Behind the Mask by Marlene Nadle

It is the time on the edge when the old has not disappeared and the new has not fully emerged that I find most exciting. Countries caught in flux, in fresh possibilities for justice, always draw me. Beneath my cynical, trench-coated reporter self, I am a peripatetic utopian searching for hope in far away places.

Brazil is such a place. It is dredging up its hidden racism at a time when America is submerging its own in the illusion that Barak Obama's election means the color problem is over.

So, once again I flew to Salvador da Bahia in Brazil's sugar-growing Northeast. Even on my first day walking the cobblestone streets of the colonial city set on a cliff, I bumped into the sometimes somber, sometimes silly argument the country is having about its racism . In a cubbyhole travel agency where I stopped for the air conditioning, a sweaty tourist from Rio was staring at his friend and saying, " Are you telling me the famous carnival song, "Hard Hair Blackie" is racist instead of a little joke?'
"Yes. Oh, yes. Yes it is," the other man kept repeating like a Brazilian Molly Bloom having an epiphany.

His insight lit the corners of the national fantasy that Brazil has been a racial paradise since it freed the slaves in 1888. That fiction of equality had never been disrupted with anything crass. There were no "Whites Only"signs." There were no Jim Crow laws. The unwritten racial code ran like a foul stream beneath the society's consciousness. Until now.

As the men from Rio continued to argue over lyrics about a black women who stunk like a skunk, the summertime travel agent, wintertime teacher looked on with amused blue eyes. Once the duo exited fighting, he began flitting from computer to fax. In motion, his middle-aged body was slight, sleek, full of greyhound tension.

I waited him out by his desk beneath a poster of fishing boats for hire. I wanted more news of whites like him moving beyond denial. As soon as he settled in his chair, and introduced himself as Luiz Magalhaes I, without bothering with finesse, said "So, Brazilians are finally beginning to admit their racism."

"Racism," he mocked, giving the traditional response. "What racism? Brazilians have had the mixed blood of whites, blacks and indians in them since colonial times. Even former President Cardoso admitted he had one foot in the kitchen."

It took some time for him to peel away the irony and the lie of an equal, mixed-race people. He reached back into his own family and brought up the contradiction. My father's father was black," he began jolting my perceptions and enjoying it. "My grandfather lived in a palm-thatched house in Aracaju in the interior of Bahia. My mother's family was Portuguese and had a small farm nearby. I spent most of my summer vacation with her family. Sometimes we would pass my father's Aunt Mania. She was very black. Very fat. She sold corn and milk in the market. She was an embarrassment. We didn't include her in our celebrations. We didn't speak of her. My mulatto father accepted cutting his Aunt out of his life, but I think he was a little bit angry.

In Luiz's family and in other's the unwritten racial code was taught while the myth of Brazil's racial democracy was maintained, even believed. The subterranean racism's first principal was brutal in its simplicity. Black was bad. White was good."The habit of excluding blacks," Luiz continued "goes from our homes to the church pews, barbershops, professions, boardrooms, courts...The habit works. We have no need to put it into law. The closest we come is in the classified job ads. They often ask for someone 'with a good appearance' Everyone knows that means a white or light appearance."

He rose to greet a flood of tourists and switched easily from French to German. I stayed put. Entertained myself looking out his doorway at the tumult in Pelourinho Square and inhaling the drift of ginger steam coming from a cast iron pot full of red palm oil and frying bean fritters. All around the spacious plaza that tilted downhill from where I sat life was being lived in the open. A man was rocked back in a kitchen chair getting shaved with a straight razor. A local women was having her hair braided into corn rows. Musicians were up on a platform setting up for their concert. Every few feet someone was selling iced bottles of water as a hedge against the wall of heat. One black man had cobbled together a coffee wagon out of two wooden boards and scribbled on it, " I am happy to be working."

At the bottom of the slope, I noticed a church that was not a prissy pastel, but a bright royal blue. Following my gaze when he returned to his desk, Luiz said it was the church the slaves built for themselves. It was in an appropriate spot. Pelourinho Square was where the whipping posts had been during the colonial era. They had been moved from a spot near the Cathedral. The priests and their parishioners didn't want their prayers or conscience disturbed by the screams of slaves. Hiding Brazil's racial reality was a very old tradition.

