Counternarratives
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0811225526
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly)
Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution; “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; “Rivers” portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.
streets outside the windows, once a comfort, now a menace, requiring a miracle to survive another Carnaval. The heat, as if every oven, stove and kiln in Rio were firing, glazing him and all but the hardiest to half their size. The sheet music’s notes, like the newsprint’s accounts of the unfolding and distant world war, the dictator and Depression closer to home, all sliding inexorably away from his fingers and eyes. His knees, back, the ankles that rattle with each hike up a stairwell, each
contraband or scuttled it on censorious shores before it moors upon your writing table. Nor is it likely that they will have laid a finger on the few other and sundry effects of yours, which include a rosary of colored Italian glass, an embroidered muslin handkerchief, a chasuble of black silk, embroidered in resplendant hues of violet, and a tattered and faded red vest of common linen that I am told you once wore faithfully during your conversions along the upper Capabaribe River. These effects
shall not call out any names, but I must testify to you, as I have not yet dared even in Holy Confession, that I did not always appear for prayers and on Sundays I did not always rise from my bed before midday. I hoarded food and ate eggs raw rather than let them be cooked. I raised my voice to the Negroes and even once took the Lord’s name in vain. I—” “My dear brother,” D’Azevedo started, his face crimsoning at Dom Gaspar’s torrent of words, but the charge continued: “I tell you, my Lord, the
D’Azevedo began, but the illogic of what he was hearing, coupled with the revelations already uttered scattered his thoughts, like his secreted marbles, about the room. “Those two have put all the Africans to wickedness and grief, from the sun’s rise till it sets. When the brother Gaspar first arrived they took care to cloak their malevolence, as your Satan often wears a cape when he strolls in the sun. I read you when you first passed through that gate, and believed you could assist in our and
her bed and extracted a small bundle from the corner behind the portion of headboard nearest the wall. The stinking, reddish-brown mass of fabric made me retch, but I knew what she wanted me to do, so as soon as she handed it to me, I slid it under my own cot. The white girl, still not uttering a word, approached me and, seizing both of my hands, plunged them in one dead swoop between her thighs. I drew them back, but the white girl grabbed ahold of them and again buried them between her thighs,