Counternarratives Read online

  Also by John Keene

  FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  Annotations

  For Rudolph P. Byrd

  and Gerard Fergerson

  and in tribute and thanks

  to Samuel R. Delany

  CONTENTS

  Mannahatta

  On Brazil, or Dénouement: The Londônias-Figueiras

  An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

  A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon

  Gloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows

  The Aeronauts

  Rivers

  Persons and Places

  Acrobatique

  Cold

  Blues

  Anthropophagy

  The Lions

  I

  COUNTERNARRATIVES

  Perhaps, then, after all, we have no idea

  of what history is: or are in flight

  from the demon we have summoned.

  James Baldwin

  The social situation of philosophy is slavery.

  Fred Moten

  So it is better to speak

  remembering

  we were never meant to survive.

  Audre Lorde

  MANNAHATTA

  The canoe scudded to a stop at the steep, rocky shore. There was no slip, so he tossed the rope, which he had knotted to a crossbar and weighted with a pierced plumb square just larger than his fist, forward into the foliage. Carefully he clambered toward the spray of greenery, the fingers of the thicket and its underbrush clasping the soles of his boots, his stockinged calves, his ample linen breeches. A thousand birds proclaimed his ascent up the incline; the bushes shuddered with the alarm of creatures stirred from their lees; insects rose in a screen before his eyes, vanishing. When he had secured the boat and settled onto a sloping meadow, he sat, to wet his throat with water from his winesack, and orient himself, and rest. Only then did he look back.

  The ship, the Jonge Tobias, which had borne him and the others across more nautical miles than he had thought to tally, was no longer visible, its brown hulk hidden by the river’s curve and the outcropping topped by fortresses of trees. The water, fluttering like a silk shroud, now white, now silver, now azure, ferried his eyes all the way over itself east—he knew from the captain’s compass and his own canny sense of space, innate since he could first recall—to the banks of a vaster, still not fully charted island, its outlines an ocher shimmer in the morning light, etching themselves on his memory like auguries. Closer, at the base of the hill, fish and eels drew quick seams along the river’s nervous surface. From hideouts in the rushes frogs serenaded. Once, in Santo Domingo where he had been born and spent half his youth before working on ships to purchase his freedom, he peered into a furnace where a man who could have been his brother was turning a bell of glass, and he had felt the blaze’s gaping mouth, the sear of its tongue nearly devouring him as the blown bowl miraculously fulfilled its shape. Now the sun, as if the forebear of that transformative fire, burned its presence into the sky’s blue banner, its hot rays falling everywhere, gilding the landscape around him. He was used to days and nights in the tropics, but nevertheless crawled beneath the shade of a sweet gum bower. He turned down the wide brim of his hat, shifted his sack to his left side, near the tree’s gray base, opened his collar to cool himself, and waited.

  The first time he had done this, at another, more southerly landing nearer the dock and the main trading post, one of the people who had long lived here had revealed himself, emerging from an invisible door in a row of bayberries, speaking—yes, repeating—a soft but welcoming melody. Jan, as Captain Mossel and the crew on the ship called him, or Juan, as he was known in Santo Domingo, or João as he had once been called by his Lusitanian sailor father and those like him among whom he worked, the kingdoms of the Iberians being the same in those days, and before that M——, the name his mother had summoned forth from her people and sworn him never to reveal to another soul, not so distant, it struck him, from the Makadewa as the envoy of the first people had begun to call him—had stilled his ear like a tuning fork until he captured it, and with the key of this language that most of the Dutch on the ship assured him they could not fully hear, he had himself unlocked a door. Pelts for hatchets, axes, knives, guns, more efficient than flints or polished clubs in felling a cougar, a sycamore, an enemy. He had wrung a peahen’s neck and roasted an entire hog, but despite having heard several times the call to revolt, he had never revealed a single secret or shibboleth, nor had he killed or been party to killing another man. So long as the circumstances made it possible to avoid doing either, he would. Someday, perhaps soon, he knew, his fate might change, unless he overturned it.

  The envoy had, through gestures, his stories, later meals and the voices that spoke through fire and smoke, opened a portal onto his world. Jan knew for his own sake, his survival, he must remember it, enter it. He had already begun to answer to the wind, the streams, the bluffs. As he now sat in the grass, observing the light playing through the canopies, the shadows sliding across themselves along the sedge in distinct shades, all still darker than his own dark hands, cheeks, a mantis trudging along the half-bridge of a gerardia stalk, he could see another window inside that earlier one, beckoning. He would study it as he had been studying each tree, each bush, each bank of flowers here and wherever on this island he had set foot. He would understand that window, climb through it.

