Counternarratives

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

COUNTER
NARRATIVES

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

T
h
e 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 returned 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

On Brazil

F
rom 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

T
h
e 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.
Th
e 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

A
fter 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.

Despite the fact that his captives were all found mortally wounded, as
soon as the Dutch retreated he was duly commended and promoted. His sense of
superiority and bellicosity, however, caused problems in the context of the general
state of peace. Continued battles with his superiors led him to abruptly resign his
commission. A star does not orbit its moons. He returned to Salvador, and in a
moment of even greater rashness, married the sickly daughter of an immigrant
physician. He found the situation of his marriage and his estrangement from the army
intolerable, and headed south, his goal the distant coastal city of Paranaguá,
essentially abandoning his ill wife, who was, unknown to him, with child.

Fortunately for heroes fate's hand is surest. In 1630 a fleet led by the
Dutchman Corneliszoon Loncq seized Pernambuco. Londônia, who had gotten no further
than the town of Vila Velha, north of Rio de Janeiro, was located and recalled. His
commission involved his resuming leadership of the remnants of his former
regiment—Souza, Antunes, de Mello, Madeira—which was now under the general command
of Fonte da Ré. The Portuguese forces were intent on retaining their patrimony, so
adequate plans were being drawn up. Lázaro Inocêncio, however, pressed to
participate in the first battles in Olinda. A farsighted man, Fonte da Ré recognized
the looming catastrophe and ignored Londônia's agitation to take the field.

But Londônia did have a reputation for bravery, so Fonte da Ré, after
receiving word that an official fleet was already bound toward the seized northern
capital, ordered his commander to head west, up the Rio São Francisco, moving in a
pincer movement into the rear flank of Pernambuco. He was to press into the leaner,
bottom portion of that colony, then head back southeastwards, tracking the southern
rim of the unforgiving sertão, then moving north again towards Olinda, which was
under Dutch control. Rivercraft awaited him on the Sergipe d'El Rei side, provisions
at the post west of the thriving town of Penedo in Pernambuco. He was not to attack
any Portuguese colonials unless they declared allegiance to Nassau. In order to
preserve manpower, he was not to engage in any other combat unless absolutely
necessary. This course of action would keep him out of the main campaign, Fonte da
Ré hoped, until Londônia's enthusiasm could be put to direct use in a clean-up
operation. Two other batallions were added to his command.

After a journey by horse along the coastline to the mouth of the São
Francisco, Londônia and his men set off on pettiaugers up the deep and refractory
river. On the northern shores, past the sandy banks and the falls, settlements and
plantations periodically appeared. The aroma of cane and the sight, from his boat,
of
engenhos
and mills, goaded him like a spur. There was no genius
comparable to that of his people; the greedy Dutch must pay. Within a day he and his
men had passed Penedo and reached a small Portuguese outpost from which they would
proceed into the interior.

As they moved inland on foot, Londônia's men realized he was as
unfamiliar as they with the difficult, nearly impassably dense forest terrain.
Unlike them, however, he was indefatigable. He wanted to drive forward, forward. A
few of his men, however, began to fall by the wayside, to fevers and periodic
attacks by Indians, who had been living somewhat undisturbed in the vicinity.
Londônia demanded that his soldiers not flag: here we see history repeating itself,
though in a guise bearing professional validation. One mutineer he shot outright,
another he threatened with similar summary judgment. On they proceeded, through
forest to clearings of scrub-land and then to forest again: soon, hunger, thirst and
questions about the validity of the mission enjoined the men. Though they marched, there were no Dutch to be found anywhere.