Not everyone went along with the church and society's self deception even before the current questioning. Jorge Amado, the 20th century Brazilian novelist, didn't. I had seen a photo of him giving Jean Paul Sartre a tour of the 16th century Church of Sao Francisco. Amado's face was creased with disgust, his eyes rolled as he looked at the ceiling covered with gold leaf paid for with the toil of plantation slaves. He seemed haunted by that past. In his Tent of Miracles, one of his characters, looking at Pelourinho Square says:

Is that the reflection of the sun or a smear of blood on these cobblestones? So much blood has run over these stones. So many cries of pain rose to heaven, So many supplications and curses resonated on the walls of that blue church.

Armado, who lived half a block from Luiz's office for much of his life, probably took comfort in 2000 when the Catholic Church acknowledged its past sins and apologized to Afro-Brazilians It was a part of the attempt to end the country's denial.

So was the 2005 law requiring black studies for all pupils. "Now" Luiz said, "in the evangelical protestant school where I work, they have to teach Afro-Brasilian culture and religion. It is making them crazy. They think we practice the devil's religion."

"We?"

"I converted to the Candomble religion eight years ago," he said, laying proud claim to the African gods imported by the slaves and repressed in the past by the priests with the help of the police."

His conversion was a personal rebellion, a refusal to have the African part of himself blended away in the myth of mixed race, equal Brazilians. Mornings when I stopped by I found him tossing manioc flour outside his office door for the gods or sprinkling water for them . I wasn't sure whether I was watching the practitioner of Candomble or Catholicism. He seemed to be doing penance for his Aunt Mania and his father. He seemed to be seeking salvation for his own soul in a country that long considered the black part of him bad.

Even at my shabby bed and breakfast with plastic fish on the walls, the truth about the country's racism was being retrieved. The mainly Brazilian guests sitting on the sagging couches frequently argued over the government's affirmative action laws like the one for universities. Affirmative action was the country's shorthand. It was a way of touching the more essential question: was Brazil a racist country that needed affirmative action or was it a racial democracy that didn't? It was a matter of national identity. Psychologically, as well as politically, the government's official recognition of the need for these programs was one more thing chipping away at the myth of Brazil as a racial paradise.

Fortunately, Jeferson Lobo lived in Brazil. Not in post-racial America where nobody talks about affirmative action, and Obama doesn't have a black agenda. The cafe-au-lait-skinned 23 year-old wearing the teeth braces his family couldn't afford when he was a child was a constant presence at the reception desk. He had taught himself English by listening to Bob Marley's Jamaican reggae records and spoke the language with a lilt. Ambitious, engaging, he was able to get two things blacks who came from poor families rarely obtain: a high school diploma and a good job. He did his work with alacrity, was the chief fixer when the owner had a tantrum, or I couldn't get a phone call through with my limited Spanguese.

One amber morning when I was having breakfast on the porch overlooking the glinting bay two hundred feet below, he leaned his gangly frame against my table to talk about his future. He kept interrupting himself to welcome guests straggling to the spread of multiple kinds of breads and cakes, half a dozen tropical fruits, cold meats, and the bohlinos de quejo, the fried cheese balls, the cook made if he was in a good mood. Between greetings, Jeferson worried that affirmative action with its free tuition wouldn't be enough to help him. "I don't know if I can pass the university entrance exam. It is very hard," he said as distress washed over his delicate features and made him seem so vulnerable. His terrible public school had not prepared him for the competition. His life hung frailly on one exam and a quota.

At the table next to mine, a grandmother who had been eavesdropping turned to Jeferson in confusion and asked, " How can there be quotas for blacks? We are so mixed, so many shades: mulattos, carboclos, pardos, morenos, pretos...How can we know who is black.?"

Jeferson's reply was quiet, respectful. "We can use a self-definition of blackness. If there is any doubt," he teased, "we can ask a policeman. They always know who is black. "

A white man with an overloaded breakfast plate and the look of a philosopher king objected to the notion of quotas. "We can not fight racism with racism," he pronounced righteously. I wondered how righteous he had been about racism against blacks.
Another wizened white man was mumbling angrily in the corner about quotas for dumb monkeys. Even on the porch, Brazil's transition from racism and denial seemed far from complete.

Reluctantly, to try to measure the change, I left Salvador for a few day to meet a political analyst I knew in Rio. Copacabanaland was not one of my favorite places. I always found Rio cold despite its reputation. It was too big city. It was skyscrapers and offices filled with anglers. I arrived to find the streets still on fast. The outdoor coffee bars were mainly counters with a couple of stools not meant for lingering. They offered salty or sweet little things to be had in a hurry.