  He stood and unsheathed his knife. Then he removed a roll of twine from his bag. Using the tools, he marked several nearby spots, hatching the tree and tightly knotting several lengths of string about the branches, creating signs, in the shape of lozenges, squares, half-circles, that would be visible right up to sunset. In nearby branches he created several more. There was always the possibility that one of the first people, whom he expected to appear at any moment, though none did, or some nonhuman creature, or a spirit in any form, would untie the markers, erase the hatchings, thereby erasing this spot’s specificity, for him, returning it to the anonymity that every step here, as on every ship he had sailed on, every word he had never before spoken, every face he had never seen until he did, once held. If that were to be the case, so be it. Yet he vowed not to forget this little patch where a new recognition had dawned in him. If he had to commit every scent, every sound, even the blades of grass to memory, he would. He walked around, bending down, looking at a squirrel that had been looking intently at him. . . .

  Despite having no timepiece, he knew it was time to return. A breeze, as if seconding this impulse, sighed Rodrigues. He began sifting through his store of images for a story to recount to them, shielding this place and its particularities from their imaginations. He broke off two branches big enough to serve as stakes and carried them with him down to the bank and the canoe. Using his knife and fingers, and, once he had created an opening, the thinner end of his paddle, he dug a hole, and pounded the first stake into it. Using the twine he created a cross with the other branch, then strung a series of knots around it, from the base to the top, wishing he had brought beads or pieces of colored cloth, or anything that would snare the gaze from a distance. He stepped back to inspect it. He was not sure he would be able to spy it from the water, though it commanded the eye from where he stood. But, he reminded himself, once he re
turned to the ship, it would be for the last time, and he would have months, years even, to find and reconstruct this cross again, to place a new one. The first people would guide him to it, too, if they happened upon it. He replaced his knife and the twine, collected his anchor, then hoisted himself back into the canoe, paddle in one hand, in the other his ballast. He pushed off from the shore, out into the river, and as he glanced at the cross, it appeared to flare, momentarily, before it disappeared like everything else around it into the island’s dense verdant hide. It was, despite his observations of the area, the one thing that he recalled so clearly he could have described it down to the grain of the wood when he slid into his hammock that night, and, when he returned a week later, his canoe and a skiff laden with ampler sacks, of flints, candles, seeds, a musket, his sword, a small tarp to protect him from the rain, enough hatchets and knives to ensure his work as trader, and translator, never to return to the Jonge Tobias, or any other ship, nor to the narrow alleys of Amsterdam or his native Hispaniola, the very first thing he saw.

  ON BRAZIL, OR DÉNOUEMENT:

  THE LONDÔNIAS-FIGUEIRAS

  On Brazil

  Male Found Beheaded in Settlement Ranked Among Most Dangerous in Metro Area

  STAFF REPORT

  The nude, headless body of a male was discovered shortly after dawn in an alley off Rua dos Cães, at the edge of the new and unauthorized favela of N., on the periphery of the industrial suburb of Diadema, by an officer from the São Paulo Metropolitan Police department. The department and the São Paulo State Police have opened a joint investigation. . . .

  According to Chief Detective S.A. Brito Viana, authorities still have not confirmed widespread rumors that identification found on the body indicates the deceased is banking heir Sergio Inocêncio Maluuf Figueiras, 27, who has been listed as missing since the early summer. . . .

  On Brazil

  From the 1610s, the Londônias were the proprietors of an expanding sugar engenho in the northeasternmost corner of the captaincy of Sergipe D’El-Rei. The plantation began some meters inland from the southern sandy banks of the Rio São Francisco and fanned out verdantly for many hectares.

  The first Londônia in New Lisbon, José Simeão, had arrived in the Royal Captaincy of Bahia in the last quarter of the previous century after receiving a judgment of homicide in the continental courts. Before this personal calamity, he had spent several decades serving as a sutler to the King’s army. Because his first wife had died during childbirth while he was posted in Galicia, once he arrived in the land of the pau brasil, he promptly remarried. His new wife, an adolescent named Maria Amada, came from the interior of Portugal’s abundantly expanding territories, and was a product—according to Arturo Figueiras Pereira Goldensztajn’s introduction to the Crônicas da Familia Figueiras-Londônia-Figueiras—of one of the earliest New World experiments: the coupling of the European and the Indian. José Simeão and his wife settled in the administrative capital, São Salvador; he worked as a victualler and part-time tailor, drawing upon skills acquired in his youth, and she produced several children, only one of whom—Francisco, who was known as “Inocêncio” because of his marked simplicity of expression—lived to adulthood.

  Francisco Inocêncio followed his father’s path into the military. Instead of provisioning, he became an infantryman. By the time he was 25, he had taken part in several campaigns against Indians, infidels, foreigners, and seditionists in the western and southern regions of the King’s territories. His outward placidity translated, in the midst of battle, into a steadfastness that even his opponents quickly came to admire. Facing arrows or shot, he neither faltered nor flinched; when his flatboat capsized, he calmly surfaced on the riverbank, pike in hand. A commission and promotions were soon won. But there is only so much gore that sanity can bear. He eventually resigned to settle in the remote northernmost region of São Cristovão, Sergipe D’El-Rei, near the Captaincy of Pernambuco, where he set up a small estate. Not long thereafter he married the widow of a local apothecary.

