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Callaloo 24.2 (2001) 504-509



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from Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring 1994)

from The Machete Woman, A Novel

Gayl Jones


Chapter One

It is 1637 and I'm an African born in the New World. I was once a slave, but now they've begun to call me the Machete Woman, because I dared to free myself. How? Everything blends into the details of one's days. I don't want to write my story, but I must. And the sisters in this convent have enough writing paper that they make themselves from ixtle fiber and old pieces of cloth. They've even got palimpsests, new manuscripts written over old ones. Sometimes the old ones show through, though. And there's one the nuns say shows a text written in the 6th century--probably a nun's diary or a monk's journal.

And they themselves are always keeping journals, notebooks, diaries, and the like, the ones from Spain and the ones from here in the New World. New Spain they call it, though the Indians have got another name for it, and it's as old a world as any other. Tlatelolco, the Indians call it. Tlatelolco. Tlatelolco, I've heard them say, clicking the roofs of their mouths, just like I've heard Africans do.

I suppose if it was a woman's world, they'd write other sorts of books than journals, notebooks, and diaries. Giant tomes on philosophy, moral and natural, like I've seen in the nun's library, but always with a man's name attached to them. Mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and logic. Or maybe the diary and the notebook would be accorded greater value, and not just thought a mere woman's book in woman's language.

But there's enough writing paper, like I said, and one of the sisters even calls herself writing a man's book, a history of the conquest of Mexico, a history of Hernan Cortez, the great conqueror himself, that old devil, whom the blancos say discovered it. When I ask her if she's heard of Tlatelolco, she says it must be some imaginary place.

"Say it again," she says.

I say the name again, clicking the roof of my mouth.

"You Africans have a wondrous way of talking," she says. "All your clicks and clacks."

But one thing that you can say that makes the sisters different from most of the seƱoras, the planters' wives, is that they do know how to read and write. Sometimes a planter's wife might hire a schoolboy or scholar-vagabond, a licenciado, to read to her--as long as she's chaperoned, that is--but most know as much about reading as a botfly. But the planters, they like it that way. Learned women, I've heard them say, don't make true wives or true wifehood or even true womanhood. Learned women, [End Page 504] some would even say that that's a contradiction, to be both learned and a woman. True womanhood and learning they say that's incompatible. Same thing they say about us slaves. Learned woman, eh? The same as saying learned slave, eh? Best to keep slaves ignorant, they say, if you want a true slave. True slavehood and learning, eh? True slave or true wife, keep them both ignorant, eh? And of myself, you could say I've been both a true slave and a slave's slave.

Slavehood and learning? As for reading and writing, I've learned to read and write. And how to read and write, you may ask, in a New World such as this one where teaching a slave to read and write is a true crime, eh? Well, it was part of an experiment, the master called it, when I was a slave--a slave's slave I should say, because I not only did chores for the master but for a woman who was herself a slave. In Uruguay, a slave's slave, before I was sold to the Mexican.

Before I came here to the convent, when...

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