“By any of the laws, of nature or state,” Aries D’Azevedo started, but before he could complete his sentence, Burunbana whispered, “They are coming lest you fear…” rendering the priest silent.
“Is it now the hour when you are to meet them? Go straightaway to collect Dom Gaspar, as he will be departing with us. Do not go anywhere but to the chapel, and do not inquire of those two, and bring the head of hair that he brought there, and come straight back.”
Aries D’Azevedo stared at Burunbana, trying his best to decode the person before him, but could only register how empty his own mind was, more so than it had ever been. At first he could not move, but somehow did and, since it was already past nine and the house was darkening despite the summer sun’s long tail, he took a lamp and went directly to the chapel. The hallway narrowed as he walked, and felt so cool that for a second he wondered if he had somehow entered a secret passage taking him underground; moreover he felt the impulse to visit his room and pack up a few of his things, at least a sack’s worth, but every time he began to turn around he rebuked himself and kept forward. Soon he found himself in the chapel. Dom Gaspar was kneeling, saying a rosary, weeping.
Aries D’Azevedo lifted his fellow monk from his knees, and pulled him toward the door. He started to ask where Padres Pero and Barbosa Pires were, but remembered Burunbana’s warning. He also thought to tell Dom Gaspar about the servant, then thought better of it. Instead, he had Gaspar hand over the wig and they left the chapel, arm-in-arm, bearing swiftly back to the office, relocking the door carefully behind them.
Burunbana was standing at the windowsill, peering into a bowl and muttering something barely audible. He had splashed the water from the urn in various places on the floor, a pattern Aries D’Azevedo could not discern, then annointed himself with with a bit more. Another bowl sat to the side, and Burunbana drank from it, then traced symbols on his forehead and crown, and chest, and shoulders, and stomach, and loins. Aries D’Azevedo did not, dared not interrupt him.
“You must give him the list you wrote and the hair to me,” Burunbana said without turning around. The priest complied. “Now we must make haste. Extinguish the lamp. We will depart through this portal.”
“Where are we going?” Aries D’Azevedo asked.
Burunbana didn’t answer, but cracked one of the shutters and peered out into the lightless cloister. From somewhere erupted three consecutive cannon booms. Aries D’Azevedo began to examine various papers on his desk, trying to figure out which he ought to grab, and scanned his shelves and walls to identify any books or documents he ought bring with him.
“Extinguish the lamp,” Burunbana repeated, his voice a feather splitting stone. Aries D’Azevedo complied, and Gaspar filed behind him. Burunbana opened the shutters completely, and tossed the water out into the black cloister, hoisting himself up through the window and out into the warm air. The line the water left, a long diagonal across the stone walkway, into the yard’s center, and towards the rear gate, glimmered as if studded with flecks of phosphorus, or miniature stars. Aries D’Azevedo could not believe his eyes, but he kept up, and soon he and Dom Gaspar were up over the back wall, then the gate at the rear of the estate and into the curtain of trees, moving along a path that glowed only when Burunbana trod on it.
They continued in this way, through dense brush, in a tunnel of blackness in which only the ground offered light, for what felt like hours, until finally, they reached a clearing, and there stood the two boys, Zé Pequenhinho holding a dim candle, and two of the three remaining Africans. Burunbana did not ask where the other one was, and none of them spoke. It was only as Burunbana blew out the candle and they resumed their trek that Aries D’Azevedo registered that both of the former adult workers wore priests’ white doublets.
I shall conclude this letter by noting that the final destinations, much like their destinies, differed for the Africans and for your two men, Aries D’Azevedo and Gaspar Leite, for, as Burunbana assured them, under the Netherlanders each would be able to fulfill his liberty, which included practicing his faith and profession, whatever those might be, while no such freedom was guaranteed to the Africans unless they claimed it themselves. Aries D’Azevedo and Gaspar initially asked to remain with them, as brothers, in that place of refuge to which they initially went, and the provost assured the enslaved ones of their emancipation there on the spot, but Burunbana countered that they were already free and neither writ nor oath, from the Church, Dutch or Portuguese, could trump that. In any case, he provided the priests with a guide, who would connect them to a network of guides providing safe passage and the necessities for survival, leading them along the eastern base of the mountains north, all the way to Olinda, which you, and other members of the House, fearing persecution after Corneliszoon Loncq had raised the flag of Nassau, had already fled.
As for Aries D’Azevedo, who now once again goes by the name of Manoel, he has abandoned the cloth and practices the faith of his ancestors without worry, repeating the motto of that Greek philosopher: “When I saw all this, and other things as bad, I was disgusted and withdrew from the wickedness of the times.” Yet in his writings and study he pursues a thread of thought that steadily brings him into conflict both with the training his schooling, in Coimbra and elsewhere, imposed on him, and also with that of his people, for whenever one looks too deeply beyond the surface of this world of men, one may find truths submerged that not even the most long-held beliefs and traditions can withstand. As for Dom Gaspar, he will alert you, in case you did not think to examine the martyrology’s binding, to the presence of this history. He suffered a crisis of the soul upon his return to his native city, but clove ultimately to your faith and thus returns to you.
As for the Africans, they now live in such a place as does not exist on your map, though you will eventually find it, even if you can never lay claim to it. There is no leader, only a community, with elders who consult and concur amongst themselves about our habits and practices. Many from the town also come here, and from other towns, including your people too, the sugar plantations having bled so that they appear likely to die for lack of cultivation, though we can be sure that the Dutch will show as much industry as the Portuguese, and will install new gears to insure the smooth running of their machine. As for that Burunbana, who is a Jinbada and was known as João Baptista, that one continues spirit work among the people, who is their agent and their instrument, their conduit and gift, that one is I who write you this letter, for as my sister will write in the distant future, “it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive,” I who know what I am meant to know and am where I am meant to be, writing in tribute to my dear brother Manoel Aries with whom I maintain a correspondence, it is thus that I close this letter with the proper date, Elul 5390, signed, as you will see when you have raised this page to the candlelight,
N’Golo BURUNBANA Zumbi
GLOSS ON A HISTORY OF ROMAN CATHOLICS IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1790–1825; OR THE STRANGE HISTORY OF OUR LADY OF THE SORROWS
A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic: 1790–1825, Jos. N. O. de L’Écart-Francis and Ambrose Carroll Meyer (Boston: Flaherty & Smith, 1895)
The status of the ancient Faith differed on the eastern shores of the Mississippi and its southerly tributaries. A convent and school, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, are referred to indirectly in the records of His Holiness Bishop John Carroll of the Diocese of Baltimore, whose curacy extended at that time to the far western frontiers of the virgin Republic’s lands. A specific reference may be found, however, in the personal papers of Fr. Auguste-Marie Malesvaux, a native of Saint-Domingue, whose evangelistic labors encompassed the Spanish and later French territories from Louisiana as far north as the Great Lakes. Malesvaux offers brief notations on the convent and school, which he asserts were the first in this region. Flemish Nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Charity of Our Lady of the Sorrows established both near the village of New Hurttstown, in this frontier region of western Kentucky, in 1800. Because the convent and school suddenly vanished without a trace, and within several years the order itself disappeared as well, and as the nearby non-Catholic settlement suffered through a series of calamities before dwindling to near-extinction until its reestablishment in 1812, no other definitive records of this foundation remain.* It was not until the Reverend Father Charles Nerinckx, the native of Herfe-