  Though his wife was not beyond her childbearing years, Francisco Inocêncio adopted her son, José, who was thenceforth known as José Inocêncio, and her daughter, Clara. From his mother, they say, José Inocêncio inherited a will of lead and a satin tongue. These gifts led to his greatest achievement, which was to ally himself with and then marry into the prominent and clannish Figueiras family, which had acquired deeds of property not only in the capital city but throughout the sugar-growing interior. The Figueirases were also involved in trade, as agents of the crown, in sugar and indigo processing, and in the nascent banking system. As a result, they were rumored to be conversos. In any case, the royal court benefited greatly from their ingenuity, as did the colonial ruling class, of which Londônia soon became a member. To the connected and ruthless flow the spoils.

  Within a decade, José Inocêncio had quadrupled the acreage of his father’s estate, acquiring in the process several defaulted or failed plantations, some, according to his rivals, by shrewd or otherwise extralegal maneuvers. He had plunged into this business with the same zeal with which his father had once defended the crown, which is to say, relentlessly.

  José Inocêncio was entering the sugar trade as ships were disgorging wave upon wave of Africans onto the colony’s shores, and he viewed this as a rising historical and economic trend, the product of the natural order. The mortality rate for slaves was extraordinarily high in 17th-century Brazil. It was higher still on Londônia’s plantation. He could not abide indolence or anything less than an adamantine endurance, so he devised a work schedule to ensure his manpower was engaged productively at every moment of daylight. Nightfall barely served as a respite. Those who did not fall dead fled. He was thought of by his fellow planters as “innovative,” “decisive,” “driven,” a man of action whose deeds matched his few words; in the face of such immediacy and success who needs a philosophy or faith?

  On the estate itself, things were moving in the opposite direction. The final straw came when he ordered Kimunda, a frail cane cutter who had collapsed from hemorrhages while on his way to the most distant field, tied to an ass and dragged until he regained consciousness. As stated in the schedule, which each slave was supposed to have memorized, Kimunda was expected to work his section of the field from sun-up to midday, circumstances be damned. The result was that a cabal from the Zoogoo region mounted an insurrection, seizing swords and knives and attempting to lay their hands on gunpowder. José Inocêncio quelled it with singular severity. Sometimes the fact of the lesson is more important than what is actually learned. Half a dozen of the plotters, including Cesarão, a particularly defiant African who had become the de facto leader of the coup, after torching a field of cane and a dry dock, escaped across the river into the wilds of what is now the Brazilian state of Alagoas.

  José Inocêncio swiftly rebuilt his operation. He viewed himself as a man of estimable greatness, of destiny. It is undeniable that he had possessed what might be classed as an exemplary case of proto-capitalist consciousness, for afterwards he sought out as diverse and well-seasoned a workforce as possible. Growing markets have no margin for mercy. Several years before his death, he received a litany of honors from the crown.

  The Londônias-Figueiras

  The Londônia family: Londônia’s eldest son José Ezéquiel strongly resembles his mother in appearance, his father in canniness and business acumen. Short, heavy-set, with a broad jawline covered by a thick, black, immaculately groomed beard, like most of the Figueiras clan. He is described in some tendentious contemporary accounts, according to Figueiras
Pereira Goldensztajn, as almost “rabbinical” in mien. Eventually he inherits his father’s estates, and his branch of the family gradually expands them along with his mortgage empire until the collapse of the sugar economy, despite which these Londônias head a new feudal hierarchy in the region for generations.

  Londônia’s youngest son Gustavo—emerald eyes, skin white as moonstone, a swan’s neck, impressive height: all recessive traits, all valued highly by the Court society in Lisbon. Fluent in gestures, languages, charms. A career in royal law is predicted for him. By the age of twenty-four, he has infected several women in his social set before dying of the same blood-borne illness himself.

  Maria Piedade, the only Londônia daughter, finding no adequate suitors, married back into another branch of the Figueiras family. The other children, as was common even among the rich in those days, died before reaching adolescence, except for the middle son, Lázaro Inocêncio, who possessed his father’s tendency towards resolute action, his high self-regard, his inflexibility.

  Lázaro Inocêncio

  After two years at the Jesuit college in Salvador, where his classmates alternately nicknamed him “the Colonel” because of his assurance and hair-trigger temper, and “Guiné” as a result of his thick, expressive features, swift tan, and woollen locks, he chose a career that placed him near a center of power. He was by birth a Figueiras, nothing less was expected. He gained a commission in the King’s forces, serving as vice-commander of a regiment based in Itaparica. During the final Portuguese invasion to recapture the capital city of Salvador, in 1625, he held steadfast against repeated charges. After the commanding officer had taken shot to the chest, Lázaro led his men in a daring advance through the rump of the lower city that resulted in the capture of a small batallion.