Maria Celina D'Arrugu, worked at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. She was familiar, the kind of intellectual I'd know in New York, a progressive who welcomed her country's move towards racial reality. With quick steps she rushed her crisp, professional, short self and me towards lunch. On the way up the boulevard, she assured me that "Brazil's ability to confront its racism and denial is improving." Then she added the kicker. "It still isn't good." She didn't quantify.

There certainly had to be more than when President Getulio Vargas was around. I'd read that from 1930 to 1945 he used repression to protect the myth of an equal, nonracist country. He outlawed black groups, arrested their members, and banned press coverage of their issues. After his death, black militants didn't get far in disturbing the illusion. The Generals made a coup in 1964 and treated any mention of inequality as subversion. The secret police were often tougher on black activists than on communists. Challenging Brazil's identity as a racial democracy apparently was a greater threat than bringing down the political system.

Maria Celina was discussing current racial history in clipped tones when we arrived at the minimalist penthouse she picked for our meal. Given the context of our conversation, I was surprised that she didn't remark on the absence of dark face among the diners filling the grey banquettes. Even for an aware white women, the exclusion was so much a habit she did not see it. It made me uneasy in my own white skin.

I followed her complacency and the restaurant's to a buffet table with salads. It was a prudent choice for a fortyish Brazilian divorcee in appearance-conscious Rio. During all the dishing up by yawning waiters, the disrupter in me kept waiting for the chic black models and their agency's owner to crash the place as they had been doing all over the city. They were challenging not only elite spaces, but stereotypes. They were detonating the image of black women as maids.

Once we reached our table with its sanitized view of the park, Maria Celina traced the moments when Brazil's denial first began to shatter. In the 70's, she said, the Black Movement exploded and began to show their life was no crystal stair. By 1985, after the generals fell, Blacks began to force that awareness into political parties and the labor movement. In 2000, the reality instead of the myth was brought into the mainstream and media when a very prestigious government institute did a study of Brazil's racial inequality. She dropped some numbers from the study on me. The richest tenth of the country was 85% white and 15% black. 69% of blacks were indigent. Only 3.3% of blacks finished middle school. "The enormous press coverage given those statistics made it harder to pretend there was no racism," Maria Celina concluded with a satisfied nod that in her passed for joy.

Denial is harder, but not impossible even among the well meaning. At another friend's suggestion, I called Ana Paula de Queiros. She was working as a volunteer in a black shantytown called a favela and giving reading lessons to kids from failing schools like Jeferson's. An hour after my call the blonde psychologist with a bohemian tinge appeared in the lobby of my Rio hotel. She seemed like a hip church lady with arms full of bangles and do-goodism. Not a bad thing. She kept turning up at the classroom in the favela when her students were sometimes too frightened to run the gauntlet of drug gangs.

As she perched on a magenta sofa all shy tentativeness over steel, she told me in a whispery voice that the attitudes were altering among elites like her conservative family, and some were taking responsibility for the poor.

She was sincere in her concern. Yet, she was still skittish about confronting Brazil's racism. I tried to shake her denial as much to restore my faith in change as for her country's sake. She wasn't ready. After my questions she often responded with long silences while the lush singing of Gal Costa floated from speakers besides the plants. If I referred to the black students in her class, she always corrected me with tang saying, " I teach poor students." If I asked if they were poor because they were black, she danced away, evading the statistics, and the truth that most dark-skinned blacks haven't come up very far from slavery. "It is not a problem of skin color," she insisted. "I know lots of rich blacks," she argued, using the handful to hide the multitude.

I listened with some sympathy as she contorted herself in the psychological drama at the center of her culture. Like many, she had an embedded belief in the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy. The notion had been so much a part of her schooling. I knew no one had done more than Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre to popularize the idea. He used it as emotional solace to the shame, the shadow of inferiority, that lingered from being a racially mixed people since the earliest Portuguese. In his 1933 classic, The Masters and the Slaves, he makes Brazil's mixed blood a positive thing and the basis of a new supra racial national identity. Ana couldn't disturb that identity without agitating her sense of self and psyche.

After she left, I dropped by a bookstore to look at a former best seller called We Are Not Racists that sustained other Brazilians' need for illusions. The gossipy store clerk wrapping my copy of the book gave the lie to its premise, saying with disdain,"Even former President Cardoso finally admitted Brazil wasn't a racial democracy."

