About this author: Cedric Brown is a Bay Area writer and performer who is originally from North Carolina. He has self-published three chapbooks of poetry and made musical and spoken word appearances in numerous venues. Brown is currently completing a manuscript about an Afro-Cuban love story set in Havana. Web site: www.cedricbrownsf.com/

Done

by Cedric Brown
January 2006

Asha was ready to fight. Her eyes, the color of the golden sand on the Brazilian beach where we stood, were blazing.

?I didn?t come all the way down here to get into it, but she getting on my laaaast nerve...? Asha warned.

A bold, broad-hipped Bostonian who kept her Roxbury roots within reaching distance, Asha was not to be messed with. I knew the other woman was in trouble. Uh oh.

Prior to that point of dramatic tension, my visit to Salvador de Bahia was a dream. People told me before leaving the States: ?If you like Rio, you?re gonna love Bahia.? Nonsense, I thought.


Rio gives you the undulating waves of Copacabana and gods and goddesses of varying brownness, sauntering coolly about in dangerously skimpy swim gear. Rio was caipirinhas and Corcovado for Cariocas. Rio was samba! And ever since I?d been turned on to the whip-your-ass-into-a-frenzy sounds of the Batucada, in part due to multiple viewings of Black Orpheus, I was addicted. I lived to samba. Not only did I have to samba, I had to have it at its purest source. And that brought me to Rio. After a fantastic night of frenetic footwork at Salgueiro Escola de Samba, I still didn?t believe that Bahia could or would outshine the magic of Rio. ?If you like Rio, you?re gonna love Bahia.? Yeah, we?ll see, I said.

Bahia was the first place I?ve ever visited where even the people at the airport smiled, standing out on the balcony and waving as you walk across the tarmac into their northeastern bit of heaven. Salvador was my salvation, Africa in the New World, where I felt normal, rooted and connected. Not beholden to an aesthetic of ?whiteness is rightness.? I hugged the intricately headwrapped Baiana who fed me hot acaraj? and hotter vatap? while acting like my newly-christened South American grandmother. Bahia was dancing to afox? rhythms with other sweaty, svelte cocoa bodies on the beach and wearing t-shirts that shouted Brazil?s growing and insistent Black consciousness: ?100% NEGRO!?

My hostess Elaine, a Jamerican with a house in the Santo Antonio district, complained that the ancestors would not be pleased that people were partying in the Pelorinho, but I argued over heavily-garlicked pizza that Baianos were reclaiming and re-appropriating the beautiful multicolored colonial square on behalf of the Africans who were bought there to be punished (pelorinho is Portuguese for ?whipping post?).

Each samba-reggae beat pounded by Olodum?s drum corps during their Tuesday rehearsals neutralized the past pain from lashes on the backs of Bantus and Yorubas forced to work the canebrake. Every flying capoeira spin kick by a shirtless, six packed maestre, every chant to Ex? and Iemanja and Xang?, every stroke of a brown pigment-tipped paintbrush on bright folkoric montages was an affirmation that Africanidade is here to stay, not to be diluted by whiteness and washed away, as the old school purveyors of Brazilian racial democracy would have happen.

Asha was ready to smack this girl if she asked sandpaper-skinned, blonde-dreadlocked Asha ONE more time why she considered herself Black. ?Here in Brasil, you could be white,? Mariana reasoned. ?Look at your eyes and your skin. You could be white. I can call myself mixed, mulata, pardo, morena, but never Black.?

Never Black?

Such a shame to our American eyes and ears, such a shame. Never Black. In a U.S. context, someone would surely ask Mariana as she walked slowly down a Southern street in cutoffs jeans, ?Hey Redbone, want some company?? Instead, here in her native land Mariana was about to get beat down by Asha because we outsiders were offended by her negative notions of Blackness. Fortunately, Mariana escaped with minor lacerations to her pride after Asha?s left-hook-eyeroll and hasty departure from the scene.

After the tension on the beach that day, we sought more answers from people who did call themselves 100% Negro ? Moises and Vilma and Nilsete and Jo?o. Eventually we understood that because we ?weren?t in Kansas no more? that the ?One Drop Rule? no longer applied. Eventually we understood that Mariana?s references to Blackness were strongly tied to class, and that many Afro-Brazilians are poor (and many poor Brazilians are Black). Eventually we understood that, in a realm where multiple complexions are recognized and named, Blackness also describes a feeling, an orientation, a values system.

In a strange way, Mariana could be right. We are Black because we choose to be. How ironic that our wake up call to membership in the African Diaspora was due in part to a woman who never described herself as Black, even when given many reasons to do so in that sunny, soulful slice of the world.