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Toni Cade Bambara:
"When I first ran across Dr. [W.E.B.] DuBois's passage [on "double-consciousness" and living "behind a veil", from Souls of Black Folk] as a girl, I had a problem straightaway. It conflicted with what I'd learned early on through Eldersay, namely, that the seventh son (or seventh son of the seventh son) who was born with a 'veil' (some said 'caul,' which I heard as 'call' as in having a calling) was enhanced by it, was gifted. . . . Second sight enabled the person to see things others couldn't see. Persons born with the veil were, if not clairvoyants, at least clear-seeing. They could see through guise and guile. They were considered wise, weird, blessed, tetched, or ancient, depending on the bent of the describer. But they were consulted in the neighborhoods, occasionally revered. . . . When I came to the bit about looking at your own self all the time through the eyes of people who either pity you or hate you, that did not sound like the second sight I'd heard of."
---Toni Cade Bambara, "Deep Sight and Rescue Missions," in Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation, Gerald Early, ed. (NY, Penguin, 1993), 310-11.
[RIP, toni cade!]
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ON CONGO SQUARE, NEW ORLEANS
"[T]he [slave] market [in Congo Square, New Orleans], which simply represented the embodiment of some of the slaves' free-day activities, enjoyed only informal recognition [by the authorities]. It is true that during the Spanish period a number of free colored vendors almost certainly came to participate in the market alongside the bondsmen and that the authorities could have subjected such free vendors to commercial regulations. But, by and large, the market remained a slave activity, and, as such, had no standing in law. Spanish administators, as much given to leaving bureaucratic paper trails to justify, and cover, their actions as their French predecessors, obviously could not officially regulate something that did not officially exist. Thus, while New Orleans's Spanish colonial records were filled with numerous, detailed regulations on the other markets and vendors of the city, none applied to the slave vendors" (16).
"The slave and free-black vendors continued to set up there [in Congo Square] on Sunday morning, and to mingle with the crowds of other slaves and free blacks who gathered on Sunday afternoons for the square's famous, and historically significant, African dances..." (36).
"In addition to the various drums, gourds, sounding boxes, and banjo-like instruments that Latrobe saw, other observers noted the Congo Square musicians blowing cow-horn hunting crooks and 'quillpipes' made from reeds strung together like panpipes, playing marimbas, scraping the teeth of horses' jawbones with sticks, and having adopted European instruments such as violins, tambourines, triangles.... They described the dancers as 'dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashions . . . ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts," with "fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls, jingling and flirting about the performers' legs and arms.' The women, one onlooker reported, wore, 'each according to her means,' the 'newest fashions in silk, gauze, muslin, percale dresses.' And the males clothed themselves in 'oriental and Indian dress' with 'Turkish' [sic ????] turbans of red, blue, yellow, green and brown..." (40, 37).
--from Jerah Johnson, Congo Square in New Orleans (New Orleans: Louisiana Landmarks Society, 1995).
Johnson is quoting contemporary sources from the pre-Civil War era; as he notes, these testimonies are eye-witness accounts but must be read skeptically, for the writers were often Anglo-Americans new to New Orleans, fascinated but scandalized by and largely ignorant of the Congo Square activities they sought to describe.
*******
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And what is the connection of Palmares, Brazil, to Congo Square, New Orleans, for a history of the Americas?
"Zumbi, the man who inspired the current racial debate [in Brazil], has often been described ... as the Americas' first martyr for freedom.
Palmares was [an area in northeastern Brazil] formed in 1597 after some 50 slaves fled from a nearby sugar plantation and took refuge in the surrounding wooded mountains in what is today the state of Alagoas. The quilombo lasted for 97 years, covering 216 square miles, with 10 villages and as many as 30,000 inhabitants.
Palmares was not just an African village. By the time Zumbi assumed power in 1678, he ruled over a panracial community of those persecuted by 17th century Portuguese colonialism -- including Indians, poor whites, Muslims and Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism.
When the Dutch invaded the northeast in 1630, the quilombo flourished while the European powers fought it out. Palmares warriors raided nearby plantations and freed hundreds of slaves from barbarous conditions. In those days, most plantation slaves lasted an average of five years before dying from a combination of overwork, accidents, poor diets, crowded living conditions and corporal punishment.
Still, the Portuguese masters never lacked for slaves. Before Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 -- the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so -- about 4.5 million Africans had been transported in, about six times the number that entered the United States.
As military commander and Palmares' third and last king, Zumbi fought the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the slave trade for nearly two decades, until Palmares was destroyed in 1694 by Portuguese troops. Zumbi was killed a year later in an ambush.
' Zumbi believed in all or nothing, victory or death,' wrote historian Decio Freitas, author of Palmares: War of Slaves.
For many Afro-Brazilians, Zumbi is a legend.
'He's everything: peace, love, dignity,' says Cristiani Oliveira dos Santos, an 18-year-old Rio dance student who recently performed in a tribute to Zumbi....
While most Afro-Brazilians are content with Zumbi's new status, -- the city of Rio de Janeiro even declared November 20 an official holiday -- some hope the federal government will go way beyond the festivities.
'We don't need coins and stamps with Zumbi's likeness,' says Conceicao. 'We need jobs, health and education.'"
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