Ogun

The black woman Mariana Cesário was born on November 20, 1964, on a street called Resistance. Her birth took place at home assisted by the midwife Dona Francisca, a woman of around seventy, who had such ability and experience in catching babies that no one ever forgot her.

After Mariana arrived in the world, her parents separated. This was a separation that had been coming for a long time, due to the constant fights about race. White mother, Italian descent; black father, African descent. At the end of each fight she would say: “My parents always warned me. Don’t marry a black because they only know about soccer, football and . . . nothing about studying.” He then would say: “I married you to give the baby a name you . . . and what’s more: that child that died wasn’t mine, I know that very well.”

On the day she was born, Mariana Cesário’s father went to the phone company office and chose the installment plan with twenty years to pay. He wanted to leave her something. Of the three children, she was the only one that he loved. This was the first and last present from her father. Afterwards he disappeared, leaving only memories.

When she was fifteen years old, Mariana Cesário passed her civil service exam and went to work in an office in the building called “HERE THERE IS NO RACISM,” where one of the central activities was to maintain international relations with other countries. From there professors in different fields of expertise were sent to countries with whom Brazil maintained relations, especially in Africa. Of course, only white lecturers ever went there.

“The job came at a good time,” thought Mariana Cesário. With the disappearance of her father, she had kept up the phone payments. He had only made three payments and if it were not for the influence of her mother—manager of the building “SOUND MINDS AND BODIES—she would have lost the phone. Her mother said to everyone she knew: “I began to work in that building as a cleaning lady, today I am a manager.” She believed that this promotion was due to her opposition to unions and she always counseled Mariana Cesário to act in the same way.

On a beautiful Saturday morning when she was twenty years old, the telephone company installers arrived at her home to put in the phone. First they were surprised by the outside and then by the inside of the house. The exterior was painted entirely in white and inside there wasn’t a single object of any other color. It was white all over.

Mariana Cesário was taken aback when they took the black telephone out of the cardboard box. She did not hide her disappointment. She forgot that she had waited twenty years for this dream to come true. One of the workers tried to explain: “The box came sealed, and we brought this phone because you asked for it.” And he emphasized, “We’ve got nothing to do with this.”

Mariana Cesário even got a headache, thinking about what she would say when her mother got home. She was so angry that she wanted to leave, go to the closest pay phone and ask them to exchange that phone immediately. She remembered that it was Saturday and only the watchman was there, so she would have to wait anxiously until Monday.

The first time that Mariana Cesário went to the phone distribution center, nobody wanted to even wait on her. After they found out from her personal file that she worked in the building “HERE THERE IS NO RACISM,” and, that six months ago she had been promoted to section chief, inexplicably they began to treat her differently.

The director of the distribution center recalled that she had sent a letter to them, at the end of her installment plan. In the letter she had requested that they install a home phone that had memory, music, a clock, recorded conversations, and had an answering machine to take messages and could intercept a call in case of a wrong...