Patient Anthony - A Brazilian Boy's Walk to Slavery -2 (Republished to Groups)

The Portuguese bought Patient Anthony for three hundred milreis, the equivalent at the time of one hundred and fifty dollars, a good price for a slave boy in the backlands.

The slaver was Saturnino Rabelo, a man in his mid-fifties. Previously involved in the African slave trade, for the past four years Rabelo had been engaged in a lucrative human traffic from north to south Brazil.

Rabelo told one of his slave drivers to take the new purchases to the column at the jurema trees. They were to leave immediately, heading toward the Rio Pajeu and the road to the south.

"Come! Come, little burros!" the driver said and grinned, showing his dark, decayed teeth. He was known as Tropeiro, for he'd been a mule driver before working the slave columns.

"Mae Monica!" Patient Anthony shrieked."Help me! Save me!"

His mother broke away from the other women. Clasping her skirt, she ran to the Senhor Capitao, Joao Montes, and Rabelo, who were still on the veranda.

"Senhor! Senhor, my child. . . "

Heitor Ferreira looked sadly at Mae Monica but said nothing.

"Antonio Paciencia is sold," Joao Montes announced bluntly.

"Ai! Je--sus! Ai! Santissima Virgem! No, Senhor Joao! Mercy, senhor!" Mae Monica fell to her knees in the dirt and held her head in her hands, moaning loudly.

"The fazendeiros of the south need boys like Antonio Paciencia," Joao Montes explained. "He must go to them. They're good men of great wealth. They'll treat him well."

"My Antonio? Oh, Master Joao, my obedient Antonio?"

Senhor Heitor heaved himself out of his chair. "You still have two sons and a daughter at Jurema," he said irritably. "Thank God, Mae Monica, that they weren't sold."

Joao Montes waved to Modesto Cavalcante, who crossed to him, removing his hat as he approached the veranda. "Take Mae Monica to the boy and let her bid him farewell."

"Yes, senhor."

Quickly then, Joao Montes left the veranda.

Isabelinha, Mae Monica's daughter, had been standing with her mother during the slaver's inspection and now she went to their hut for Patient Anthony's clothes. She added to the small pile an old leather hat that belonged to Patient Anthony's stepbrother, the blacksmith's helper, and a new gray blanket she'd bartered from the peddler.

Patient Anthony saw Mae Monica and Modesto Cavalcante coming toward the jurema trees, where the drivers were assembling the column, snapping their whips and cursing the lazy and listless among the one hundred and sixty captives.

Patient Anthony ran to Mae Monica and clung to her legs. "O, my Mother! What did I do?"

Mae Monica clasped her son's bony shoulders, rocking her body and sobbing.

"Get dressed, child," Isabelinha said, holding his clothes for him. "You've a long, long way to go."

"Aiieee!" Mae Monica wailed. "How can it be? Our Antonio carried off with these devils!"

Isabelinha pulled Patient Anthony away from his mother and hurriedly dressed him. She was putting on his shirt when a slave driver shouted for him to join the column.

The final parting was swift and confused. Patient Anthony was begging, again and again, to be left at the fazenda. Isabelinha offered prayers aloud to the Virgin for his protection. Mae Monica lamented at the jurema trees like a very old woman crying for the dead.

As the column started forward, Isabelinha dashed over to Patient Anthony. She'd forgotten to give him the blanket and the hat, which she jammed on his head. "May God go with you, little brother."

"Isabel---" Suddenly his tears flowed again. A slave behind him swore and shoved him forward.

"Antonio Paciencia!"

He saw Chico Tico-Tico wave weakly. He made no attempt to return the greeting, so ashamed that Chico Tico-Tico and other boys of Fazenda da Jurema should see him not as one of them but as a slave child. He lowered his head and the wide-brimmed hat blocked his view, except for the feet of those walking near him.

Dust-covered feet. Feet with open wounds from cuts and gashes. Feet with old scars, calluses, corns, and suppurating blisters. Bare feet of slaves rising and falling, day after day, week after week, as the column marched south through the backlands.

From Patient Anthony's first night away from Fazenda da Jurema as he lay wrapped in his sister's blanket, weeping, until journey's end three months later, the boy was rarely spared sorrow and fright.

The column marched soon after dawn each day, through storm and rain, cold wind and hot, thick white fogs rising from the river, burning suns. They would rest at noon, the length of the break depending on the mood of the drivers, then on again until sundown. They were fed two meals a day of corn porridge and dried beef and beans. Once a week, the men were given cachaca and a twist of tobacco. Saturnino Rabelo promised this generosity so long as all behaved themselves.

The rations of cane brandy and tobacco had been suspended for two weeks after five slaves attempted to flee into the sertao. Caught and returned to the column, the fugitives were flogged, the lashings administered in a way least damaging to their flesh. Instead of one flogging of ninety lashes, which Rabelo determined they deserved, on nine successive days at each evening's halt the runaways were given ten lashes.

