Black people stuff, black people stuff

The Black man, so natural, so at ease, changed the way he interacted with the bourgeois he encountered in Recife. The bows and greetings to foreigners became a plumb line held high on his chest, conversing in English with the more cultured Recife residents. Why? Provocative, with a keen sense of his adversaries' shortcomings – the people who had been denied the same opportunities – he would strike at their most painful points with a lancet. They didn't cry out "Ouch." Their desire was to fall silent. Formal books, formal pronunciation, formal conventional phrases, polite greetings, the words of good schools with the correct person and number inflections, fell to the ground useless and defeated. In English, the Recife bourgeois conversed as in the books. Here and there, for greater distinction, they delivered brief speeches with a British accent, which at most they gleaned from BBC radio broadcasts. The black man didn't laugh at the refined manners of textbook ladies. But like a new barbarian, he struck them with punches, kicks, spitting expressions, and variations in phrases, in a torrent that seemed to them more like the unintelligible syllables of bebop. "My God," they wanted to raise their eyes to the heavens. To which he would unleash a jab:

If you prefer, we can talk in French. I don't particularly like French because of the effeminate pronunciation.

And with thick lips, in a toothless mouth, he affected "ouis" to further demonstrate the loss of machismo, which in his view constituted the French way of speaking. In truth, the feigned loss of machismo ended up affecting the bourgeois speakers of the language, who were no longer comfortable in English. If he didn't speak like Shakespeare with an air of Alec Guinness, the stocky, dog-like, smelly, slave-ass black man reduced them to Molière's bourgeois. If in his natural state – and here an entire chapter could be dedicated to the nature of bourgeois and poor mixed-race people in Brazil, the former considering themselves white, the latter treated as inhabitants of the slave quarters – if in his natural state they kept him annoyed because of his color and lack of refined references, despite his glasses and American trousers (for monkeys in films also wore them), what will he say now, when he speaks of a privileged realm of education, proper to chic people, and, insolently, corrects them by mistreating them? If that wasn't a monkey, it must have been a doll, which the bourgeois looked at in fright, searching for an owner:

Where's the ventriloquist? Where's the guy who speaks behind that Benedito puppet?

For the black man possessed several characteristics of the fairground puppet that traveling artists take to the squares: large, very lively eyes, thick lips, dark skin, and, above all, a mocking spirit that tormented people of class. Such a being could not be master of his own dark features, and yet he would say to them:

- You're speaking like you're reading a textbook lesson. It has nothing to do with English.

What insolence! The bourgeois were on the verge of spitting in the face of the Benedito puppet. The devil was that the thing, monkey or puppet, was real, it moved, raised its voice, adopted the intonations of an intelligent man, spoke with wit and presence of mind. In other words, with absurd manifestations in inferiors. What was that? It was better to see it from behind, with its wide backside dressed in imported jeans, "smuggled in," without the made-in-USA glasses, "smuggled in," without the imported pout, which was neither human nor could it be. It was something else, from a realm between animal and human, sometimes more animal, sometimes less human, but something that could not be treated as an equal to them, aspiring bourgeois of the upper class. They hated it. Not that it approached the dignified gentlemen with aggressive posture and gestures; it was crazy, but not that crazy. But its mere presence, face to face on equal footing, was an aggression. He carried on his skin a bacteria that could contaminate even the most respectable people. Instead of striving for equality through self-improvement, he brought down the individual who wanted to be white, pure, to his level. If they were similar, it would mean, in the minds of the educated, that everyone was black, equally black. The equivalent of a socialism of misery, of infamy, that his presence brought. The equivalent of a nobleman from a sugar plantation, sitting on the floor, drooling on the same pipe as the slave beside him.

He achieved this absurdity when, despite being shorter in stature, he spoke with his chin held high in English to the doctors and lawyers of Recife. What an insult! He didn't even need to spit at the doctors, as his moist lips sometimes vilely threw into the mouths of his opponents. It almost seemed deliberate, the spittle reaching them like a black man's spit into a white man's mouth. There was an absolute aggressiveness in his presence. What had previously been absurd—that very existence of someone in that form expressing himself like a human being, a funny absurdity, as funny as inferior beings are when they imitate men, like puppies in diapers or chimpanzees in tuxedos, for the absurd becomes comical through the unwarranted resemblance—then became embarrassment and anger, because the impossible event was altered to become an equal to that of the good bourgeois. A discomfort identical to that of a guest being greeted at the door by a maid wearing the same wristwatch and shoes as the grand lady. How unpleasant! The refined people of Recife felt an itch, an allergic itching on their skin, upon hearing such intimacy from that inferior:

How is your family? How is your health?

What audacity! For the world was not, and could not be, equal for everyone. Black people and the little people in general had to know, had to stay in their place. Luxury, education, decency, were not born for everyone. Or rather, the excellence of education showed its quality in being accessible to few. Imagine the scandal if there were caviar for all the toothless mouths on the planet. The common people, the vast majority, the others, would not have the capacity to perceive excellence. Imagine the nonsense of an ape in a suit starting to discuss elegance. From this nonsense, the educated entered the nightmare of the monkey pointing a dirty finger at them, while saying: "your shirt and your pants don't fit, your clothes are wrong." If the reader imagines such illogical constructions, they can understand how the good bourgeois felt in the face of that vulgar little man, without class and without formal education, a mongrel teaching them formulas and expressions of the language of cinema. Shit! Shut up! The white faces, which were merely pale, were transformed.

Excerpt from the novel "The Renegade Son of God"