The land I inhabit was molded by slave work. Women who looked just like me cooked and labored, cleaned and shoveled, endured and birthed in this place, whose cities carry the name of peculiar ores or Catholic Saints. Their motherly traces are forever imprinted on the accents of our language—in the nasal vowels, in the rotation and omission of consonants that make us speak something other than mere Portuguese. Cantar. Canto. Cafundó. We all sing the rhythms our black mothers shared in the dark.
But it is my white maternal great-grandmother I think of when I look up to see these mountains.
She was a tough woman whose Italian family tree included the rape of an indigenous girl from the lands one day we would call Brazil. My grandma used to tell me about how her mother would lock up her family shack to hide from an onça-pintada. I can almost hear the sharp and raspy noise of its feline fangs while it lurked around my great-grandma’s home while she paced alone in the one room, alert—a baby being fed with fubá in her trembling arms and a vigorous shhhh to silence the other three children playing by her feet. On some nights she would hold a shotgun. She was sixteen.
Her husband, my great-grandfather, was out gambling.
My grandmother tells me these stories like they are some old folk’s tale. She was not there, she insists. She was born in the capital city: Belo Horizonte. When Ana Maria and Joaquim decided to leave their small piece of land to take a chance on the city, my grandma was not born yet. And she wouldn’t be for a while, she being the twelfth child, or the sixth, if one counts only the ones who survived infancy. When she comes to my house, she repeats it every chance she has: Born in the capital. Nothing to do with onças-pintadas and children left to be buried at home. Her wounds came from other beasts.
When I ended up moving to this area due to a job opportunity, my grandma laughed and said that I was going back to my ancestral home. She could never do it, she said. She is a creature of fast-paced cars and low-quality air. Now, when I say we have all of that here, she pretends she is not listening and goes on about some minor distress with her neighbor for the hundredth time. I interrupt and ask where exactly her mother lived. She says nobody knows, because the church that kept all the records burned down in the 1950s. So, I’m left wondering from what angle my great-grandmother looked at these mountains.
There’s an araucaria tree, typical from the south of Brazil, in my window view. It was planted more than 900 km away from its native place. Its 1.8m-deep roots seem to like the iron filled soil of this land, so it flourishes beautifully. After some months living here, I found out that it has a companion—another araucaria tree, one that I cannot see from my window. They only thrive when paired. Something about spores and having male and female flowers—such a strange concept— but here they are living their best life away from their family of origin.
Feet, crosses, smoke, rocks, far cry from the woods. Sometimes I dream about this place, the one my grandmother says is too rural for her to stay in for more than the two days she spends here when she visits my husband and me with my parents. I wake up feeling like someone is outside just waiting for me to come out. I try to listen to the sound of darkness, but I can’t. It is never completely silent here, even though I live far from town. There’s always the never-stopping roar of the steel mill. It’s a deep and heavy hum that fills the air subtly. Sometimes I forget it’s there. On other days it’s all I can hear.
The red dirt, the mountains filled with mist, the cool and heavy tropical rain, the wild plants: this familiar sight, so common in the Minas Gerais countryside, became my home. As someone who writes extensively about being a bored teenager in the capital city of Belo Horizonte in the 2000s, this feels wrong somehow. Fifteen-year-old me would look at this house in the middle of nowhere and shout: “What the fuck are you doing? We don’t belong in here.” I shout back at her: “I know!” The araucaria tree stares at me, startled. You are from here, dear, she seems to say.
And I am.
It was also my grandmother who told me that her father was the grandson of an enslaved man. She doesn’t remember what he was called, she says, but she knows that part of his family still lives in a nearby city. She doesn’t know their names either. It’s a footnote to her story that suddenly became my every day. I’m intertwined in the erratic pattern of this motherly ancestry. But I don’t have my great-grandmother’s green eyes and her straight black hair skipped two generations and went to my mother. I have soft curly hair that I suspect is a bit similar to my grandma’s, but she has always kept hers short. I suspect even she has forgotten what it looks like.
That’s when I think of the ancestor who looked like me—she couldn’t have lived far from here where so many slave-labor farms were subdivided to enforce housing developments a hundred years ago. She probably had a Catholic name. Maria, Ifigênia, Luzia. I like to think we share not only the same hair, but the same smile. I hope she smiled. I dream that she smiles still.
Did she sleep on the floor at a senzala? Did she work at casa grande and spent her days scrubbing floors, cooking, and washing clothes by the river? At night, did she sing to kids that weren’t hers? All that scrubbing and cooking and washing and cleaning while chanting…all that weaving with words was some kind of incantation that reverberated in these mountains, passing down cantigas in the rhythmic cadence of another language, slowly betraying the colonizers. My black foremother and women like her raised those golden-haired kids and now, generations later, children all ask for angu and chicken with quiabo. Those vowel shifts would never leave their tongues.
My mother sang to me when I was a child. About being a good girl. About golden dreams and magical kingdoms. Mainly about being a good girl, though. All in those hypnotic trochee heptameters that echoed everywhere, first in my room, then in my house, then in these mountains and finally in my head. Maybe that is why I can only speak about this land and this lineage in a language that is not mine. I don’t want to betray the rounded words that come from my mouth. I need the intrepid consonants of English to refrain from turning this into a song.
I stand outside my house feeling the full force of a tropical early-afternoon sun. Right behind the woods, if you look the right way, you can see the mountains. “It’s such a beautiful view to have your roots in, love,” says my father when he comes to visit. He who married a woman with the same long, straight hair he always wished he himself had. He doesn’t mean roots like I do. He’s thinking of something foreign like the araucaria tree. But I’m from here—my roots are not growing; they are so deep in the ground. Maybe they touch the araucaria’s, I don’t know, but all this dirt, red with iron and blood, feeds my own veins somehow.
“It’s a beautiful place to grow old,” he says dreamily.
My dogs bark and I suddenly remember I don’t have kids. That I won’t have kids. It is full circle, then. My eyes try to track the movement of the sun.
There we go. The slaves, the mining, the vowels, the shotgun, the hair, the dogs, the songs. There will be nothing left of us here, only a tentative silence conjoined with the hum of the steel mill. Until the day I join the spirits of the mountain, and they sing songs reveling in the sounds of my true name.
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