Country's in transition, with their unpredictable combinations, are exhilarating and often confusing. I experienced that again on a Saturday afternoon when I took myself to the beach. Ipanemas urban sand was a narrow ribbon bound by white apartment buildings, a mosaic sidewalk, and kiosks of men with machetes slashing the tops off coconuts. Near lifeguard station 7, I joined the bathing suit society. The crowd looked like an ad for the happy, unprejudiced Brazil of myth. Dark and light skinned people were flaunting bodies, drinking beer, and nibbling the necks of their lovers. As I looked closer, I saw most of the darkest skins belonged to venders selling ice cream or young men who braved this particular beach for the good surfing. These surfers made it almost comfortable for the couple of poor black families who came carrying their picnic pots of meat, beans, and toasted manioc that were the makings of a good fejjoada The outsiders feast was spoiled by low insulting murmurs about their food and their skin. It made me again question how much Brazil had recognized its racism and begun to give it up.

Before returning to Salvador, I found some promise in Juliana Rocha. An exuberant journalist who was a bottle redhead and seemed unambiguously white, she had simultaneously discovered social concern and the frustration that went with it. That two-headed demon was part of the connection we shared. Over an outdoor health food breakfast amid cascading crimson bougainvillea, she angsted over Brazil. "There are black people living only a few blocks from here who don't have enough money for rice and beans," she said flinging her arm toward the hills where the marginal live and gaze down on the glitter that is Rio. She was newly passionate about race and poverty, but her life, like Ana's, was on the other side of the country's economic chasm. She was the daughter of a factory owner, drove a Mercedes, and could pass for one of the tropical fashionista parading like peacocks in front of the cafe.

She was abler than Ana to get past denial because she was open to the black movement that kept slowly shifting the country's perception of itself. She was receptive to the part of the left that was disentangling itself from the myth and Marx enough to realize race as well as class can cause people pain. Even more, she and Brazil were influenced by watching Luiz Lula da Silva wield his rhetoric about poverty and, increasingly, about race during all the presidential campaigns he ran starting in 1989.
"I voted for Lula in 2002 when he finally won." Her frown followed quickly. It reflected the disappointment of many of his early supporters. They believe he has done social justice on the cheap. Even in his total budget for 2010 only 2.88% went for education, and 3.78% for health. His former fans feel betrayed because the massive land reform Lula once promised the peasants was never delivered.

With Juliana's hero a bit hollow by the end of his second term, with her dream of great change undone, it will be tempting for her in the years ahead to retreat into her comfortable private life and shut her eyes. If she continues banging her head against the world, it might be because she is the sort who, even sitting in the pleasurable sun, had to notice the ragged black man selling two peanuts in a packet to the outside tables. Maybe she will stick because of her tendency to not just go along, but to test everything including the value of electoral politics. Somewhere between the granola and yogurt she mentioned her trip as a reporter to a black favela to ask if they thought any politician did enough for them to deserve a vote. Still devastated by her journey to the previously abstract neighborhoods of the needy, to the hillside homes without lights, without water, without toilets she could only say, "I'm embarrassed for my country.

On my last day in Rio I went to see what further myth removal was being done by the black movement . I wandered past the phone booths curved like ears and all the stores that didn't sell the umbrella I needed for the brief daily showers until I reached the office of Criola which was filled with life-sized statues of regal black women wearing African dress. Jurema Werneck, the equally regal founder of the group, greeted me wearing a dashiki, granny glasses, and pride. She immediately cast a harsh eye on her country. "It will be at least forty years before there is equality and an end to the illusion of racial democracy." She said it in a matter-of-fact tone with only the slightest tinge of bitterness. "It is difficult, "she continued, "for whites to agree there is racism in Brazil. If they agree there is racism in Brazil, they have to admit there are racist in Brazil."

It is difficult, I thought, for whites to agree there is racism in America. Only 13% of them admitted there was serious anti black discrimination according to a Pew poll I'd seen at the end of 2009. 43% of the blacks in the poll saw discrimination and a different country. Obama, cool as a splash of Evian water, wasn't likely to disturb white America's illusions.

The denial in both countries was depressing. Still, Jurema had a temperament that didn't idle. She wasn't likely to be stopped by her own prediction of a 40-year-wait until the end of denial and inequality. No more than she had been stopped as a young girl by the odds against her going on from her poor neighbor to graduate from medical school with the support of a close community that supplied her food and the two struggling tailors who were her parents.

