Notes for an Autobiography of My Mother
By Eraldo Souza dos Santos
My mother was seven years old when she disappeared, but she cannot say for how many years she went missing. She estimates that she was gone for three years, but many in my family believe it was likely seven. After a family feud, her white foster sister kidnapped her, sold her into slavery, and disappeared in turn. For years, no one knew the fate of my mother. She was enslaved in the house and on the fazenda of a white family in Bahia, Brazil’s Blackest state.
She disappeared in December 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888) and four years into the U.S.-backed anti-communist coup d’état (1964), the month when the military overruled the Constitution by decree. Since 2021, my mother, Nilva Moreira de Souza, and I have been working together on a family memoir about her experience with enslavement, tentatively titled “Everything Disappears.” The five poems below are part of a related yet distinct project: a poetry collection in which I explore the meanings of Blackness-as-property, the phenomenology of disappearance, and, taking inspiration from Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, the idea of writing an autobiography of my mother. [1]
[Anonymous, "Senhora escravos," 1860]
A Homage to Valerie Mason-John
I was your Negro
Captured and sold
I am still your Negro
Arrested and killed
Captured and sold
Arrested and killed
Captured and sold
Arrested and killed
Captured and sold
Captured
Arrested
SOLD
Killed
I am still your negro
I am still
Yours
I am still
Still
THERE IS SO MUCH
GOLD
IN ME
TONIGHT SOLD
THAT WHOEVER $1.50
BUYS $0.50
ME
IS A LUCKY
man
“All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity.”
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Firmament
I often dream that I fly
almost
touching the floor
from the top of the
mountain to its
Fundament
the street where I was born.
I often dream that I descend
once again
that once again the
Fire
Two [Blank] Plays
A. The Slave
Two people, A and B.
One of them, B, has a suitcase in hand and is standing at the front of a door.
A looks for something everywhere in the theater.
After some minutes, B opens the suitcase and dumps its contents on the floor: hundreds of keys fall.
A looks at B, furious.
They start fighting. A eventually kills B.
A tries to open the door using the keys on the floor. None of them seems to unlock the door.
Blackout.
B. The Servant
Two people, A and B.
A dining table with a plate and a pot full of food.
A sits down at the table. B serves A a spoonful of food.
A eats. B serves A again. The amount of food increases with each serving.
B begins to serve food faster and faster. Before A can finish, more food is already on their plate.
A grows angrier and angrier.
A stops eating. A spits in B’s face, spits on the plate, and leaves.
Blackout.
lullaby
i cannot see dark ghosts in the dark.
but to my cry answers
another cry, another man, another certainty,
to a hand, another arm, another eye, another
ear on my chest to make sure i am living.
yes, i can count countless in the room—
the ship the Death the sea.
but do you hear these rustling sheets?
we can see white ghosts in the dark.
[Johann Moritz Rugendas, "Navio Negreiro," 1835]
Notes
[1] See Louis Simon. “Triumph of Ambivalence: Jamaica Kincaid's ‘The Autobiography of My Mother.’” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 4:1 (2005): 31-37.
Cover Photo Credit: Albert Eckhout, “Black Woman with Child,” 1650.
Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a historian and philosopher with research interests in the history of ideas, the invention of traditions, and the politics of translation. “She Is There,” a piece stemming from their family memoir, will appear in Best Small Fictions 2025. The anthology features the best 110 short stories published in English worldwide in the previous year. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Law and Society as well as History (by courtesy) at the University of California, Irvine. They were previously a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Read more.