, it seemed to D'Azevedo, might easily topple it. Not a
soul, priest or layperson, broke his line of sight.

He opened the gate, which promptly tumbled from its hinges. The driver,
a withered type who had passed the entire trip in a barely controlled tremor,
did not help him unload his coffer, nor accompany him to the door, but as soon as
D'Azevedo had done so, the man sped off into the darkness at a clip far faster than
during the entire journey from the port. D'Azevedo stumbled down the path, dragging
his bindle and the heavy wooden box filled with other necessities behind him, and
knocked gently on the main door, so as not to wake anyone but the person who might
be keeping watch. When, after a great while had passed, there was no answer, he
rapped harder. Still, no one responded. He began to wonder if he had been brought to
the right building, for there were no addresses in this part of the world nor was
there any proof, save the lantern, that a living soul still occupied or visited this
building.