kept me buoyant. I trusted river. When Mãe left

I cried the free-flowing tears words cannot reason away,

felt the seed of Rage root itself and try to murder me.

Nights, Mãe had cradled Pai, an infant in her arms,

now I cuddled Gilberto to sleep like he was my child,

rocked him when nightmares snake-attacked him awake

in the darkness of our hot wattle and daub hut.

But when we boys exploded in fury, Gilberto was worse.

Pai threw cold river water over us, tried to drown Rage.

‘Calm down, my sons. If you lose your

temper you will come under the lash of the overseer.’

We are slaves. We must control our feelings. Always.’

My anger went underground, where it smouldered.

TEN BLISTERED SUMMERS raised me on that remote fazenda

as boyhood dissolved into a blur of sugar cane fields.

Without rites of passage we were the forgotten people,

sweating our laboured days till darkness made us blind.

Sundays – a time of rest, to ease our knotted muscles,

fortify our hearts, while we prayed for eternal salvation.

Me and Gilberto gazed the same reflection in the river,

grew quickly like reeds, ripples on our hard stomachs.

The gods chiselled our cheekbones into bowls.

Fine. We were fine, and noticed, were sent to serve

the old Senhor in his great stone house beyond the fields.

A sweeping staircase spiralled to a domed ceiling

of heavenly, stained-glass angels; oil paintings of porcelain-skinned

noblewomen travelled the length of the walls;

golden tapestries of flaming red dragons hung in alcoves;

there were chandeliers, chests of lace, chairs with lion’s legs,

stuffed alligators and jaguars, cupboards of bone china,

rugs of the Orient and a floor of polished mahogany.

We were put in purple livery and ordered to sleep outside

Senhor’s room so he could summon us in the night.

LIKE A SUN-DRIED tobacco leaf, prematurely aged,

our pai withered. We heard about quilombos,

escapees in the hills, who lived together, fought

bandeirantes with bow and arrow. We boys so longed

to join them but Pai told us No. Sundays,

me and Gilberto would sit by the river and hear

Pai’s stories passed on by his mother Calixta,

once a free woman named Abimbola in Yorubaland.

He spoke: ‘Before this slavery-time there was a lady

in the old country who bore fifteen children

and lived to a great age. Wizened, wiry, wise,

her face a map of creases, and when she gripped you,

they said, you could feel the pulse of blood pumping

through her veins like a river rushing on.

She was my mystical memory grandmother

and she spoke from the deepest part of she-she-self,

and everyone was hypnotised by the drum-drum rhythm

in her voice as she spoke the lives, loves, losses

of our people. There, by the lapping waves, spitting fire

cackling on, flickering shadows onto she old-old face.’

My pai told me this story with such tenderness