The priestess of Salvador told me to honor Osain with this offering. So I did. The priestess read the cowrie shells, told me I was the daughter of the river, the daughter of the rainbow serpent. I believed her because the Everglades whispered this truth in my heart for months, the way wild places talk to people, but I had no ears to translate until in Brazil they taught me how to decipher God from the nature of things.
She told me to take candy to children in September. You are a twin and must honor the Ibeji. So I did. I did everything the priestess instructed except wash myself in popcorn in front of the sea. I did not do that only because I am not ready for Omolu, orixa of disease, of healing, cloaked in raffia to hide his maladies. He, whose dance I witnessed in Brazil, makes me quake with the nearness of God. Now in my early 40s, I continue to clinch the last of my childishness, ever possessive still of the illusion of my own power.
In Salvador, the priestesses and grandmothers are the same. They are the businesswomen of axé, they traffic and tender the life-force of all things. They wear white, wrap their heads in white, wear the beads of their orixas, treat their people, lead and guide them in spiritual righteousness. They call up the gods to mount them and their people in dance during ceremony. They are old. These practices are old. They are the granddaughters of Yoruba and Bantu, brought to Brazil enslaved to work sugarcane and serve the Portuguese, hiding their African gods and goddesses, the orixas, in plain sight, pretending to worship Catholic saints instead of practicing candomblé. Now these descendants stand, like ancient cypress trees, holding together the infinite swamp of blood born of Africa and sent all over the new world. The grandmothers rule Salvador, The Land of Happiness.
I met a woman down in Brazil named Angelina. I looked in her eyes and saw my sister in there. We loved each other right away. Radiant, bossy, descended from Nigerians and part Haitian, Angelina lived in Los Angeles as a middle school vice principal but she lived in the world as Yoruba, burdened with the task of wading into the river of the black wound and collecting the lost bodies strewn across continents in the lost centuries. She has work to do. Many people do this work in the river with the bodies. Some of us can only take our own body to the river, and this work, too, is enough. We find each other in the river, in this work. So I found my sister Angelina in Salvador.
On her 39th birthday we traveled to a samba party in Sau Barra, Bahia, a third-world outpost hours outside of Salvador at the one-room school of our samba teacher, a revered candomblé dancer and elder, Zelita, the grandmother of everyone. The neighborhood, pastel open houses pasted together on orange ochre dirt roads, survived without commerce, no nearby water.
Zelita’s students, boys and girls of elementary age, danced for us while their fathers, uncles, and brothers clanged out the exquisite cacophony of Afro-Brazilian samba on drums, bells, sticks. Mothers, aunts, and other grandmothers danced in the kitchen, preparing hot soup drinks, laughing. We danced for the children, a clumsy, well-intentioned but inferior samba. Yet they loved us, bound as we all were through our common teacher, inheritors of a knowledge transmitted through the body, through the generations back to the motherland.
Before we left, the aunts and mothers surprised Angelina with a homemade cake, her name spelled across the frosting, claiming her. Arms outstretched, they offered Angelina this sweetness.
Then Zelita wrapped Angelina in her arms, hugging her to her chest. One by one, the grandmothers embraced Angelina. They murmured into her hair in Portuguese. I asked a woman near me what they said. She translated the words of the grandmothers, the priestesses, the words of the cypress trees.
“Our daughter, we found you at last. Welcome home.”
This article appears in Oct 20-27, 2016.