Quilombo Barrinha São Francisco de Itabapoana, North Fluminense Region
The aroma that exuded from medicinal herbs and spices that were used to season the fish mingled to the sounds of stories and verses of jongos. This singular event that cannot be translated into words, happened at the home of Mrs Lídia, the Quilombo of Barrinha, in São Francisco de Itabapoana. What a luck that experience was captured by the senses and get stored in our bodies!
The house of Mrs Lídia, president of the Remnant Association Quilombo Barrinha, is located in the Barrinha community, in a Quilombo seaside, where she and more than 80 families live. Beside that location, which today are community land was a cemetery called the "new black" in the slave period, where were buried the bodies of newcomers from Africa that blacks could not endure the grueling crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. In this space, over several generations, established a community of kinship.
Black beans, papaya and pumpkin stew, mocotó pumpkin with meat were some foods that Mrs Lídia recalls from her childhood. However, the fish was the central element in the everyday dishes being consumed, even for breakfast: "In my house, there was a wood stove [...]. Would put [the mother] morobás on a plate, a carazinhas; then after my mother made a salt water, a deposit, one bowl of water, because we did not have dishes too. Then would put the fish there, salted, then left there pretty good, tampadinho for the morning. Then, in the morning, we woke up, it was coffee cane, it was not sugar in the coffee [...]. Then my father, we had already crushed the cane at the mill; everyone sat around the table, there was no table, it was a bench with some boards on top, there was our table. [...] My father would put a coffee cane, I did not like coffee cane because I always, I was poor, I'm poor, but I had a spirit that was going away. “
Whenever we get together, the fish stew is there: "There's a gentleman, Ademir, who is also a former member of our community, and when I go to his house is the biggest party, because day by day people are gone. And then, when I go, it has this tradition that joins a little "Referring this way when it comes to the house of Mr Ademir, Mrs Lídia says." Look, I've got a fish stew "According to her, to make the stew, the main fish are traíra, sairú, yams and morobá.
The contagious energy of Mrs Lídia teaches that life is hopeless, but a little extra help is needed, she recommends the herbs that are in her backyard. Lemon grass and bilberry for digestive problems; Balm for high blood pressure and anxiety; Avocado leaf for kidney stone; Mulberry Leaf hormone replacement; arnica for good healing, among others. Fearless as jongo sung by her, "I'll put my drum on the slope because I want to learn to roll, learn to roll ...".