Still girlishly lean and focused in early middle age, Dr. Werneck was sharing her medical knowledge in phone consults about a conference on black health issues. After juggling the eleventh call, her perfect posture slumped and she allowed herself an exhausted sigh. "We need more skilled people who can talk policy to the government. Slogans are no longer enough," she said, putting as tough a demand on others as she puts on herself.

She quickly switched our conversation back to the importance of digging the myth of racial equality out of the culture and mixed in some of her feminism. One of her projects, she said, was advising on a film about Benedita da Silva who went back to school in midlife and became the first black women elected to Congress. The film opens with scenes of Carnival, the ultimate fantasy in itself and in its happy image of the races playing together. Then it strips down to Benedita's reality spent first as a favela child selling fruit in the street. Later it shows her losing a Rio mayoral race to cordial prejudice with punishing campaign jokes like, "If Benedita is elected, she will replace the statue of Christ above the harbor with a statue of King Kong."
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Jurema's battle against denial, her energy, and dedication reminded me of another time in American history and of my own life in the civil rights movement. So did the watercolors on the wall of Montgomery boycott heroine Rosa Parks, icon Coretta Scott King, and writer Maya Angelou. The longer we talked the more the line between my reporting self and my political self began to blur.

Once back in the Northeast, the heartwood of the black movement, I didn't have to look for activists in offices. There were signs of them in the streets. On a 16th century wall those who wanted to expose the country's reality and alter perceptions had put up a plaque honoring Afro-Brazilian cooks who, since plantation days, had created the country's rich cuisine. It was a silent rebuttal. A block away in stores, black-faced dolls wearing the cook's colonial dress, huge white lips, and the dumb pop eyes of the minstrel show waited as presents of caricature and contempt to be passed along to children.

On a sloping lane leading to Pelourinho Square, a black man with the high cheekbones of a Benin mask wore a T-shirt that flaunted a map of Africa . A small drum was slung around his neck. He was calling out the rhythm to three white would-be percussionist leaning into their instruments. The teenagers didn't get it. The man tried again ." Bom te bom bom. "They still didn't get it and looked like they wanted to crawl under the cobblestones. A passerby, exchanging a glance of pity with the leader, murmured in admiration, "What patience."

After the lesson was over, Antonio Carlos Souza was just as patient with my questions. A gentleness, a sweetness came off him. He was a member of Olodum, a famous percussion band that began in the 70s, toured the States often, and was politically active like many black instrumental groups. Olodum ran its music school to raise money for projects in the favelas like teaching Afro-Brazilian band and dance."We" he smiled,"are really teaching black consciousness. The music is the bait."

His cell phone rang and there was fury at the other end of it. He was suppose to be in a concert that was starting. He rushed me uphill and into a courtyard draped with a banner saying, "Brazil wouldn't exist without Africa."Olodum's special mix of samba and reggae was already vibrating the space. Antonio handed me some ear plugs, strapped on a drum that hit at the knees, and took his place front and center stepping with the line on stage. He was good, and the other drummers knew it. They sparked off him.

A female singer in sequins began one of Olodum's early songs. A rough translation is, " Black race Olodum wants to march in the streets."The spectators standing below the stage stepped in unison with the line of drummers. The music and pride built with each chorus of "black race." So did the chances of change in Brazil.

The Northeast was an inspiration. Even Danielo, a baggy-panted lovable rogue like the one in Amado's Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, seemed involved. Between hustling me to buy one of his trips to a Candomble House, he shared an insider's knowledge of the new political role these Houses were playing. Even intellectuals, he said were returning to them to plot strategy between the ceremonies. He mentioned one of the most savvy Candomble priestesses, Mae Estella, who was rumored to be ready to endorse electoral candidates. She had been an early troubler of Brazil's denial of racial differences. In 1983 she publicly kicked over the pretense that Afro-Brazilians were practising Catholicism behind the camouflage of saints.

A Blanche du Bois in Brazil, I continued to count on the kindness of stranger to show me possibilities. It happened in casual encounters in ice cream parlours filled with hedonism in 50 exotic flavors and in plaza teeming with street children begging money for sniffing glue.

Most of all it happened because of Jeferson. One day at the bed and breakfast I asked him if he was part of the black movement. "I can't be," he answered with slow regret. "I am working all the time." Grave, intense, he opened a window on his world saying," These people really move me."

