Ballad and Dagger: Part One

Three enemies within:
A child of the book,
An outlaw of the waves,
A son of the stones.
Each thrown from their burning vessels
Amidst cataclysmic warfare,
Cursed to drift forever through a storm.

She’s a small, round woman, my aunt, but when she’s armored up in all that regalia and paint, she seems to tower over everyone around her.

They’re covering an old Galerano bolero, some murder song—all these old ditties are either about praising God, falling in love, or murdering someone (sometimes all three at once)—and the band has fallen into a fierce vamp while Gerval stands at the edge of the stage and just lets out a howl.

She has me wrap them in colorful, silky fabrics every year on the anniversary of her initiation as a Santera (which is coming up, actually), and each is adorned with sacred implements, ceremonial blades, and tacky porcelain animals.

Our genesis sounds more like a bad joke than the actual founding of a nation: One stormy night centuries ago, a pirate, a rabbi, and a Santero escaped some battle together and watched in awe as the island of San Madrigal arose from the Caribbean Sea.

And because I was gone from Little Madrigal for so much of my childhood, mine feels like a double diaspora, my own personal haunting.

A tinny old-timey shanty streams out of Barbudo’s Barbershop, and the clack of the clave tack-tacks along beneath it in a series of off-kilter exclamation points while the accordions wail out the harmonies.

Tolo’s club is just ahead, across the next street. It’s all decked out in Christmas lights and tacky pirate-themed decorations, and the words SAN MADRIGAL GRANDE FETE TONIGHT!! proclaim what’s happening across a bright marquee.

Let me tell you something about us Galeranos: we don’t call the cops. It’s just not done. That’s what happens when an island is full of pirates and people escaping either slavery or the Inquisition—a healthy distrust of authority figures settles in. It’s canon, and that’s carried on to our diaspora here in Brooklyn unabated.

Let me tell you something about us Galeranos: we don’t call the cops. It’s just not done. That’s what happens when an island is full of pirates and people escaping either slavery or the Inquisition—a healthy distrust of authority figures settles in. It’s canon, and that’s carried on to our diaspora here in Brooklyn unabated.

Those glares make me feel like I did something wrong even though I definitely didn’t.
Well, maybe I aided and abetted?

In the middle of it all, as large and languid as an iguana in a sauna, is Tolo Baracasa, wearing his usual wide guayabera shirt and well-creased slacks.

This is my favorite place in the world—the only place where things make sense. Here, I can work out the world and its terrors, turn them into something malleable.

Chords rise and fall, harmonies jangle, dissonance escalates, and our emotions follow.

During our brief stints at home, they’d send me around to the different music masters in Little Madrigal.

On the wall behind me, a mural shows the three archetypal founders in a battered raft. A pirate, a rabbi, and a Santero gaze up in awe at a beautiful woman made out of light who floats above the ocean: San Madrigal.

It all comes back to this, though: so much of the colorism problem around the world goes back to the colonial powers bringing slavery and all its false justifications and hierarchies everywhere they went. Then how do a people who have supposedly escaped the shadow of empire still manage to cling to some of the worst power structures inherent to it?

She comes in with a thundering roll on the tom in time with the slow-pounding dirge, and I drop a chord full of all the dissonance and shimmer I can muster, just right for the Muertos.

I can’t put my finger on it at first, but then I realize: the Muertos normally show up with their heads bowed, eyes closed in quiet reverence for the ceremony.

My fingers find each chord as I trundle up and down the keyboard, keeping it sparse so everyone can hear each name, keeping it a little off-kilter, a little jangly, a little weird.

“For the past fifteen years,” Anisette continues, “we have lived in mourning. Bereft of the very land we call home, we are a people in exile! A lost diaspora from a lost island!”

The voice that says I don’t belong gets louder, tries to yell over each note, the clamor of the crowd.

When Anisette says children, it isn’t literal; they do these elaborate ceremonies to consecrate people as priests of a certain deity, basically.

My aunt’s spirit is Shango, the thunder santo, so she’s a child of Shango. It means they have a whole connection and she’s kind of his emissary in the people world, I guess you could say.

“What most of you don’t know,” Anisette yells over the rabble, “is that all three children of the original santos are here in this room with us!”

My face finds my hands, and I just sit there, heaving. Not crying, not puking. Just rocking as these wild, unfathomable gasps heave through me, send my shoulders up and down, and nothing, nothing makes sense.

Sure, she could defeat Satan with that chancla swipe of hers, but this is a teeming street fight!

Si was the epitome of the pirate trifecta: showboat, warrior, and businessman.

By the time the island sank and the rest of us showed up, Si had already set up his own little criminal empire and laid the foundation for a working arrangement with the cops, the same one Anisette would later codify, that kept them far away from these streets and our business.

“Please evacuate!” the loudspeaker croons, sounding a little more conciliatory now.

Just a whisper. It’s not a voice; it’s a sensation—the feeling of a free fall interrupted. Sanctuary, however brief and tenuous. A tiny way forward.

That hooded spirit from before. He’s watching me, a bright enigma in the shadowy night.

Tams’s still deep in her phone, and I walk slowly toward the apparition, my whole body a single, thundering pulse.

There are Galeranos who cling tight to that pirate identity, the lineage, the lingo—but the core gist of that pirate life reached everyone, Santero, Sefaradi, agnostic, whatever.

Supposedly, it goes all the way back to the first tumultuous year on the island—celebration of life mandated by the dead, according to some.

“You buried the lede.”

She does this every time she comes over—I’ve gotten used to it. Just one more thing I relegated to the back of my mind.

Anisette seems to believe—or wants us to believe she believes—that somehow someone initiated two other people, one to Okanla the Destroyer and one to Madrigal the Creator, without me knowing. Seems dubious, sí.

“I mean it’s a lie by omission. When you’re afraid, that’s all you know, all you hear. There is always more to the story. The good and bad always live in the same space. But fear takes up all the oxygen. This is why you must listen, you must go deeper.”

Tams doesn’t care about that stuff, and she knows who I am beyond all that, so it’s easy with her. But Chela, Tolo, all the others at school—I’m fine just being the aloof kid.