Seven slaves died from sickness during the march. And twice Patient Anthony watched as holes were scratched in the sand beside the road to bury infants born to slave mothers. The column wasn't reduced by these deaths: Saturnino Rabelo acquired seventeen additional purchases from fazendas along their route.

About half the slaves had been born in Africa. They told the boy they'd dreamed of returning to their families, but each day farther out on the ocean, they realized this would never be. "It's hopeless to long for the past," he was advised. "Forget everything but that you were born to live as a slave in the lands of Dom Pedro Segundo."

Patient Anthony had heard Mae Monica and others talk respectfully of "Dom Pedro Segundo," a great man of the earth with power over all Brazil. Hearing more about this powerful patrao increased Patient Anthony's curiosity.

"Are these his soldiers?" he would ask the older slaves at a town or village.

"Every soldier in Brazil serves Pedro Segundo."

"Is this his fazenda?" he asked at a big ranch where Saturnino Rabelo sought further purchases.

"No. Pedro Segundo has a grander house at Rio de Janeiro. Ask Policarpo to tell you about it."

The slave Policarpo had been bought by Rabelo at a fazenda in Pernambuco. Several years earlier he had belonged to a Recife merchant whom he'd accompanied to Rio de Janeiro. Policarpo told Patient Anthony that he'd seen Dom Pedro Segundo riding along the rua Direita in an open carriage with eight cream-colored horses plumed with green feathers.

"Long live Dom Pedro Segundo! Long live our emperor of Brazil!' I shouted," said Policarpo, his face radiant.

On a bright morning in mid-September 1855 as the slave column marched up the valley of the Sao Francisco river, some 750 miles to the south at Rio de Janeiro, a black man stood for inspection by his master as obediently as had Patient Anthony at Fazenda da Jurema. His name was Rafael and he was in his early fifties. He smiled as his master scrutinized him.

"No, Rafael, I don't want you to smile. Relax your face," the master said. Rafael was standing in the middle of a patio. His master was about ten feet away.

"Fold your arms, Rafael."

Rafael obeyed.

"Good, Rafael. Turn your head slightly to the right . . . Yes!"

Rafael watched his master step over to a brass instrument mounted on a tripod.

His master bent his tall body to peer through a peephole at one end.

"Excellent, Rafael. Keep your eyes toward me. Bend your head back ever so slightly . . . Yes! Don't move, Rafael . . . Don't move!"

Rafael heard his master give instructions to an assistant whom Rafael knew to be in a room off to the right, where, bright though the day was, the man worked by candlelight behind black drapes. His master unscrewed the back of the brass instrument, removing a round glass screen. The assistant hurried over to him with a circular wet plate, which was substituted for the screen.

"Steady, Rafael. Steady, now . . ."

Rafael did not blink an eyelid as Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil, took his photograph.

Rafael derived great satisfaction from serving his master, to whom he was devoted. No ruler on earth was wiser and more just than His Majesty, Dom Pedro Segundo of Brazil.

Dom Pedro was indeed a benevolent and paternal ruler. For example, once a week he would receive members of his Brazilian family at court: exalted nobles, humble Negroes, and representatives of the few remaining Tupi-Guarani clans. Yet, for all the respect and esteem shown him, the emperor was prone to a melancholy reflected even in his dress. By choice he wore a black suit with frock coat, black cravat, and tall black silk hat, like a man in mourning.

"Were I not emperor, I should like to be a teacher," he said on occasion. "What calling is greater or nobler than directing young minds?"

Dom Pedro disliked slavery, as much from his moral upbringing as from the offense given by a horde in bondage at Rio de Janeiro, a capital that sought to be the Paris of America. The emperor had liberated the slaves he'd inherited but dared not exceed this personal magnanimity: Talk of emancipation stirred up the wrath of senhores de engenho and fazendeiros, whose plantations provided the empire's greatest wealth. Sugar, cotton, tobacco -- all continued to yield good profits, but today's El Dorado was coffea arabica.

Dom Pedro Segundo looked upon the poor and landless, who were the majority of his Brazilian family, with paternal and Christian concern. Spread throughout his holdings were millions of vassals who lived as had their ancestors in positions of servility and with little opportunity to possess the smallest part of the royal patrimony.

They'd experienced few changes in the years since their country had taken its place among independent nations, and for some of them, things would seem to have grown worse-- like the child Antonio Paciencia of Fazenda da Jurema, who was torn from his mother and taken a thousand miles and more through the backlands. Patient Anthony had only the vaguest knowledge of this great man of the earth and none at all of the freedoms protected by His Majesty.

ends Part 2 of 4

Patient Anthony: A Brazilian Boy's Walk to Slavery (Part 3)

Patient Anthony: A Brazilian Boy's Walk to Slavery (c) 2007 Errol Lincoln Uys

Excerpted from BRAZIL, a Novel by Errol Lincoln Uys, Second Edition, Silver Spring Books

Please visit the writer's website with two unique literary archives:

Working with James A. Michener: The Story Behind The Covenant

Brazil: The Making of a Novel