Going further, he cold called half the city looking for black activists for me. One man he turned up was Jose Carlos Limeira who had been part of the movement since it began in the 1970s. He was a well known literary figure, but not arrogant enough to present me with one of his three books of poems when we met. The portly writer did trouble to dress the part of a continental intellectual wearing a gray goatee, a vest, and jacket despite the heat. He was very formal as he escorted me through the squat academic building.

However, once inside a tiny conference room, we huddled like two geezers in rocking chairs trading our movement memories. Mixing his nostalgia with sadness Jose said, "After your civil rights movement in the 60s the treatment of American blacks got was so different from what happened in Brazil. Your blacks got respect, some power, money, jobs."

"That is half right," I replied, my anger rising. I was so sick of reminding people, there were two black communities. The one that wasn't Obama's didn't have any respect, power, money, jobs, or visibility. "Nobody sees them. Not even you." I shouted. My frustration over the denial was even greater coming from one of my own.

He grumbled without conceding the point. It was personal. He had studied to be an engineer but was too dark to get easily hired in the 70s or now.

There was a mutual simmering in the room. Ignoring the tension, I asked him how he thought you could change a country.
"If you don't see a problem, you can not fix it." he said and we were back in perfect sync. He spoke in a low impassioned voice echoing the need to get rid of white and black denial. "In my community they have been educated not to think about color. It's a stretch to say 40% have a black consciousness."For him, the biracial denial was a given, a starting point, a task waiting to be done. There was a solidity, a doggedness about him that kept him going. In one of his poems he says of himself, "My dream is never silent/'It's an old griot narrating a legend.

A man of vision as well as words, he had incorporated the black pride part of the movement, the pragmatic policy proposals like Jurema's on health care, and was pushing on. What he was imagining was Afro-Brazilians taking political power in a country that hadn't let illiterates vote until 1985. He wasn't at the clenched fist stage. He was thinking about electoral power.

"Blacks do not vote black," he complained, prickly in his discontent. The leader of the musical group Ile Aiye wanted to be mayor of Salvador. He didn't know how to take our people by the hand and get them to the polls. If we could motivate blacks to vote black, our reality would be different."

He both believed it and knew better. With pain running under his words, he spoke of the current black leaders who did not do much for their community. Commenting on Lula he said , "He is the best President for blacks in my lifetime. That isn't saying a lot."

Against his doubts, he was prepared to work. He was full of plans to find better politicians, to organize endlessly. I marveled at Grey Beard's political will.

Yet, his way to change a country rubbed against my uncertainly and Juliana's about the value of elections and the politicians they produce. With growing discomfort, I asked if he was suggesting electoral politics instead of social movements.
"Why chose?" he asked shrugging off the dilemma. He was in sympathy with the views of Brazil's progressive Social Forum. Its white and black activist had met in the Northeast early in Lula's first term to rearrange their disappointment and stop romanticizing him as a savior. "Their guy" became just an important person to push on policies, one part of a multilevel movement to eliminate denial, racism, and poverty.

As Jose and I left the building and walked to the road that curved past a convent, we talked strategy. Unspoken was any mention of personal ways for surviving in a world where your ideals are ignored, of staying sane in a country like his just at the beginning of a long struggle or mine giving only crumbs of equality. One of his poems describes what it feels like to live that life and says, "I am the exposed nerve/And I show you in every wrinkle of my face, weary of/bruises...and pain."

Two scarred veterans, we stood together in the road. Suddenly, a black teenager with an orange Mohawk haircut, tank top, and shorts rushed over to pump the hand of the perfectly tailored Jose. The boy said he had been to one of his poetry readings. The writer laughed with surprise and pleasure at the connection across the years. The connection went beyond the poems. The teenager was part of a new generation of hip hop activists and belonged to a group called React.

Turning to the budding black leader with the stand-up orange hair, I asked if he thought people would succeed in cracking Brazil's racism and denial." If we worried about whether we had a chance of winning, we would never start," he answered as naive as he was wonderful. Like a motley vagabond, he free styled his own version of " We can't go on. We go on." He, like Jose, Juiliana, Jurema, reminded me of the honor of trying, of being the prophetic minority lugging along a culture's humane values. They, and the others that I met, talked to until dawn, connected to as part my world family, my compadres, finally gifted me with some fragile hope to take home.